This 44-part series began running in WCT Nov. 8. Readers can read all the installments to date at www.windycitymediagroup.com .
From the journal of John 'Jack' Quincy Adams, Chief Secret Service Special Agent in Charge, The White House. Code Name: One.
Part 20. Winners and Losers
Jack Adams, the Secret Service agent charged with assassinating President George W. Bush and being held for psychiatric evaluation, is telling how the Republicans lost the House in the midterms, but the gay marriage and gay adoption issue hung like a specter over Thanksgiving dinner that year.
The Democrats won back the House, in the midterms by four seats. That meant that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California became the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives. She was having a good time of it, too, giving back all the committee chairmanships to Democrats. The Republicans loved to say, 'It looks like payback is going to be a bitch—literally.' But they weren't laughing much.
The RNC had done everything they could to pull the elections out of the fire. They sent the president to Iraq on a secret junket that not even his staff knew about; he went to bed early one night after a cabinet meeting at Camp David and the next thing everyone knew he was in Iraq. We were in Iraq, I should say. And even I didn't know we were going.
The next thing they tried—and I was in on these meetings, or rather my jacket was—was actually fairly brilliant. And it was Pure Rover. In July, right before the midterms, they arranged through the Chinese to pay Kim Jong Il's government to launch a couple of short range missiles in an attempt to scare the electorate into thinking our country should keep the Republican, hawks in office. But voters would not be distracted from either the war—or more accurately the cost of the war—or the economy, which looked good on paper, but wasn't translating into more money in people's checking accounts. And no matter what Angler and Co. did to try to get oil prices down, it was now running amok. Gasoline was headed toward $4.00 a gallon and people were furious about it.
It didn't help that Bob Schieffer, on the CBS Evening News, was making a mantra of the obscene, record-breaking Mobil-Exxon profits week after week, so voters couldn't forget that Hurricane Katrina had nothing to do with the price of gasoline, and if they wanted to know why gas at the pump kept creeping higher and higher as summer wore on they would have to ask their congressional representatives. And that's what they did. When they didn't get answers, they voted them out. Never the less, the Korean missile launch was one of the slickest political maneuvers I'd ever witnessed.
And as if all that weren't enough, two more 'events' pushed voters over the edge. First, the Alaska pipeline finally started leaking after years of neglect, so BP had to shut it down for an indeterminate length of time. Even worse, Hezbollah crossed the Lebanon-Israeli border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Within two weeks the two countries were at war, Trailblazer was not telling Israel to back off, and hundreds of civilian casualties on both sides were being tallied. Hezbollah, with arms from Iran, was striking deep into Israel and taking a serious toll.
We gathered, as usual, in Baltimore for Thanksgiving. Of all I had to be thankful for, at the top of the list was that the vast majority of ballot measures prohibiting gay adoptions had been postponed until the 2008 elections.
But there was no delusion among my family: we knew it was going to be on the ballot eventually. The Catholic Church shut down adoption programs completely in Catholic Charities, the church's national nonprofit social services organization. They chose not to facilitate any adoptions at all rather than abide by state laws that allow for gay people to adopt children. It began in Massachusetts in the spring of 2005 following a directive from the Vatican and swept across the country after that. Meanwhile, my family was trying to enjoy the respite we had been given until 2008.
Dinner conversation meandered through a host of topics, including the Marriage Protection Act amendment. My children argued that the MPA wasn't fair to anyone and I found myself nodding in agreement with almost everything they said. It seemed particularly unfair to unwanted children—like my grandson—who were growing up in institutions or in one foster home after another, or sometimes on the streets.
As I observed our own Thanksgiving dinner conversation I wondered if this scene was being enacted in millions of homes across the country. I found myself hoping so and then thought, My God, my children are making me into a Liberal.
