6:00 a.m. (12 hours until Senate vote on Bill 301)
Leo McGarry walked into the West Wing at 6:00 a.m. Margaret was already at her desk. She said good morning and handed him a pink phone message slip. Leo glanced at the message, did a double-take, and closed the door to his office; 6:05 a.m. and already there was a crisis.
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6:58 a.m. (11 hours, 2 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
After spending an hour on the phone, the only information he had was what was on the phone message. Senator Jack Dodger of Idaho was going to vote nay on the education bill. They needed to fix this.
The hour hand of the clock crept past seven. Josh should be in by now to help him sort this out. Leo dialed his deputy's extension and was rewarded with a pleasant, "Josh Lyman's office, how can I help you?" from Donna.
"Donna, it's Leo. I need Josh in my office."
There was a slight hesitation. "I'm really sorry, Leo, but…see, the thing is…" There was obviously no polite way to say what she needed to say. "Josh has barricaded himself in his office. I think he's got the bookcase blocking the door."
This was going to be a very bad day. "I'll be over in a minute," Leo said, hanging up the phone.
It was more information than any of Leo's other phone calls had yielded. Josh had something to do with this. That couldn't be good.
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7:14 a.m. (10 hours, 46 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
The door to Josh's office was in fact barricaded. Luckily, there was a side door. Leo pushed open the unencumbered door and found Josh sitting behind his desk, frantically sorting through a stack of paper ten inches high. Startled by the presence in his office, Josh looked up. He glanced at the door Leo had just walked through, blinked, and said rather abstractly, "I don't know why I didn't think of that."
Not in the mood to discuss his deputy's eccentricity, Leo launched straight into the problem. "Josh, what is this about Jack Dodger? I just heard that he's not going to vote for the bill. Why the hell not? Didn't he specifically say two days ago that he would be voting for the bill?"
Visibly frazzled, Josh held up his hands as if to ward off Leo's words. "What is this, Twenty Questions?"
"That was in fact three questions, Josh. We could call it Three Questions if you like," Leo responded sarcastically.
"Okay," Josh answered, his mind drifting away from the conversation and his fingers once again picking through the sheaf of papers.
"Josh," Leo called, annoyed.
"Yeah?"
"I want the answers to my three questions," Leo prodded.
"I really don't want to give them to you," Josh said, focusing on Leo in earnest for the first time since he'd come through the door.
"Do it anyway," Leo said firmly.
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7:35 a.m. (10 hours, 25 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
"So what you're saying is that you lost us Dodger's vote by insulting the staple crop of his state?" Leo summed up incredulously after hearing Josh out.
"Essentially, yes," Josh replied.
"Essentially?" Leo questioned, feeling the urge to smack Josh over the head. He decided to wait until he got all of the damning evidence.
"I may have insulted him personally as well," Josh conceded. "Apparently he comes from a long line of potato farmers."
Working himself up to giving a gloriously biting rant, Leo suddenly noticed exactly how ragged Josh looked. His suit jacket was discarded on one peg of his chair, his tie was askew, and his hair was sticking out in several directions. Obviously he realized he'd screwed up. Possibly he'd slept here. What they needed to do now was work on fixing this.
"Okay," Leo said. "You're an idiot and you should have called me as soon as this happened, but okay. We need to fix this, Josh. This bill was a huge part of the President's platform; it needs to go through. The vote is in ten hours, we need to fix this now. What about other senators?"
Josh shook his head. "They're all locked. Dodger is the only one that could possibly reverse his vote."
"We're just going to have to get Dodger back then," Leo said decisively. There was a minute of silence as they both tried to think of something that Dodger wanted, some kind of leverage that could swing him back to a yea vote.
"He's up for re-election next year," Leo considered. "We could pressure him. Tell him that if he makes fools of us, we'll be running a very well-funded moderate Democrat against him so it doesn't happen again."
"Leo, Dodger is a junior Republican senator in a solid red state. Plus, he has a 65 approval rating," Josh argued.
"I'm not saying we'd actually do it. It'd be a bluff," Leo said.
Josh looked at him skeptically. "If it were you, would you go for that?"
"No," Leo admitted. "But not everyone is as smart as me." Josh did not look comforted. "Okay, we'll find something else. You tried to apologize?" Josh nodded grimly and Leo surmised that his apology had not been well received.
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9:42 a.m. (8 hours, 18 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
Two hours and two discarded plans later, there was a knock on Josh's side door and Sam stepped in. "Am I interrupting something important?" he asked, taking in the men's tense postures and the fact that Leo was in Josh's office.
"Sam," Leo said, "If you were a junior Republican senator in a red state and you had a 65 approval rating, would you feel in any way threatened by a well-funded moderate Democrat challenger?"
Sam looked at Leo like he was telling a joke and chuckled appreciatively. "No."
Josh hit his head on his desk. Hard.
"Well, not everyone is as smart as Sam either," Leo tried.
"What did you come in here for, Sam?" Josh asked, trying to get off the subject of his humiliation.
"Oh," Sam said, "Right. I was wondering if I could borrow your stapler."
"Don't you have a stapler?" Josh asked, sensing something behind the seemingly innocuous question.
Sam looked away and fidgeted with his shirt cuff. "Mine is…out of order."
"Did you run out of staples?" Josh asked, confused.
"No," Sam replied unequivocally.
"How else can a stapler be out of order?" Josh questioned, baffled.
Sam removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his shirttail. "I don't think you'd believe me if I told you."
"Sam," Leo said wearily, "A lot of improbable things have been happening today."
"I stapled my stapler to my desk," Sam stated.
Josh stared at him. "What was that you were saying about people not being as smart as Sam, Leo?"
"Hey!" Sam protested. "I'm getting the feeling that you've done something more damaging than mishandling office supplies."
Josh sobered. "Yeah, buddy, I really have." Sam looked concerned and opened his mouth to ask what was going on, but Josh cut him off, not wanting to rehash the situation at that exact moment. "How did you manage to staple your stapler to your desk?"
Sam took the hint. "You know how sometimes what you need to staple can't go between the top and bottom parts of the stapler because of the angle, so you need to open the stapler and just press down the top part?" Josh didn't really, but Donna did most of his stapling, so he suspended disbelief and let Sam continue. "Well, I was doing that over my desk and I pressed down a little too hard which resulted in the staple going all the way through the paper and attaching itself to my desk."
"And you couldn't just pull it out?" Josh asked in disbelief.
"Staples are surprisingly sturdy," Sam said defensively.
Leo shook his head and stood up. "Josh, why don't you go…help Sam and I'll take over the Dodger thing."
"Leo!" Josh objected, jumping up from his chair.
"Josh, we're going to have to talk to him. It's the only way to work out a deal. And he's not going to want to talk to you." Leo patted his deputy on the shoulder.
Normally, he'd probably come down on Josh a lot harder for a mishap like this that had the potential to spin so utterly out of control. But the kid was obviously beating himself up over it already, and if Josh looked even more despondent after Leo left his office than he did when Leo entered, he knew Donna would give him that doe-eyed disappointed look. News of his nastiness would then travel down the assistant grapevine. Margaret would end up sabotaging his coffee, and when he asked her why she put in enough sugar to stock a bakery when she'd been bringing his preferred black with a dash of cream for ten years, she'd say something like, "I was just trying to sweeten your disposition a little."
"Seriously Josh, don't worry. I'll fix this," Leo said before heading back to his office.
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1:40 p.m. (4 hours, 20 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
Four hours later, nothing is fixed. Senator Dodger and his staff have been giving him the runaround and he had yet to think of anything Dodger would want that they could conceivably offer.
There was a perfunctory knock at his door before Josh burst in. "Anything yet?" Josh asked, desperation tingeing his voice.
Leo was surprised that Josh had had the patience to wait four hours before attempting to help fix the situation again. "No," he responded. "I can't even get the man on the phone."
"He's just doing this out of spite!" Josh cried.
Leo rubbed his forehead where he could feel a headache coming on. "Don't be ridiculous, Josh. I'm sure there's money involved somewhere too."
If only they had a Democratic majority in the Senate, Leo lamented internally. Wrangling votes for controversial legislation was always a challenge, but trying to get Republicans to vote for something specifically proposed by the President was like trying to buy a sixty dollar bottle of wine with a penny.
What they needed was to see Dodger face to face. "Josh, I need you to go up to the Hill," Leo said, "I need you to find Dodger and get him over here. Tell him we're willing to deal, but don't promise anything."
"I'm on it," Josh said and rushed out the door.
"And don't say anything else about potatoes!" Leo called after him.
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4:15 p.m. (1 hour, 45 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
At a quarter past four, Margaret came in to tell him that Dodger was in the Mural Room. "Thank you, Margaret. I'll be right there," Leo said. He abandoned the paperwork that had been failing to distract him over the past few hours and strode through the halls.
He entered the Mural Room to find the elusive Senator Dodger and a strained looking Josh. They both rose as he came into the room. "Thank you, Josh. You can go," Leo said, hoping to decrease the level of tension in the room. Josh nodded in acknowledgement and closed the door behind him.
"Jack," Leo said, stepping forward to shake the senator's hand. "You've certainly lived up to your last name today."
Senator Jack Dodger was a tall, thin man, slowing creeping past middle age. He had graying brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. The smile he gave Leo had a rather sharp edge to it. "You'll forgive me for not wanting to be further insulted by anyone from this office," he replied as the two men sat down.
Leo leaned forward and frowned. "Don't try to blame this all on Josh. We both know that was just a convenient excuse. The vote is in less than two hours. What do you want?"
"What do I want?" Dodger parroted back tersely. "What I want is to be taken seriously. I want my state and the interests of the people I represent to be taken seriously. Agriculture is still our main source of income, and agriculture in Idaho is practically synonymous with potatoes."
Leo looked at him calmly. "Jack, I'm Irish. You don't have to explain the importance of potatoes to me. What I want to know is what potatoes have to do with you not voting for a bill that will finance new schools."
"Leo, I'm not disputing that education is important. I'm not. Children need to go to good schools to learn to read and write and count and grow into whoever they want to be. But what about the children that don't go on to college? What about the children that grow up to be farmers in a country where farmers have to produce more and more to keep up with dropping prices, where good, hard-working people find it increasingly difficult to just scrape by? What about them?"
Dodger's voice was sincere, almost anguished, and Leo felt some of his annoyance fade. "You know we want to help farmers, Jack. But I don't see how not voting for the education bill going to somehow better their lot."
"Leo, I'll vote yea," Dodger said, "I just want one small thing in return."
"Name it," Leo offered.
Dodger folded his hands and took a deep breath. "I want the President to consider my proposal for increasing the price of potatoes. I know it's one of those things that on first glance sounds rather ridiculous, but it's important to my constituents and it's important to me."
Leo decided, a little grudgingly, that he might almost admire a Republican. "I'll get him to consider it," he promised.
"Thank you, Leo," Dodger said, standing to leave. He smiled, and the sharpness of it was entirely gone. "I've got a vote to get to."
Leo smiled back. "Remember to vote yea. Thank you, Jack." The two men shook hands and Dodger slipped out the door.
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5:02 p.m. (58 minutes until Senate vote on Bill 301)
Potato proposal in hand – it really needed a better name than that he contemplated – Leo walked into the Oval Office. "Mr. President. I need you to consider this."
President Bartlet took the proffered folder and flipped it open. Leo watched his eyes track down the page and waited. He didn't have to wait long. "Leo," Bartlet said slowly, "The man is proposing to raise the price of potatoes in every state but Idaho. A potato tax, Leo."
"I realize that, Mr. President. It's something you should talk about with Jack Dodger in the future. Here's the reason why it's important right now. The Senate is going to vote on the education bill in an hour. Yesterday, three senators were abstaining, 48 were voting nay and 49 were voting yea. Without Dodger, the ratio tips to 49 – 48 in the other direction. That's not a majority. Not the kind we want, at least. We got Dodger back to a yea vote, but what he wanted in return was for you to consider his proposal."
"Well I don't suppose that's too unreasonable a request," the President replied. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and continued reading.
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6:05 p.m. (5 minutes into Senate vote on Bill 301)
At 6:05 p.m. Senator Jack Dodger of Idaho voted yea on the education bill.
"See, Leo? Didn't I tell you the bill would get through?" Bartlet said jovially.
If Jed Bartlet wasn't the President of the United States, Leo would have been very tempted to smack him.