The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear Read Free Page B

nature called Armstrong George about to devour us like a hungry wolf, and, to top it all off, they had to go and have the damn convention in my hometown. For Christ’s sake, was God spending all of His time trying to screw with me, or just most of it?
    On the other hand, if a woman named Sandra Juarez just happened to see me with the Indians up onstage looking like I had my act together in a big-time way, that was just fine by me. It had been a little over eighteen months since my very public meltdown, which had coincided with Sandra Juarez and me breaking up. No, that wasn’t accurate: my very public meltdown that resulted from Sandra Juarez dumping me. I’d like to think I was over it, focused on the future, all those things you are supposed to do. But I still thought about her more than I liked to admit. Mostly I thought about how humiliated I had been after splitting in such a spectacularly public way, which had been my fault. But also I thought about—and this is what I really hated to admit—how much I had loved being with her, living together for that year and a half.
    Sandra was one of the few really good print reporters who had made the transition from covering politics for
The Wall Street Journal
to working for television. She was first-generation Mexican-Cuban American, an unusual mix. Her Cuban mother was a doctor and her Mexican father was an auto dealer. It wasn’t exactly the hardscrabble immigrant story, but still, when she looked in the camera and said, “As a first-generation Mexican-Cuban American, I understand…,” few people stopped to point out that she had gone to Groton and then Harvard. We had met when Sandra was covering the Florida governor’s race. She had already moved from the Orlando market to CNN but was back in her home state covering the race. We met in the spin room after the first debate; a less romantic, tawdrier place for a first encounter would be hard to imagine. My candidate was a Cuban American woman running against a wealthy North Florida businessman, and I made the mistake of trying to play the Cuban-and-female card with Sandra. It didn’t go well.
    “Don’t you think Florida would benefit from having a Cuban American female as governor?” I asked.
    She smiled very nicely and then took my head off: “So the best case you can make for your candidate is what she achieved before she was born? That is probably the most pathetic defense I’ve ever heard.” Then she walked off. I did the only reasonable thing in this circumstance: I chased her and groveled. Not because she was beautiful and smart but because it was in my client’s best interest. I told her I was an idiot and she was right and then spilled out all the policy reasons Roberta Bello was the best choice. She listened to all of it with a blank face, then said, “Thanks, not bad,” and left. Her post-debate coverage was okay, not great. I sent her an email telling her I thought it was fantastic and to get in touch if I could help with anything else. Nothing works with any kind of reporters like flattery, since mostly they just get the crap beat out of them, but she ignored it.
    A week after Roberta won, I was at CNN doing an on-air hit about the elections. I’d won every race I’d worked on that cycle and was feeling fairly bulletproof. It was the standard setup, where you show up for five minutes or so and try to sound smart, which for five minutes is usually not that hard. I ran into Sandra in the greenroom and she asked me if I was going to work for Roberta’s administration, or for any of the other clients I’d elected. “God no. I don’t do government. I hate government.”
    “Great,” she said. “So no conflicts. Want to get a drink?” We spent every night together for the next 418 days, at least the nights when I wasn’t traveling for clients or she wasn’t out on the road. Until I was standing in the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and saw the
National