The Faithful: A Novel of the 2008 Campaign

By Carla Dickens

The "Faithful" of Carla Dickens's novel are a vibrant cadre of volunteers devoted to the most charismatic presidential candidate in fifty years. Drawn from today's newspaper headlines and political blogs, The Faithful follows a cast of young, smart, beautiful, and driven men and women shepherding their candidate through the turbulent waters of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497632974

Carla Dickens

Carla Dickens's first novel is The Faithful.

Book preview

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The Faithful

A Novel of the 2008 Campaign

Carla Dickens

Contents

Chapter One:

Hope Takes Des Moines

Chapter Two:

Setback

Chapter Three:

Yes, We Can

Chapter Four:

Star Power

Chapter Five:

Obamania

Chapter Six:

Obamamentum

Chapter Seven:

The Inevitable Candidate

Chapter Eight:

The Empire Strikes Back

Chapter Nine:

A Crisis of Faith

Chapter Ten:

White People

Chapter Eleven:

The Beginning of the End

Chapter Twelve:

Dead Democrat Walking

Chapter Thirteen:

Hillary Steps Up and Stands Down

Chapter One:

Hope Takes Des Moines

Iowa Caucuses, January 3, 2008

Barack Obama: 32%

Hillary Clinton: 25%

John Edwards: 24%

Bill Richardson: 6%

Joe Biden: 4%

Christopher Dodd: 2%

Dennis Kucinich: 1%

Maybe Caroline Stevens would not have thrown her perfect no mistakes life away if Barack Obama hadn’t won the Iowa Democratic Caucuses. On the other hand, she would be the first to say that the life she tossed away like a fast food wrapper slam-dunked into a wastepaper basket would never have been as thrilling as the one she has now. She would have been a blameless bride; and now she is something else, more sinful, yes, but nicer too. Caroline is one of the real Obama Girls, true believers, devoted to the man (and his wife), the cause and the campaign. Don’t confuse our hard-working campaign girls with that actress/model Obama Girl on You Tube singing embarrassing love songs to a man she doesn‘t know to promote her own bikini-clad body. No cynicism in our girl, beautiful shapely Caroline of the shining blue eyes holding a sign with the word HOPE on it that night in Des Moines. She was the creamy-skinned blonde babe in the front-page photo the Chicago Tribune ran with the cut line:

Jubilant Obama staff carried Hope aloft as they danced and chanted on their way from their campaign headquarters to a massive celebration party at the Hyvee Hall in Des Moines.

Caroline believed that Obama would lead us to the race-less society where the first thing we notice about one another is not the color of our skin. The guy behind her in the conga line was a study in subdued, dignified jubilation. But the first thing she noticed about the incomparable Reggie Williams, was definitely the color of his skin, rich, deep, dark brown the color of chocolate that you wanted to devour.

Caroline, Baby Girl, you can’t ever deny it to me. I was standing beside you when Reggie walked into the new campaign headquarters on the eleventh floor at 233 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago the first Monday in October 2007. He hadn’t cut off his dreads yet and they swayed, long and thick, against his shoulders as he walked. Hip Hop star, somebody whispered. I didn’t turn around to see who said that. Standing beside Caroline, I felt her temperature rise along with mine. Our fantasies were jumping out of our heads and co-mingling and cross-pollinating. His dreads were pouring like a fountain over our naked bodies. That skin. Dense, luxurious, like velvet. That walk. Confident, assured, a model’s walk without the arrogance. He was wearing tailored jeans, the crispest, whitest shirt and a black blazer, vintage and cashmere, basically the working uniform of journalists and paid campaign staffers everywhere—but taken to a higher level. Brilliant, inspired. (Caroline loved cashmere. While she considered herself one of the people, she hadn’t traded her cashmere sweaters for the wash-and-tumble dry wardrobe of the typical campaign worker.) When he stopped in a pool of sunlight, turned, looked in our direction and smiled, everyone in that room knew where this was headed. His dark eyes lapped at her ivory skin while her blue eyes licked his chocolate. The race-less society? I don’t think so. They connected through their skins.

He’s not gay, Thomas, she whispered to me.

Caroline, I knew that. A boy can fantasize, can’t he?

You’re engaged, I reminded her; and she had the good grace to blush—or maybe that was just heat infusing her cheeks. As they disengaged eyes and he resumed following his office tour guide, I added, He’s not my type anyway. You know I only stand up for underwear models.

She laughed. That was our joke about my current sex life: masturbating to the gorgeous black male model in the Calvin Klein underwear ad. I was in a dry spell. It’s tough being young, gay and urban without the abs of steel. I would do better in Paris or Greenwich Village in the 50s when effete artists and intellectuals were taken seriously—or anyway taken carnally.

And you are engaged, I repeated when she failed to say he wasn’t her type either—but she was a white girl who’d never crossed the color line so technically speaking, he wasn’t her type aside from his ability to rearrange her molecules in across-the-room-eye contact.

I was in the Chicago office watching CNN when Caroline and Reggie appeared on screen carrying Hope aloft in Des Moines. Wolf Blitzer was giddy.

And I just want to let our viewers know that there were 220,000 Democrats who showed up at these caucuses—that’s a record—and 114,000 Republicans or so who showed up. I think that’s a record for the Republicans. A lot more Democrats participated in these caucuses in Iowa, though, than Republicans.


Millennial voters! Chloe shouted from behind me. Young people aged eighteen to twenty-nine, Millennial voters, who had failed to show up in previous elections had made their presence felt in Iowa. They were one of our key demographics. No one had ever mapped out a campaign strategy as well as the Obama team, utilizing the internet and a door-to-door Get Out The Vote campaign that made Clinton and Edwards look like also-rans. (And they were also-rans in Iowa.) Are you gnashing your teeth in frustration at not being there? she asked.

Not so much. I gave it the studied casual shrug. Chloe, our own Sex Girl, petite and curvy, was probably sorry she‘d passed on the trip. What better opportunity for hot sex with a co-worker, any co-worker, than a victory party? But volunteers like Chloe and me had real jobs and couldn‘t afford to give 24/7 to the campaign. I teach photography at Chicago Art Institute and do a fair amount of freelance work. Chloe was finishing her Ph.D. in political science and interning with the campaign. I got the photos I wanted traveling the state with Barack.

Enough of them too? Chloe asked, nodding her head in the direction of the TV screen where Caroline and Reggie were among the campaign staff on stage awaiting the triumphant arrival of Barack and Michelle. As she studied them, she ran one finger down her throat to the top of her cleavage, nearly always showing to good advantage as it was that day framed by a fine Merino wool black V-neck sweater. They are so nauseating.

Everybody except Chloe, me and our friend Kanesha adored Reggie—and maybe our resistance to his charm was partly rooted in missing the old Caroline, who, though naïve enough to be a heroine in a black and white movie about sacrificing on the home front during World War II, could still make the occasional sharp observation and biting comment. Before Reggie, the four of us were a copasetic circle. Reggie changed the dynamics—and turned Caroline into Little Miss Perpetual Sunshine. I halfway expected her to burst into song during staff meetings--something from South Pacific or perhaps that old Debbie Boone stand-bye, You Light Up My Life.

I am so sick of hearing how charming he is, Chloe said, glowering at the screen.

He works hard, I said, my usual lackluster defense of him. He was putting in eighteen hour and more days on the campaign but so was every paid staff worker and some of the volunteers. One thing I have to hand him, I added grudgingly. He’s no power grabber. So many people who work on campaigns are ruthlessly building their resumes for their future careers in D.C. He is generous in giving credit. Last week I heard him tell Barack that Kanesha made the university initiative in Iowa come together; and I know he put as much into that as she did.

Yeah. She picked at a tiny piece of dried skin around a fingernail. Chloe has small, perfect hands with long fingers, the type my mother calls lady fingers. She keeps her nails impeccably manicured, short, rounded and polished clear or very pale pink. And he opens doors for women. I still don’t trust him.

Born to a single teen mother and raised in a Harlem housing project, Reggie looked after his younger brother who was enrolled at Northwestern. We didn’t know much else about Reggie, like if he and his brother had the same father. White people hate to ask black people a question like that. We did wonder who was picking up the tab for Northwestern.

I finally met the little brother Gary, Chloe said. He stopped by here this afternoon to pick up some brochures for the campus.

And? I prodded. Is he hot? Did you ask him if he’s on scholarship? Who‘s his daddy?

He looks a lot like Reggie—shorter, still has the dreads—but not as hot. It struck me that he must copy Reggie’s mannerisms because he has them all, walk, voice inflections, the way he folds his arms across his chest when he is standing. She smiled. I’ll bet little brother listens to Reggie as closely as everyone here does.

Chicagoans may deny it, but we do defer to those who have lived and worked in Manhattan. Generally, everyone deferred to Reggie. It was subtle, but we did defer. Whatever the staff thought about the Caroline/Reggie thing—and it was Personal Topic A—they didn’t hold Reggie accountable for Caroline’s shamelessly throwing herself at him, even sometimes (or so some of us thought) when her Evan was around.

I didn’t photograph them, I replied straight-faced; and she smacked my arm. Chloe works out and her little firm biceps can deliver a solid jocular punch.

It’s the ‘we’ talk that bothers me the most, she said, turning her glossed lips into a moue of distaste.

Yes, the we talk. If Caroline/and/Reggie didn’t hit your nausea spot with the hand holding, arm rubbing, shoulder massaging and general cuddling—they would surely do it with the we talk. We think. We are going. We are doing. We like. We don’t like. Yet Caroline swore that they were just friends and friends without benefits at that. Nobody else believed her, but I did. We’d been the closest of friends for ten years, since we met in a photography class at Belleville Area College, BAC, the summer after high school graduation. Caroline drove from her home in Clayton, one of the two oldest suburbs of St. Louis, across the Mississippi River to BAC because her aunt’s friend taught the class. I liked Caroline immediately. She had a broad warm smile, a good sense of herself, her abilities and assets from writing skills to outstanding long legs. For example, she knew exactly where she was in that class: not good, but not bad either. She wore sandals all summer; and I never saw a chip in her peachy-nude toenail polish. Some girls hated her because she was too perfect. Over the years, I grew to love her.

I still love Caroline, but I realized I’d had enough of them in Harlem in December.

On that first glorious October day, Caroline suggested we take Reggie out for a welcome-to-the-staff drink. The three of us hung out together for a few months. It bothered me that he always let her pick up the check with her AmEx cards (one courtesy of Daddy, the other, Evan) while I tossed down the cash for my share of the bill. (Oh, he’s a brother, Kanesha said derisively. White men pay. Black men expect to be paid for. Why do you think we‘re all looking for Oreos like Barack?) Increasingly, I felt uncomfortable in my perceived role as their chaperone. I maxed out on their company when we all went to New York for a weekend combining business with pleasure, an art show opening and a meeting with the New York campaign staff.

Sitting in a booth across from them at Mo-Bay’s restaurant on 125th Street in Harlem, Reggie’s and Bill Clinton’s ’hood, I realized: These two are smug, judgmental idealists and hypocrites who are exploiting the white men in Caroline‘s life. She was wearing Evan’s engagement ring while Reggie held her in his arms, cradling the upper part of her body and blowing kisses onto her long, slender neck. I looked up at the giant Christmas tree ornaments that hang from Mo-Bay’s ceiling year round and imagined their faces superimposed on the baubles.

Are you two doing it? I asked them; and they were insulted, offended, bordering on outraged. Hypocrites. I would have celebrated their love if they’d confessed it. Caroline is a great gal. Would I begrudge her true lust? We thought you understood us, she said. Yeah. Better than you understood yourselves. This is a special relationship. Having sex would make it less special, he said. Check, please. I tossed down some cash and went out by myself to walk around Harlem where there are a lot more white people now than when Reggie was born there. I believed them about the sex. In an odd way, that made me feel worse about them. Who did they think they were to sit themselves up as superior beings above the carnal fray?

Poor Evan, Chloe interjected into my thoughts.

She was calling him Evan and not The Fiancé, the label she had attached to him. I guessed that Chloe planned to offer consolation to Caroline’s neglected man at the appropriate time—and that was likely going to be sooner rather than later. A tall, dark and handsome young tax attorney from a prominent Philadelphia WASP family, Evan Templeton was probably the man of her secret dreams, the man whose class and last name would lift her out of her ethnic origins. Chloe Petrofsky was the daughter of South Orange, New Jersey hippie parents—Mom a New Age therapist, Dad a storefront lawyer in Newark, winner of Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year citations. The parents no kid wants to have in their own house, the Petrofskys had experimented with every sexual twist including polyamory, swinging, BDSM and group sex and then gone on talk shows as lifestyle guests to talk about it all. (If Mom and Dad turn up on Montel or The Tyra Banks Show, they should be hawking a book not pimping their sex life.) Chloe would surely renounce her casual sex ways and end up in a conservative, monogamous marriage. What else could she do to rebel?

I had pink hair in high school, she told us when Caroline and I had taken her out for a welcome-to-the-staff drink. I got tattoos and multiple piercings. Nose. So many holes in my ears I was up into the cartilage. Lip. Tongue. Nobody said a word. It was like: You make your own decisions. I casually said I was thinking about getting a clitoral piercing. My mother said to me: Do a little research on that. Maybe there is a high incidence of infections. I was sixteen years old. And my mother’s best effort at saving me was: Do a little research on that.

She didn’t get the clitoral piercing, removed the rest of her metal and let the holes heal shut. Only the tongue piercing left a scar. When the holes were closed, she took her mother’s gold Master Card to Manhattan where she had her fading pink hair turned into an expensive honey blonde Upper East Side bob, the style she maintains. Honey blonde compliments her light brown eyes. And she bought clothes from The Gap and J Crew. (I winced at that part. And I am happy to say that she now buys good basics on sale augmented, she says, by designer clothes gently used that she picks up at thrift shops on her trips home to New York City. Chicago‘s thrift shops are no match for Manhattan‘s. But I don‘t know how she affords her extensive and expensive shoe wardrobe. That is a puzzlement.)

My parents would have allowed voluntary genital mutilation, she said—and that led Caroline into the story of her own mother’s two years in Africa as a volunteer doctor where, of course, she saw first hand the suffering of women who had been cut as little girls. There is something very wrong with a mother who won’t protect her daughter’s genitals, Chloe pronounced—and who could disagree with her? Certainly not Caroline. They bonded for life that day.

I would say that 75% of the staff, paid and especially volunteers, come from families with some history of public service or political idealism. Not me. My family was not exactly racist but not exactly uncomfortable with the idea that great-grandfather was in the Klan. The family did turn Republican after Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights and Voting Acts through Congress, but my mother was very pleasant to the first black family that moved into our neighborhood. There was no white flight in Fairview Heights, Illinois where I grew up in post-Civil Rights America, stage one on the path toward true racial equality.

Do you think Reggie has the big black dick? Chloe asked.

I think he has a black dig. Big? Who knows?

My mother banged a lot of black dick in the eighties, Chloe said, affecting nonchalance. "She thought it