The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear by Stuart Stevens Page A

stress Hilda’s definition as a non-D.C. candidate. Our offices were just down the street—one of the two main streets in town—from the statehouse where Hilda started her political career. No reporters, other than the locals who had known the vice president forever, just “dropped by” because they were in the neighborhood, and donors hated to trek to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Quaint coffee shops, a couple of great independent bookstores, and no reporters or donors. In the history of world civilization, no good had ever come from having donors hanging around a campaign headquarters. But at the convention, suddenly the entire political world surrounded us, reporters and donors everywhere. Throw in Bourbon Street, and it was easy to see a campaign totally losing focus, like a football team at a bowl game with players skipping curfew. To fight distractions, Eddie and I had decided to keep the same schedule in New Orleans that we did back in Montpelier. People bitched and complained, but that only proved us right.
    I got on the elevator to ride down one floor to my room, but when the elevator stopped I didn’t get off, and let the doors close, riding down to the lobby. A few delegates were milling around with drinks, looking dazed but still arguing. Everybody was arguing in New Orleans. And drinking. In the small lobby of the Windsor Court, I counted more than a dozen uniformed NOPD cops, what looked to be three or four NOPD detectives in plain clothes, and a full contingent of Secret Service. A huddle of technicians in Secret Service jumpsuits were installing metal detectors and new bomb-sniffing scanners at the main entrance to the hotel. Almost a thousand delegates and press were going to wake up inside a “secure area.” I wondered if this was happening at every delegate hotel in town or just here at the Windsor Court because of the vice president. Whatever: none of it was good for us. Hilda Smith was the candidate of hope versus fear, and it sure looked like fear was winning.
    Luck is no small part of both life and politics, and I had done enough campaigns to know we were lucky to even be in this race. Nine times out of ten, after an economic meltdown the party out of power should be able to waltz into the White House. But the Gods of Politics had smiled on us one spring morning when the diary of the wife of the presumptive Democratic nominee, Pennsylvania governor Doug Banka, exploded into print. It was crazy.
    Banka was in his second term as governor, an Iraq War vet from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had been reelected with huge margins. He’d been elected with the help of his wife’s money, which came from the Silicon Valley world. She was a Stanford-educated engineer who had moved from Apple to Google to a venture capital start-up and made a fortune along the way. Banka had met her when he was working with a private-public aid group, Vets Recovery, and was on a fundraising trip to San Francisco. They dated transcontinentally for a year and then married in Erie. Banka ran for Congress and then made a big jump to governor after two terms. Pennsylvania loves to reelect governors, and he ran up the score, racking up numbers in the conservative part of the state like no Democrat in modern history.
    While we were fighting Armstrong George hand to hand from New Hampshire all the way to New Orleans, Doug Banka was cruising to easy victories in the Dem primary. He became the first to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, and after that it was pretty much all over. Once he had the nomination sewed up, Banka started attacking Armstrong George. I hated that he wasn’t attacking us. Every time Banka hit George, the guy went up with Republicans who figured if the other side was hitting our guy, he had to be pretty good. Had Banka put together a sustained attack on television and digital, he would have eventually damaged George with Republicans. At a certain point, negative information adds up, even if it’s coming from