The Speechwriter by Barton Swaim Page A

reading by a wide margin.
    â€œThe Knottsie’s next,” said Gil, a policy advisor. “Knottsie,”pronounced “Nazi,” was his name for Jakie Knotts. Gil was known for his inventive jokes at the expense of legislators. (“Know how to spell ‘McConnell?’” he once asked me. “Two c ’s, two n ’s, two l ’s, and two faces.”) Gil was pretty evidently in the wrong line of work; his research was sometimes inaccurate, his writing could be incoherent, and his opinions on policy matters seemed unmoored to any principle: one minute he would loudly proclaim support for legislation allowing law enforcement officers to take DNA samples at the point of arrest, and the next he would argue for the legalization of drugs. Everybody liked Gil. He was frequently wrong, but you had the feeling he knew this about himself. He often stretched his arms and back while he talked, as if he’d just awoken from a nap.
    Several staffers were now gathered around the television in our office, watching the senate. One of these was Stewart. He had been with the boss since his congressional days and took this longevity as license to refer to the governor in fantastically demeaning terms. This had the strange effect of boosting morale, inasmuch as it gave you comfort to know that ill feelings toward the boss didn’t signify incompetence or disloyalty or an inability to get along or even personal dislike. In appearance Stewart was not prepossessing: every day he wore a gigantic charcoal suit—in those days he was thirty pounds overweight—with a cheap white shirt and a drab tie; his haircuts were usually bad, and the roundness of his face gave him a boyish aspect that was only partially camouflaged by an intermittent beard and tiny wire-frame glasses. But he was utterly indispensable; he understood every policyquestion the administration had ever faced, and he could explain the import of each one in overarching terms or in detail. Although he had a fierce temper (several of his assistants had fled in tears and never returned), Stewart had a way of cheering everybody up. He had a penchant for vaguely inappropriate humor and laughed with a great baritone tremolo; sometimes in a convulsion of laughter he flung himself violently backward in his chair and you feared he might fall and hurt himself. His jeremiads were notorious. When an adversary criticized the governor, Stewart would emit long streams of profane and grammatically flawless invective in defense of the administration. By the end, you wondered what reason anyone could have for criticizing policies so obviously reasonable. After a year or so it started to seem improbable that we were so consistently and wholly right about everything, but even then Stewart’s jeremiads offered warm reassurance that we were basically, if not always wholly, in the right.
    At a time like this we needed Stewart around, and I was glad he was there. Aaron casually mentioned that the governor had returned the money.
    â€œReturned the money?” somebody asked.
    Yes, Stewart said. That morning the governor had transferred the money out of Reform Alliance’s account and put it in the state’s General Fund.
    Nat wanted to know why.
    â€œFor the sake of appearances. He hasn’t done anything wrong, but just to be completely above board, he wanted to put the money into the General Fund.”
    Nat rejected that explanation as “press secretary crap” and pointed out correctly that when you return something in a situation like this, you look guilty. Aaron said he’d told the boss that, and so had Stewart, “but that’s what he wanted to do.”
    Stewart: “You know he’s always got to go further than any other politician would. He’s got to be lily white, Nat. He’s incorruptible.”
    Nat: “Oh, that’s great, now he looks like a crook. He didn’t do anything wr—. Why would