The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear by Stuart Stevens Page B

the anti-Christ. But Banka didn’t lay the heavy wood on him, just took shots at George’s plan to build a wall the full length of the border and banged him day after day on the New Bill of Rights. Armstrong George’s people loved him for all those things; it was like accusing a supermodel of being thin. That was the point.
    Every poll had Banka up five to eight points over both Hilda Smith and Armstrong George. Until the Gawker Bomb hit. It came on April 19, at five a.m. EST, which gave it sort of a classy Pearl Harbor “hell at dawn” touch. I was just trying to wake up and drag myself out of bed in another hotel in Ohio, where we were slogging through the last primary, when my phone lit up like one of those flashers they give you at Fuddruckers to let you know when your crappy food is ready. Within five minutes, I had over a hundred calls, my voice mail full and throwing up. “What the hell?” I was fumbling with the cheap coffeemaker when Eddie Basha burst through my door.
    “You hear?” he asked.
    I was standing there in gym shorts, after my usual four hours of sleep, feeling like death before coffee. Eddie was dressed in a nicely pressed shirt and tie, looking like he had won the lottery. “How the hell did you open the door?” I asked.
    He held up a key. “Advance has passkeys to all the rooms,” he said. “Didn’t you know that?”
    “Christ.” I had a rush of panic, thinking of when Ginny and I had been having mad campaign sex in other hotels. “The advance guys always have keys to every room?” I asked. Why didn’t I know that?
    “Her diary,” Eddie said. “Focus. Gawker got her diary.”
    The coffee sputtered that it was ready. I was really not good at this early-morning chaos without coffee.
    “Eddie,” I said, feeling better after the first few sips of the coffee. “What the hell are you talking about?”
    He picked up the remote and turned on the television. “Watch,” he said.
    And we did. Sitting next to my top guy and drinking the bad coffee, I heard the breathless story that Gawker had obtained the diary of Amanda Collins, the wife of Doug Banka, and it contained “explosive details of their intimate lives.”
    “Good, so good,” Eddie said gleefully, and for once the reality of the story lived up to the billing. For the next two weeks, Gawker strung out the juicy details of threesomes with Amanda’s college roommate, “sexcations” in Thailand, “lost weekends” in Vegas. Banka refused to comment on any of the details. About a week into the drip-drip of details as Gawker teased it out, Maureen Dowd wrote in
The New York Times
that the diary read like some
Cosmo
fantasy and she doubted that any of it had really happened. That kicked off an Internet treasure hunt for articles and stories that resembled the scenes that the first lady of Pennsylvania had described. Rumor had it that she was so offended by Dowd’s accusation that she wanted to hold a press conference and reassure America that, in fact, this stuff really had taken place.
    We won Ohio but no one seemed to notice, the whole political world transfixed by the meltdown of Mr. and Mrs. Banka. Editorials and what passed for “Democratic Wise Voices”—these were rare in both parties—urged Banka to withdraw and throw his delegates to the second-place finisher, Senator Richards of Rhode Island. The problem was that Richards was such a boring “White Man of Wealth and Privilege” that no one had been particularly excited about him when he ran; the idea of turning over the nomination to the guy seemed to generate an amount of enthusiasm slightly lower than you might feel at having to kiss your aunt. The concept of honorable resignation in America had never been especially popular, and since Bill Clinton had proved that hanging on was the key to success, many seemed secretly to admire Banka’s stubborn refusal to cave.
    Usually the party in power has their convention last, but this time the Republicans had chosen