Author's Note: Hey all! This is a prompt fic from an old, old, old prompt that I let get lost in the wilds of my Tumblr askbox. I didn't want to finish out the fic-a-day without answering it, especially since the prompter has been subsidizing my work today by letting me use his computer's power cord. This one is from AvengerAssembled, who asked for: "The 2006 Democratic primary - in a race against President Ritchie, who is seeking a second term."
Just a reminder, this is the last week of my long, long Fic-a-Day, which will end on Day 100, January 4. It's not the end of me writing fanfic, just the end of this freakishly productive season of it. I think we'll all be happy with the results of me having time to do a little more polishing on some of the stuff I'm putting out, not to mention me getting a chance to have a life again. :D Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading and leaving feedback, you're all the best. Hope you enjoy!
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Some people called it a disaster, some people called it inspiring. One news anchor called it the grudge appetizer preceding a coming grudge Thanksgiving dinner, but that didn't really catch on. It's a sure thing, though, that nobody called the 2006 Democratic primary campaign boring. It had taken a year or so for the dust to settle after Jed Bartlet's devastatingly narrow loss to Bob Ritchie in 2002, but even before the end of the midterm elections, the factions were already forming up to nominate a new challenger.
John Hoynes, of course, was the crown prince in waiting, putative leader of the party with Jed Bartlet retired back to obscurity on his New Hampshire farm. He wasn't incredibly popular; many Democrats found him too moderate and the general sentiment was that if he couldn't beat Bartlet, how could he beat the man who did? But he was a safe choice, a reasonable choice, the known quantity. He had a campaign manager who was fairly new to the field, an operative named Will Bailey who'd burst onto the scene by getting a dead man elected to Congress in a year with very few Democratic accomplishments at all. He'd topped himself by going on to manage the special election that put Sam Seaborn into Congress despite his opponent's efforts to tag him with miasma of the outgoing administration. Talking heads in Washington were calling Bailey "the next Josh Lyman," which reportedly did not sit too well with the original version. Will Bailey played smart and took few risks on the national level, aiming to increase his candidate's appeal to the center and center-left who would be needed to defeat even an unpopular incumbent.
Josh Lyman (the first one) was the second player on the field, with a candidate so obscure he was almost an afterthought. When the Bartlet administration had gone down in flames, Josh had steered into the skid and married his assistant almost immediately, so that by the time the bad press for one died down, the other was already old news. Josh and Donna (and it was almost always the two together, not unlike celebrity power couples on the opposite coast), made a formidable campaigning team; his innate understanding of politics and her formidable base of information and contacts creating a two-person juggernaut that didn't need money or institutional support to get rolling.
Their chosen guy for this cycle was a practically unknown Congressman named Matt Santos, one who'd been a client of their consulting firm for his reelection in 2004, one who they'd been grooming almost since then. Santos had a thin portfolio in Congress and had only been a Mayor before that, but he was a handsome, Hispanic military veteran with a beautiful wife, charming children, and an honest face. Most pundits saw him as a direct rebuke to John Hoynes from the man who'd once nearly put him in the White House. Public opinion was split on whether Josh Lyman was a villain who'd conspired to conceal President Bartlet's failing health from the American people or a hero who'd come back from the brink of death after being shot in an assassination attempt. Either way, he was a memorable figure, and people were interested.
There were a few other candidates as well, there always were. Governor Baker of Pennsylvania tossed his hat into the ring for a little while, but dropped out with no explanation given before the first primary even happened. Senator Rafferty made some noise from the sidelines, got added to the first couple of ballots, but she was obviously in the race for issues and not to go all the way. Donna Lyman and Toby Ziegler had several closed-door meetings with her before the primaries started, and by the time New Hampshire rolled around, Rafferty was a vocal Santos supporter and the Santos campaign had a new health care plank. Despite the seemingly wide-open field, most other potential candidates were scared off by Hoynes' name recognition and institutional backing or by Santos' powerhouse campaign team. Sure, the Bartleteers were smudged from their previous administration, but Jed Bartlet himself was more admired than ever now that the American public had gotten a load of President Ritchie's America. They could potentially take their candidate all the way.
The first months were brutal, as always. Hoynes had the institutional advantage, with most of the establishment Democrats choosing to line up behind the man who'd been Vice President, but there was an overwhelming sense that this settling was tenuous. Will Bailey spent at least as much time corralling the supporters as Hoynes did courting the undecided, and the Vice-President's natural tendency towards the middle didn't sit well with the Democratic base. This was made worse when the Lymans managed to coax CJ Cregg away from a lucrative private sector job to run media management and press strategy for the Santos campaign. She kept her public appearances brief and infrequent, knowing that she herself was too strongly linked to the old and failed, but reassembling the old guard meant Hoynes had to put his paddle in the water and steer strongly away from Bartlet and his people. Too much praise for the old administration meant people might start looking at the members of that administration and ask why they were all running against him now. Too much criticism, and he was disloyal to the man he'd been Vice-President to, a man who was still beloved by many Democrats. It was a difficult position to be stuck in.
On the other side of the race, the Santos campaign had lots of enthusiasm and drive, but little external support and almost no money. At the beginning it was Josh and Donna in a rented storefront in New Hampshire with a couple of people from the Congressman's staff and a handful of volunteers. Rather than burden the campaign with weeks in a motel room (and having personal experience with the area's seedier motels), Donna created a little apartment in the back storeroom, amongst the piles of leftover lifejackets and kayaking gear. It wasn't the Ritz, but it was comfortable enough, and it meant she could actually get Josh to lay down and sleep sometimes. As the staff grew and the operation started going round the clock, they eventually moved to a hotel and let the storeroom be used for general nap purposes, but she still had a soft spot for it in her heart. Once they won New Hampshire in a surprise upset, thanks largely to support from the Bartlet family, they hired CJ to handle the media and Toby on as a speechwriter and general naysayer, packed up their things, and turned the office over to the state Democratic Party to be a satellite office. On the night before they headed out, Donna insisted on sharing the bed in the back room one more time with Josh, for old time's sake. He was fairly easy to persuade.
Setting up the primary debates was a bit of a nightmare for everyone involved. As far as Will was concerned, his guy still had the advantage despite losing one tiny primary. Hoynes was still up in Iowa, Ohio and South Carolina, and there was a lot of primary still to go. He wasn't about to cede any ground he didn't have to, and although John Hoynes was certainly not a bad debater, he looked old and just a little bit weaselly on stage next to the super-charismatic Matt Santos. No sense showing that off any earlier or more often than necessary, but to not debate at all would look like weakness. He wanted later debates, off-peak hours, and no more than one or two. Josh and Donna on the other hand (and god, he was starting to hate the constant double-teaming, friends of Sam's or no), wanted more debates, prime-time debates, and debates with as few rules as possible. Being cornered made Will combative, and being nagged to death on details made Josh irritated, to the point that eventually Donna and Will's debate consultant Annabeth sent the boys to their respective corners and hammered out the details themselves. Nobody was exactly happy, which meant it was probably a good compromise. The midwestern debate got eaten alive by the ethanol pledge question, which was not great for either candidate, but the other two went well enough. Hoynes didn't flounder, but Santos got a chance to hold his own against a much more experienced opponent, then followed up each time by touring the host city with his incredibly photogenic family. Will had already asked about the possibility of Hoynes' wife and son making a few strategic campaign appearances, and was urged not to broach the subject again. That wasn't going to make his life any easier.
Santos won three of the next six states, no big prizes but a steady growth of momentum, enough to start the establishment pendulum swinging. There were meetings between Santos and the DNC, Santos and the DCCC, Santos and an entire alphabet soup of organizations with D in their names and money in their pockets. Many of them were worried about running a Hispanic candidate, obviously, but Santos was as ideal as they were likely to get, and in a year when they were running against an incumbent who'd made himself incredibly unpopular with minorities and majority alike, it was worth taking a risk. Hoynes might attract more centrists, but that wasn't who they needed if they wanted to unseat Ritchie and take back the Congress. They needed all the Democrats, the ones who didn't turn out for Bartlet, the ones who wouldn't turn out for Hoynes. They might just turn out for Matt Santos.
Super Tuesday was a marathon, one performed on no sleep, while drinking too much coffee, and with a crowd of minions underfoot and trying to be helpful while performing no visible function whatsoever. Will had hired an excellent staff, highly recommended by the DNC, vetted by the candidate, many of them veterans of Hoynes' previous presidential run. He was beginning to see why Hoynes hadn't been able to keep up eight years ago, either. Half the time Will was convinced the Santos team were lunatics, half the time he thought they might be wizards. They ran their national campaign the way Will had run his insurgent campaign back home, on the edges of the rulebook, making bold plays, pulling stunts and running risks with money, with airtime, with the stands they took on the issues. Just trying to keep up was enough to give Will migraines. At the end of his rope, he went to Sam for support, knowing that the Congressman wouldn't back Will against his best friends, but hoping for a little commiseration at least. Sam had just given him a supportive slap on the back and promised he'd like Toby Ziegler a lot more once they were working on the same team. Will wasn't even sure how to take that.
In the end, Santos took five of the eight Super Tuesday states, in a ratio that was suggestive but not quite decisive. It was still anybody's game, as Will reminded himself firmly while dragging himself back to his hotel room well after 2am. The campaigns had ended up in the same hotel again, he wasn't sure how that kept happening except that all these states insisted on holding primaries and having capitols. There were Santos staffers celebrating in the lobby, which Will didn't begrudge them despite wanting to end their lives just a little tiny bit. He spotted Donna Lyman across the room, standing near the elevator and looking confused. He figured it probably wouldn't hurt to build a little goodwill between campaigns, so he mustered up his best fake smile and went to congratulate her on the day. She looked at him like she didn't even know him, then passed out in his arms. Will hadn't realized there was a worse feeling than losing both Arizona and New Mexico to Santos, but this was definitely it. He cried out in alarm and suddenly a half-dozen Santos staffers were right there, pulling her away and talking about an ambulance. Nobody seemed to notice Will, who counted it a blessing. He suspected the only worse feeling than having an opponent faint on you was the possibility of the opponent's angry and distraught husband trying to blame you for it. He was desperately curious to find out what had happened, but Donna was back with the campaign herd two days later as though she'd never collapsed at all.
Primary followed primary with the two campaigns in hot pursuit of one another. The media loved it; for once they didn't have to manufacture a horse race, one was playing out right in front of them. CJ thought she was probably insane to have come back on the campaign trail one more time, especially after swearing she was absolutely for real and always done with politics this time, but she couldn't deny she was having fun. Actually governing had been a grind, and there was no way she'd ever serve as press secretary again, but putting her head together with Toby and devising a clever, anarchic, surprising media strategy for an insurgent campaign had been just the challenge she was longing for. Matt Santos was no Jed Bartlet, but that was for both good and bad, and he would be a good president. Working with her old friends and colleagues was good too, even the time in late March when Josh and Donna came to her room looking like kids who'd done something so momentous and terrible they weren't sure whether to be sorry or elated, and told her that Donna was pregnant and they didn't want to make a big deal about it on the campaign. CJ goggled at them for three full minutes while Donna tried to explain something about a storeroom in New Hampshire and the way not sleeping for three days could affect one's pill-taking schedule. She cut off the explanation and told them fine, she could work with this, this was no big deal, except that if Donna didn't cut back and start taking care of herself better, CJ was going to start calling people's mothers. Josh instantly agreed on Donna's behalf with the air of somebody winning an argument already in progress. Donna agreed too, but with the air of somebody who was not done arguing. In this one particular case, CJ's money was on Josh.
By April, the Santos campaign was pulling away from the Hoynes campaign, and there seemed no way to stop it. An increasingly desperate John Hoynes decided it was time to go all in, if this was their last chance anyway, denounce Bartlet, denounce his spiritual successor, and remind people that he had only ever been Vice-President to try and save Jed Bartlet from himself. Will didn't like this strategy, didn't think it was a good idea for the campaign or for party unity, but what was he doing trying to put Hoynes in the White House if he wasn't willing to follow the man's lead? Rather than explore this question more fully, Will got on board. They dug up and aired all the many failures of the Bartlet administration, especially anything they could pin on his staff. CJ's missteps and occasional mendacity with the press, Toby's obstinance that led to Republican victories, Josh's runaway ego and overly loud mouth. They only spoke obliquely about the MS scandal, nobody really needed to be reminded about that. Will put his foot down when somebody suggested pushing on the White House relationship between Josh and Donna. Not only was it ethically wrong to bring out a smear like that with no evidence, there was no way it wasn't going to backfire. Nobody in the world had ever won political points by starting ugly rumors about the past relationship of a man and his pregnant wife, and doubly so when their own candidate's hands weren't exactly clean in the sex scandal arena. The rumors started up anyway, from what source he didn't know, and Will could do nothing about them but watch in helpless shame. It wasn't the campaign he wanted to run.
Josh was livid when the articles started appearing. He'd known it was a risk they were running, knew that putting himself and Donna and their relationship into the public eye could bring on the firestorm they'd avoided three years ago by holding hands and diving off a cliff together only days after leaving office. His first impulse was to find Will Bailey and kick his goddamn ass back to California, where Sam could help Josh explain what it meant to have some humanity even in the heat of a campaign. His second impulse was a total clampdown on the press, punishment to anybody who published a rumor, anybody who so much as listened to one. CJ and Toby and Donna had to sit him down, talk him around. This campaign was about more than putting Matt Santos into the White House. Part of it, a substantial part, was a national referendum on the Bartlet legacy as personified by the staffers who'd brought it to life in the first place. People were going to judge Matt Santos by the company he kept, so the only thing to do was make that a positive. Pulling back now, acting ashamed, would play into Hoynes' hands. They had to do the unexpected, take the risk. Donna took his hand one more time and agreed.
Will finally gave up trying to anticipate what the Santos campaign was going to do next, right about the time Josh and Donna made an appearance on Oprah to discuss their love story and their upcoming bundle of joy. He hadn't known Josh could look so sappily, ridiculously happy, hadn't realized Bartlet's bulldog was capable of getting a little bit teary over a sonogram. He was absolutely sure Josh wasn't that good an actor, though, so it had to be real. By the time the pair of them finished telling the story of Donna's brave journey to volunteer on a political campaign she believed in, Josh's loss of his father during the first Bartlet campaign, their journey to Washington and then the bullet that had nearly ended the story but instead just focused them both on the important things, and years of mutual pining before their painful defeat had allowed them to finally choose each other, the audience was eating out of the palm of their hands. When Donna earnestly explained that they'd considered not joining the campaign out of concern for their family's privacy but realized that making Matt Santos president was just too important not to take the risk, Will tipped back in his chair and closed his eyes. Sometimes being a campaign manager meant knowing when you were beaten.
There were still primaries after that watershed moment, but they were mostly formalities, the party realigning itself so the guns were pointing in the direction of the Republicans instead of inward at each other. Hoynes waited until after the very last primary to formally concede, but he did so with a handsome speech, thanks to Will, and a gracious endorsement, thanks to his own desire to not be persona non grata in his own party. The convention itself took on the air of a cross between a celebration and a pre-battle rally, giving everybody a pat on the back before marching them off to the real war. Richie was already lining up his forces, and he had a big white fortress from which to launch his attacks. But if anybody understood that incumbency wasn't inevitable, it was this crowd, and they were determined that Ritchie would have no more years in office than Bartlet. Will found that sort of resolve admirable, if a little intimidating. He also found that he did like Toby a lot more when they were on the same side.