The Junior Senator
[It's been awhile. Here's a story I have been working on for quite some time. It's long, and you get it in one drop, as I don't like waiting for chapters myself. Caution: It involves a Republican, which may trigger some.]
I couldn't contain my joy as I watched Wisconsin Attorney General Jackson James Masters raise his right hand and, at age 38, become the nation's youngest Senator. I was not in the retinue that surrounded him, which included his lawyer father and homemaking mother from Green Bay, who were watching their lifelong dream for their son come true; Claire, the elegant woman he had met and married at Harvard Law School, whose ambition dwarfed his own and who had delivered two perfect daughters once they moved to Madison to teach at the University of Wisconsin School of Law; Eleanor and Evelyn, the aforementioned perfect daughters; and the President of the United States, a discolored, unprincipled man who had cajoled Jackson to go back on a campaign pledge that was less than two years old and take on the two-term Senator who, until about ten days before the election, had seemed like a lock for a third term and who seemed as shocked as she was surprised to make a concession call after rural Wisconsin county after rural Wisconsin county turned out massively for what CNN was calling "the upset of the night."
Senator Kathleen Bannister went from being on everyone's short list of potential 2020 Presidential nominees to being the only incumbent Democratic to lose a Senate election on what was otherwise a great mid-term night for Democrats.
At 53-47, the election was the opposite of what the final polls had predicted. Over the final three days of the campaign, our internal numbers had seen the same twelve point swing.
There were hints of the swing.
The last seven days of the campaign had been vertiginous. Our crowds were large and loud. Senator Bannister's were not.
The President had attended a rally in Green Bay and another in Janesville. The President didn't waste his time on "losers."
The rallies had been overflowing and raucous, the supporters outside the buildings equal to or exceeding the supporters inside. I had stood among them, their energy and love for our candidate matching my energy and love for our candidate. "This does not feel like a loss," I had thought.
The Kavanaugh vote had been a catalyst. Bannister had hawed and hemmed and refused to reveal how she would vote until she was actually voting, and she voted "No," mewing about how the allegations, while unsubstantiated and at the 11th hour against a candidate with a stellar record who had been vetted and vetted, were too serious to ignore, notwithstanding how many proved, more serious adult allegations she had ignored against those ideologically aligned with her.
"Fucking fantastic!" Jackson had declared, one of the only times outside of the bedroom that I ever heard him swear. "She just ceded us an advantage."
She had. There was only one reason for her to vote "No": 2020. She voted "No" to preserve Presidential viability and, in so doing, had ensured no Presidential viability. Unless you're Richard Nixon, you can't lose your last election before running for President. You just can't.
The "No" vote galvanized rural Wisconsin. They stood in line for hours, waiting to protest her vote with their own, waiting to cast out the woman who had placed her interests above theirs.
Jackson had seen it all coming.
"It's happening," he said, his hand in my hair as my cheek pressed against his chest and my hand played between his legs, long after we should have been asleep and restoring for one of the last campaign days. "I feel it. I'm going to win."
"We're going to win," I corrected.
"Yes, we're going to win," he accepted.
We did win. The exit polls and the turnout had us giddy by 3 p.m.
Our victory was certain by 5 p.m.
Bannister conceded at 7 p.m.
Wisconsin has 72 counties. In 2016, the President won 60 of the 72. In 2018, Jackson won 66 of the 72. He was on his way.
******
Jackson and I had met seven years before. At the time, I was a second-year law student at Wisconsin and the student representative on the search committee that interviewed both Jackson and Claire Masters, husband and wife Harvard Law graduates who had both clerked for the United States Supreme Court. After clerking, they both practiced Appellate Advocacy at silk stocking law firms in New York and, now, were moving together into academia.
I had lobbied against inviting either them for on-campus interviews. I was a Progressive (I had caught Obamania in 2008), they were Federalists, I thought Federalists were Fascists, and I didn't think Wisconsin needed Fascists on its faculty.
"We need to hire people of color, not people who want to oppress people of color," I had battle-cried.
I had been out-voted.
They had come to campus, and they had charmed the Committee and the overall community. In bearing and personality, they were the opposite of what I had expected them to be.
Jackson was tall, about 6'4". But, his impeccable posture made him seem taller.
He was not a classically handsome man. His brown hair was bland, parted on the side and flipped over just like every other Crimson, although perhaps a bit higher in the front, a cowlick exaggerating the height. His brown eyes didn't stand out. His Roman nose was a bit large for his narrow face. And, his straight white teeth were a little too big, like he needed to grow a bit to catch up to them. If Seth Numrich was taller and a little buck toothed, he'd have been Jackson's doppelgänger.
Jackson knew his teeth were too big. I could tell, because he tried to keep his smiles small, which was too bad, because his big smile revealed two crescent dimples that diverted all attention from his teeth.
Regardless, he -- like Claire -- was elegant. Although he stood ramrod straight, he moved with dignity and grace, his movements languid, unhurried. He moved like someone who had been raised well. He moved like someone who didn't need speed, who had never needed speed.
And, he filled out his tailored suit nicely. I would later learn it was from being a triathlete, biking or running or swimming almost every day so he could travel here and there to torture himself in Ironman competitions. Then, I knew only that his suits didn't drape on him like they did on most academics; they were taut and tight, like they had been crafted especially for him.
He looked more comfortable in a suit than most people looked in shorts and an undershirt. He looked like he slept in a suit.
Claire, by contrast, was smallish in stature, 5'4" or so. But, she was not smallish in either intellect or personality. She was vicious. You were bleeding out before you even knew she had cut you.
She was also eccentrically beautiful. Even I recognized that, and I hadn't been with a woman since the night W was re-elected. I had worked for the Kerry Campaign and I was as certain of his victory as Senator Bannister had been of hers. When the early exit polls predicted a Kerry victory, we started celebrating. We continued celebrating even after our inside information said the exit polls were way off and Bush would win Ohio by 3 and Florida by 5 and, with those, the election. We continued celebrating even after the networks called the election for Bush, a call Kerry would not acknowledge, much less accept. We celebrated so long and so hard I found myself inside a girl I didn't know doing things my body had never done before.
"Never again," I had pledged as I looked for the condom I hadn't worn, dressed in clothes I didn't recognize, and slinked out of an apartment I couldn't re-find if my life depended on it. "Oh my God," I thought as I walked around Boston looking for something familiar, "the re-election of George W. Bush made me gay."
Of course, it hadn't. I had been gay for as long as I could remember. I just didn't want to admit it. I thought that, if I didn't admit it to myself, then I wouldn't have to admit it to anyone else, either.
It was 2004. It was a much harder admission than it is now, and it's still pretty damned hard.
By the time I met Jackson Masters, I had given my ass to so many men that I wore my homosexuality like a badge of honor. I wouldn't have undone it even if I could. I liked being gay. I don't know that I'd have chosen it, but, now that I had it, I had no interest in giving it back. I reveled in it.
Anyway, Claire's eyes were like oil spills, dark brown and large, too large for her small face. At times, she looked like a Precious Moment figurine.
Her nose, by contrast, was small, a button.
Her lips continued the alternation, thick and round, although the mouth they housed was small. "I bet she can't take a dick in that mouth," we gossiped behind her back.
Like her mouth, her body was small. "She should have been a gymnast," we observed.
When we were being cruel, we wondered what she saw in Jackson. Then, we speculated that she saw the man she could make him be. Later, I'd see what she had seen, that when Jackson Masters focused on you, I mean really focused on you, everything else stopped and that focus was the only thing that mattered. It was like heroin; once you tried it, it's all you ever thought about.
When we were being really cruel, we joked that they were "The Rectitudes." They seemed so staid as to be priggish.
