DISCLAIMER
So, there's this guy named Aaron Sorkin, and he's a much better writer than I can ever hope to be. Plus, he owns the copyright to them, which has certain annoying legal ramifications. I'm borrowing them without permission, without any intent of infringement, and without a squitty little atom of a chance that I'll ever make a profit. I should add that I'll try to return them all in one piece, with permanent psychological scarring and the guarantee that they're all going to need years in therapy by the time this particular vacation is over. I'm not an American, nor am I a politician, and from these two facts you should draw the conclusion that I am not by any means an expert in American politics.
SPOILERS
To be on the safe side, spoilers apply for everything through to 'Posse Comitatus', although in practice I doubt that much from late Season 3 will be showing up here. If it happened in Season 1 or 2, it will most probably appear in this story in some form. At the present time, I would warn you to expect explicit spoilers for In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen and Hartsfield's Landing. I'll update that list as more become likely to appear.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
This is a repost of a fic of which the first three chapters were originally posted between March and April 2002. Contentwise, little has changed, and my main reason for reposting is that, in the original version, I asserted that this was, technically, going to take place within the timeline of the show, which is no longer true, as I'm being forced to ignore a couple of major plot points. I'm blaming this mostly on 'Stirred', Mary-Louise Parker, and the fact that their season finale bore no resemblance to mine. Still rated PG-13 for probable language and two men in a loving, consensual relationship. No sex. Guys smooching. Get over it. Don't say I didn't warn you. Yes, that does mean that we're in an Amy-free universe.
I owe Rhiannon, my recently-appointed beta-reader and less recently-appointed best friend and mocker, a hug and a huge promo for A Touch of Evil, her Austin Power's fanfic which can be linked to through 'The Hysterical Rhino' on my Favourite Author's page.
To The Hysterical Rhino. For teaching me about life, the universe, and everything. 42.
The Shoulders of Giants
Chapter 1: What Kind Of Day Has It Been
I remember the last campaign as a series of lower-grade hotels and occasionally, when finances were particularly tight, a middle-of-the-road motel. Our candidate was a liberal economics brainiac from New Hampshire, the donations were not exactly pouring in. I can't remember exactly when we became more upmarket. Hotels on the campaign trail are too impersonal, we're suffering from too much sleep deprivation, and they merge into a long blur. This conference room in Springfield is such a room. We've moved in, created a temporary war room, and soon will move out again. I should be crunching some numbers, or trying to at least, but I've zoned out and I'm currently listening to Sam and Toby bicker good-naturedly. I call it good-natured. To someone not versed in the dynamics of the senior staff it probably sounds like a mini-civil war.
"I call it imagery."
"And I call it bad writing."
"Imagery is art."
"I don't question that, Sam, I just don't think using a comma or a period every now and then would actually hurt the imagery, and I think it makes us look bad when it appears that the Deputy Communications Director is unfamiliar with the standard rules of English grammar and punctuation."
"See, and I just think that if he actually has to give this speech, then it's not going to matter much whether it makes us look bad or not."
I would interrupt, but I'm amazed Toby got that all out in one breath, and I do think that Sam has a point. He's been saddled with writing the 'we have to say something if we lose' speech. It's one of the non-perks of being the Deputy rather than the Director. Plus, my other reason for not interrupting is that Sam looks damn sexy with his glasses skewiff and his self-righteousness and his loose tie. I let them go on arguing as Sam keeps writing, blithely ignoring the punctuation keys on his laptop, and am disturbed from my private musings by a finger tapping on my shoulder as our now-permanent pollster tosses a file on my desk and signs to me. I recognize most of the shapes formed by her fingers even before Kenny translates them.
"America's saying that you're an irrepressible egomaniac who needs to know that the public loves you."
I tell her that it's in my genetic code to be impatient and sign 'thank you', before she retreats to the corner of the room which she originally staked out for herself when we arrived here ten days ago. Then CJ breezes in looking entirely too chirpy, tosses a transcript of the briefing on top of my numbers and various other random pieces of crap, and sits down with a satisfied smirk.
"You are far too chipper given that you're a woman for whom the next twelve hours will decide her career for the next four years, and, in fact, most of her life after that."
Toby's hands actually fall off the keyboard in a reaction to what I can only assume was the pig of a sentence I just produced. His mouth opens and closes and he finally comes out with,
"There's such a good reason nobody suggested you should work for me instead of Leo."
"I can translate," CJ says. "Although I do agree that it's a good thing we don't pay you to be eloquent."
Possibly I should backtrack and explain why the four of us are even in Illinois. Right after Dr Bartlet's birthday party, when I was trying to juggle the appointment of a Deputy Political Director for the campaign with that small matter of running the country, my addled brain figured that it would be a whole lot easier if the staff of '98 took over. The thing is, our main opponent is Hoynes. Yeah, we said that no Vice President in history had challenged a sitting President for re-election and somehow reasoned that Hoynes wouldn't do it either. We were wrong, and he was running against us, and things were going to hell because Bruno had no idea how to handle him. I worked for the man for five months, I was his campaign manager, I know his weak points. And so somehow, I managed to convince Leo and the President that Toby, Sam, CJ and I were more than capable of running both the country and the campaign. We took over and surprised even ourselves. We farmed out a lot of material to our deputies and assistant deputies, Simon Glazer generally takes care of the day-to-day White House press briefing when CJ's out of Washington, I brought Joey on board permanently, and I gave Donna a raise and permission to call herself the Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff if she so wished, along with a warning that she would sound ridiculous answering the phone like that. In return for this, she runs my office, calls me twice a day to check I'm sleeping and eating right, and doesn't go to work for a dot-com company offering her a starting salary on a par with the annual Congressional budget.
Tonight we get to see whether we actually pulled this off, or whether we've been fooling ourselves since Hartsfield's Landing.
As two Secret Service agents enter the room, we all shuffle our chairs backward and get to our feet as the President and Leo follow, flanked by a black man and a blond Canadian woman whose eyebrows shoot into her hairline the instant she sees my area of the table. So I refused to hire a campaign assistant. So sue me. The last one – the last one apart from Donna, I mean – was forced onto me four days after she left for Wisconsin during the first campaign and lasted exactly thirty-seven hours. I fired him and muddled through. He had blond curtains and a really bad case of acne and wore flowered ties and brought me coffee and called me Mr Lyman. I'm a creature of habit. Donna or Sam looks after me, or else I live with the mess.
"You need an assistant," she announces, walking past Leo and Charlie and immediately beginning to organize files.
"Good morning to you too, Donnatella." I raise my eyebrows at Leo and he shrugs.
"The White House can live without her for a day. You apparently can't. How're the numbers coming?"
"Early numbers look good."
I pull the file out from underneath the pile of stuff that's ended up on top of it and call Joey over, and she starts to talk Leo through the information she's accumulated since her people started on the phones two hours ago. On the other side of the conference table, the President is reviewing the 'we have to say something if we lose' speech, while Toby and Sam have moved on to bickering about the acceptance one. Their laptops appear to have been caught in a blizzard of paper and Sam has acquired some interesting blue flecks on his teeth, probably an occupational hazard from spending two hours gnawing the end of a pencil. CJ's on her cellphone to Carol, sorting out the latest crisis that arose in the White House briefing this morning. The noise is going to put the local drugstore out of stock on Advil by noon, my stomach is doing the tarantella all over that line you cross right before throwing up, and the adrenaline in my system alone is probably providing enough energy to theoretically power up a couple of 747's.
This is my life blood.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
10 HOURS LATER
By 8pm, my fingernails are bitten down as far as they can go. Our numbers are still good, but I keep having this feeling that right before the polls close in two hours and we get the official numbers, this is all going to go up in smoke and Healthgate's going to come back to bite us in the ass. Donna's banned me from coffee and alcohol on the grounds that it's bad for me, I have a sensitive system, I've barely eaten all day, and I'm high off just the adrenaline. I'm sure they're all perfectly logical reasons, but the lack of any intoxicants is not helping my state of mind.
"Calm down."
"Can I just send you back to Washington?"
"Yeah, Josh, because the President's going to let you borrow Air Force One for a couple hours."
"I'm nervous, Donna!"
"I'm aware of that, Joshua. I think I would have noticed your nervousness even without the chewed nails, the copious amounts of caffeine, and the fact that every item of furniture in that conference room is scuffed from your kicking it."
"Is that a new thing?"
"Is what a new thing?"
"My kicking furniture when I'm stressed."
"No. Check the legs on the chairs in the Roosevelt Room if you don't believe me."
"We're digressing into a big pit."
"I thought that was something we did. I thought it was normal."
"Yes." I make a desperate attempt to get this conversation back on track. "The point is, I'm nervous, and you're mocking me, and the smart-mouthed assistant thing was fun, but I expect a more supportive attitude in a friend."
"Yeah, that's not gonna happen anytime soon. Quit eating your fingers."
"What if we lose?"
"We're not going to lose."
"We might, and I think I would feel a little better about it if I were inebriated, so can I please go get drunk?"
"Because that would look good on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times. 'Deputy Chief of Staff Plastered At Illionis Primary.' CJ would kill you."
"CJ likes me."
"This from the author of the secret plan to fight inflation. You are not drinking tonight, no matter how much CJ likes you. This is mainly because I don't want to have another fight with Sam over who gets to deal with you drunk this time. It is, however, also partly because I don't think the President would appreciate it. You're going to go in there…" She jabs a finger at the door of the ballroom. "…and talk to high-ranking Democrats and play nice and not get in a drunken brawl with the Vice President."
"Damn you and logic."
"Yeah, damn me and logic." I feel a hard finger digging in the small of my back. "Let's go."
So, there's this guy named Aaron Sorkin, and he's a much better writer than I can ever hope to be. Plus, he owns the copyright to them, which has certain annoying legal ramifications. I'm borrowing them without permission, without any intent of infringement, and without a squitty little atom of a chance that I'll ever make a profit. I should add that I'll try to return them all in one piece, with permanent psychological scarring and the guarantee that they're all going to need years in therapy by the time this particular vacation is over. I'm not an American, nor am I a politician, and from these two facts you should draw the conclusion that I am not by any means an expert in American politics.
SPOILERS
To be on the safe side, spoilers apply for everything through to 'Posse Comitatus', although in practice I doubt that much from late Season 3 will be showing up here. If it happened in Season 1 or 2, it will most probably appear in this story in some form. At the present time, I would warn you to expect explicit spoilers for In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen and Hartsfield's Landing. I'll update that list as more become likely to appear.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
This is a repost of a fic of which the first three chapters were originally posted between March and April 2002. Contentwise, little has changed, and my main reason for reposting is that, in the original version, I asserted that this was, technically, going to take place within the timeline of the show, which is no longer true, as I'm being forced to ignore a couple of major plot points. I'm blaming this mostly on 'Stirred', Mary-Louise Parker, and the fact that their season finale bore no resemblance to mine. Still rated PG-13 for probable language and two men in a loving, consensual relationship. No sex. Guys smooching. Get over it. Don't say I didn't warn you. Yes, that does mean that we're in an Amy-free universe.
I owe Rhiannon, my recently-appointed beta-reader and less recently-appointed best friend and mocker, a hug and a huge promo for A Touch of Evil, her Austin Power's fanfic which can be linked to through 'The Hysterical Rhino' on my Favourite Author's page.
To The Hysterical Rhino. For teaching me about life, the universe, and everything. 42.
The Shoulders of Giants
Chapter 1: What Kind Of Day Has It Been
I remember the last campaign as a series of lower-grade hotels and occasionally, when finances were particularly tight, a middle-of-the-road motel. Our candidate was a liberal economics brainiac from New Hampshire, the donations were not exactly pouring in. I can't remember exactly when we became more upmarket. Hotels on the campaign trail are too impersonal, we're suffering from too much sleep deprivation, and they merge into a long blur. This conference room in Springfield is such a room. We've moved in, created a temporary war room, and soon will move out again. I should be crunching some numbers, or trying to at least, but I've zoned out and I'm currently listening to Sam and Toby bicker good-naturedly. I call it good-natured. To someone not versed in the dynamics of the senior staff it probably sounds like a mini-civil war.
"I call it imagery."
"And I call it bad writing."
"Imagery is art."
"I don't question that, Sam, I just don't think using a comma or a period every now and then would actually hurt the imagery, and I think it makes us look bad when it appears that the Deputy Communications Director is unfamiliar with the standard rules of English grammar and punctuation."
"See, and I just think that if he actually has to give this speech, then it's not going to matter much whether it makes us look bad or not."
I would interrupt, but I'm amazed Toby got that all out in one breath, and I do think that Sam has a point. He's been saddled with writing the 'we have to say something if we lose' speech. It's one of the non-perks of being the Deputy rather than the Director. Plus, my other reason for not interrupting is that Sam looks damn sexy with his glasses skewiff and his self-righteousness and his loose tie. I let them go on arguing as Sam keeps writing, blithely ignoring the punctuation keys on his laptop, and am disturbed from my private musings by a finger tapping on my shoulder as our now-permanent pollster tosses a file on my desk and signs to me. I recognize most of the shapes formed by her fingers even before Kenny translates them.
"America's saying that you're an irrepressible egomaniac who needs to know that the public loves you."
I tell her that it's in my genetic code to be impatient and sign 'thank you', before she retreats to the corner of the room which she originally staked out for herself when we arrived here ten days ago. Then CJ breezes in looking entirely too chirpy, tosses a transcript of the briefing on top of my numbers and various other random pieces of crap, and sits down with a satisfied smirk.
"You are far too chipper given that you're a woman for whom the next twelve hours will decide her career for the next four years, and, in fact, most of her life after that."
Toby's hands actually fall off the keyboard in a reaction to what I can only assume was the pig of a sentence I just produced. His mouth opens and closes and he finally comes out with,
"There's such a good reason nobody suggested you should work for me instead of Leo."
"I can translate," CJ says. "Although I do agree that it's a good thing we don't pay you to be eloquent."
Possibly I should backtrack and explain why the four of us are even in Illinois. Right after Dr Bartlet's birthday party, when I was trying to juggle the appointment of a Deputy Political Director for the campaign with that small matter of running the country, my addled brain figured that it would be a whole lot easier if the staff of '98 took over. The thing is, our main opponent is Hoynes. Yeah, we said that no Vice President in history had challenged a sitting President for re-election and somehow reasoned that Hoynes wouldn't do it either. We were wrong, and he was running against us, and things were going to hell because Bruno had no idea how to handle him. I worked for the man for five months, I was his campaign manager, I know his weak points. And so somehow, I managed to convince Leo and the President that Toby, Sam, CJ and I were more than capable of running both the country and the campaign. We took over and surprised even ourselves. We farmed out a lot of material to our deputies and assistant deputies, Simon Glazer generally takes care of the day-to-day White House press briefing when CJ's out of Washington, I brought Joey on board permanently, and I gave Donna a raise and permission to call herself the Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff if she so wished, along with a warning that she would sound ridiculous answering the phone like that. In return for this, she runs my office, calls me twice a day to check I'm sleeping and eating right, and doesn't go to work for a dot-com company offering her a starting salary on a par with the annual Congressional budget.
Tonight we get to see whether we actually pulled this off, or whether we've been fooling ourselves since Hartsfield's Landing.
As two Secret Service agents enter the room, we all shuffle our chairs backward and get to our feet as the President and Leo follow, flanked by a black man and a blond Canadian woman whose eyebrows shoot into her hairline the instant she sees my area of the table. So I refused to hire a campaign assistant. So sue me. The last one – the last one apart from Donna, I mean – was forced onto me four days after she left for Wisconsin during the first campaign and lasted exactly thirty-seven hours. I fired him and muddled through. He had blond curtains and a really bad case of acne and wore flowered ties and brought me coffee and called me Mr Lyman. I'm a creature of habit. Donna or Sam looks after me, or else I live with the mess.
"You need an assistant," she announces, walking past Leo and Charlie and immediately beginning to organize files.
"Good morning to you too, Donnatella." I raise my eyebrows at Leo and he shrugs.
"The White House can live without her for a day. You apparently can't. How're the numbers coming?"
"Early numbers look good."
I pull the file out from underneath the pile of stuff that's ended up on top of it and call Joey over, and she starts to talk Leo through the information she's accumulated since her people started on the phones two hours ago. On the other side of the conference table, the President is reviewing the 'we have to say something if we lose' speech, while Toby and Sam have moved on to bickering about the acceptance one. Their laptops appear to have been caught in a blizzard of paper and Sam has acquired some interesting blue flecks on his teeth, probably an occupational hazard from spending two hours gnawing the end of a pencil. CJ's on her cellphone to Carol, sorting out the latest crisis that arose in the White House briefing this morning. The noise is going to put the local drugstore out of stock on Advil by noon, my stomach is doing the tarantella all over that line you cross right before throwing up, and the adrenaline in my system alone is probably providing enough energy to theoretically power up a couple of 747's.
This is my life blood.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
10 HOURS LATER
By 8pm, my fingernails are bitten down as far as they can go. Our numbers are still good, but I keep having this feeling that right before the polls close in two hours and we get the official numbers, this is all going to go up in smoke and Healthgate's going to come back to bite us in the ass. Donna's banned me from coffee and alcohol on the grounds that it's bad for me, I have a sensitive system, I've barely eaten all day, and I'm high off just the adrenaline. I'm sure they're all perfectly logical reasons, but the lack of any intoxicants is not helping my state of mind.
"Calm down."
"Can I just send you back to Washington?"
"Yeah, Josh, because the President's going to let you borrow Air Force One for a couple hours."
"I'm nervous, Donna!"
"I'm aware of that, Joshua. I think I would have noticed your nervousness even without the chewed nails, the copious amounts of caffeine, and the fact that every item of furniture in that conference room is scuffed from your kicking it."
"Is that a new thing?"
"Is what a new thing?"
"My kicking furniture when I'm stressed."
"No. Check the legs on the chairs in the Roosevelt Room if you don't believe me."
"We're digressing into a big pit."
"I thought that was something we did. I thought it was normal."
"Yes." I make a desperate attempt to get this conversation back on track. "The point is, I'm nervous, and you're mocking me, and the smart-mouthed assistant thing was fun, but I expect a more supportive attitude in a friend."
"Yeah, that's not gonna happen anytime soon. Quit eating your fingers."
"What if we lose?"
"We're not going to lose."
"We might, and I think I would feel a little better about it if I were inebriated, so can I please go get drunk?"
"Because that would look good on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times. 'Deputy Chief of Staff Plastered At Illionis Primary.' CJ would kill you."
"CJ likes me."
"This from the author of the secret plan to fight inflation. You are not drinking tonight, no matter how much CJ likes you. This is mainly because I don't want to have another fight with Sam over who gets to deal with you drunk this time. It is, however, also partly because I don't think the President would appreciate it. You're going to go in there…" She jabs a finger at the door of the ballroom. "…and talk to high-ranking Democrats and play nice and not get in a drunken brawl with the Vice President."
"Damn you and logic."
"Yeah, damn me and logic." I feel a hard finger digging in the small of my back. "Let's go."