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Chapter 57 Questioning
"Marcus, we're in trouble," Ethan said bluntly. "Leo's team's VAN system access has been cut off, and we need backup."
The person on the other end of the phone was Marcus Reynolds.
He is a senior political advisor to Senator Sanders, and his position in Washington is equivalent to Karen Murphy's, but he is more astute and has a tougher approach.
Ethan briefly briefed Marcus on the situation and made his request.
"We need access to the 'Shadow Data System' in Pennsylvania."
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
The silence lasted for a full ten seconds.
Leo could sense that the other party was weighing the options and making calculations.
Finally, Marcus spoke.
His tone was not friendly, and even carried a hint of accusation.
"Ethan, let's put the issue of permissions aside for now."
"I have a few questions I'd like to ask Mr. Wallace directly."
Leo stepped forward and said into the phone, "I am Leo Wallace."
"Mr. Wallace," Marcus's voice was cold, "we've heard some rumors in Washington."
"I heard you made a secret deal with Douglas Morganfield? Is it that port expansion project you promised during your election campaign?"
Leo's heart sank.
The news spread faster than he had imagined.
"Yes," Leo did not deny it. "I did meet with him and we reached some agreements."
"Consensus?" Marcus sneered. "In our dictionary, that's called surrender."
"Morganfield is the biggest oligarch in Pittsburgh. He is an enemy of the working class and an object that we progressives have vowed to overthrow."
"And you, a candidate who claims to be progressive, went to shake hands with the enemy and even made promises to him at a crucial moment in the election."
"This has caused great dissatisfaction among many of our core members."
Marcus's tone became stern.
"Mr. Wallace, why should we waste our most valuable strategic resources to save a centrist who might defect at any moment?"
"How can we guarantee that if you're elected, you won't become the next Cartwright?"
This is a fatal accusation.
For some progressives, ideological purity is often more important than victory.
They can accept failure, but they can never accept betrayal.
Leo took a deep breath.
But before he could speak, Roosevelt's voice had already echoed in his mind.
"Purity?" Roosevelt sneered. "That's bullshit that only those nerds hiding in their ivory towers care about."
"Tell him, Leo."
"Politics is never a moral experiment conducted in a sterile laboratory."
"Back then, in order to save the New Deal from being strangled by the old fogies of the Supreme Court, I even went so far as to use administrative means to try to fill the number of Supreme Court justices, and was denounced by newspapers across the country as a dictator who violated the Constitution."
"If I had clung to the so-called 'political purity' like they are now, America would be rotting in the quagmire of the Great Depression by now."
"In this world, there are ultimately only two kinds of politicians."
"One type is the loser who clings to principles and walks into the grave."
"The other type is the victor who is willing to get his hands dirty in order to achieve the ultimate goal."
"Ask him what kind of ally he really wants?"
Leo looked up and calmly said into the phone, "Mr. Reynolds, I understand your concerns."
"But I must correct you on one point."
"I am not surrendering, I am fighting."
"If I lose and Cartwright is re-elected, then Pittsburgh will continue to be Morganfield's backyard, the working class will continue to be exploited, and the progressive ideals will forever remain just empty words here."
"If I win, even if my current victory involves some necessary compromises, I will at least have laid a real bridgehead for the progressives in the Rust Belt."
"I took advantage of Morganfield's greed to gain thousands of union jobs, modernize the port, and revitalize the city."
"That's my logic."
Leo paused for a moment, then posed his question.
"So what exactly do you want?"
"Do you want a loser who, though pure, is destined to lose the election and can only lament on the ruins?"
"Or do we want an ally who, though imperfect, can win the war and plant our flag at City Hall?"
Silence fell again on the other end of the phone.
Marcus hadn't expected this young man to discuss the relationship between means and ends so frankly.
But this is not enough.
Logic alone is not enough; politics ultimately comes down to interests.
Leo understood this, so he had to offer his real bargaining chip, and continued, "Mr. Reynolds, I know what you lack most."
"In past elections, the Democratic Party, especially the progressives, has had a hard time really penetrating the white working class in the Rust Belt."
"You've taken the East and West coasts, you've swept through college towns, but in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, in the industrial heartland of Michigan, you're losing."
"Moreover, if this trend continues, you will keep losing."
"Your ideological foundation is built on the glorious triumphs of globalization and liberalism."
"You sing praises of open borders, celebrate free trade, and champion the borderless flow of capital and goods on Capitol Hill. You tell the world that the future is green, digital, and borderless."
"This narrative may sound appealing in Silicon Valley and Manhattan, but for the steelworkers of the Mononga Hilla Valley and the coal miners of West Virginia, these words don't represent progress; they represent extinction."
"They are the losers of the globalized era that you glorify, the complete losers."
"You have never been able to gain the workers' trust."
"You're missing someone who can help you open this door."
"And I happen to have what you want most."
"Everyone knows that Pennsylvania is a key swing state in determining who will win the White House. The key to Pennsylvania's success lies in whether it can win back the hundreds of thousands of blue-collar white voters in the western part of the state, around Pittsburgh."
"Over the past decade, you've tried everything."
"You sent in pollsters, you aired TV polls, you even had candidates roll up their sleeves and eat lunch in factory canteens. But what was the result? Your vote share is still declining."
"Because your methodology is fundamentally wrong, you are trying to force a narrative of 'progressivism' that originated from the coastal elite to be compatible with the painful reality of the Rust Belt."
"It's like trying to put aviation fuel into a diesel tractor; it won't run."
"You need a model, a successful model that can be replicated."
Leo's voice was steady and powerful.
"If you help me regain data access today, or provide an alternative, you will get more than just the mayor of Pittsburgh."
"I will prove to you a completely new set of campaign rhetoric and mobilization logic, a logic that can get a steelworker who has never voted and a radical student studying sociology in college to stand under the same flag."
"This logic, this Pittsburgh model, is my gift to you."
"When you face the same challenges elsewhere in this state, or even in Ohio or Michigan, you can point to Pittsburgh and say, 'Look, that works. That's what our people did.'"
Leo concluded that this was a high-stakes political gamble on the future.
"Mr. Reynolds, the choice you face now is simple."
"Are you going to continue adhering to your perfect but useless principles and watch Pennsylvania slowly turn red?"
"Or would you rather invest in me, an imperfect ally, and let me break a hole in the hardest rust belt of this country, providing you with a path to victory in the next election?"
This is an offer that's hard to refuse.
Compared to a cold, hard list of voters, Leo offers a "possibility of winning," a strategic solution to break the deadlock.
For progressive leaders who desperately needed to prove the correctness of their path in the rust belt, this was more precious than gold.
Marcus Reynolds remained silent for a long time on the other end of the phone.
He had to admit that the young man's political acumen was frighteningly sharp.
He accurately hit the biggest weakness of the progressives at present.
Just then, a noisy background sound came from the other end of the phone, like many people talking, and the sound of documents being flipped through quickly.
Immediately afterward, a voice abruptly interrupted Marcus.
"Marcus, give me the phone."
Leo recognized the voice; it was Daniel Sanders.
"Hello, Mr. Senator," Leo said, trying to keep his voice steady.
"Young man," Sanders said without any pleasantries, "take the phone, find a secluded place, I want to talk to you alone."
Leo glanced at the people in the room, then covered the receiver and walked to the open space outside the prefab house.
On the construction site in the distance, only a few searchlights were still shining.
All around was silent, with only the sound of the wind whistling in my ears.
"Senator, I'm alone right now," Leo said into the phone.
"Regarding my deal with Morganfield, I want to explain to you that it wasn't for personal gain, but rather for..."
"I know, I know," Sanders interrupted him impatiently. "I heard everything you said, for the sake of workers' jobs, for the revitalization of the port, and for the implementation of progressive ideas in the Rust Belt."
"But, Leo."
Sanders' voice suddenly turned cold.
"In Washington, outside my office, dozens of bright young people like you line up every day to see me. Each of them can paint a perfect picture of the future, and each of them can eloquently describe the phrase 'for the people.'"
But that makes no sense to me.
"In this city, talent is cheap, slogans are cheap, and even those 'political blueprints' you were just so proud of are cheap products that can be mass-produced."
After saying this, Sanders fell into a long silence.
There was no further sound from the other end of the phone. He made no demands, did not hang up, and did not even ask any further questions.
He is waiting.
This silence was even more suffocating to Leo than Marcus's earlier refusal.
"What does he want?" Leo frantically asked himself. "I've given him a campaign roadmap, I've given him the testing ground of the Rust Belt, I've laid out every bargaining chip I can. What more does he want? What else can I give him?"
Just as Leo was about to be crushed by the silence, Roosevelt's voice slowly rang out.
"Silly child."
Roosevelt sighed.
"The promises you made, while useful to him, are all replaceable."
"What he wants is you."
Leo was stunned: "My men?"
"That's right," Roosevelt explained. "Do you think he cares whether you made a deal with Morganfield? No, what he cares about is who you were thinking when you made that deal."
"He's asking you a question through this silence."
"He's asking you: What if one day, for the greater strategic interests of the entire progressive movement, the local interests of Pittsburgh need to be sacrificed; or what if he launches a doomed offensive in Washington, and someone needs to take bullets for him on the ground, or even die for him...?"
"Would you be the so-called ally who's still haggling with him, calculating gains and losses?"
"Is he still the same soldier who could unconditionally obey orders and fight for his banner?"
Roosevelt's words brought Leo to his senses completely.
This is not a simple exchange of interests; it is a pledge of political loyalty.
"Does this mean I'll completely lose my independence?" he wondered to himself. "Am I going to become his vassal? Am I going to become a pawn on his chessboard? What if his decision is wrong? What if he really has to sacrifice Pittsburgh for the sake of the struggle in Washington?"
"independent?"
Roosevelt let out a cold laugh.
"In the world of politics, independence is the epitaph of the incompetent."
"Politics by one person is not politics; it's performance art, it's a suicide show."
Leo did not give in immediately; his stubbornness kicked in.
"But Mr. President, didn't you also stick to your principles back then?"
"You have never bowed down to the economic royalists on Wall Street, the conservative old men on the Supreme Court, or even the conservative forces within the Democratic Party."
Even when you were isolated, you didn't choose to go with the flow. Since you possess that pride of standing up to a million people, why do you demand that I now become someone else's vassal?
Roosevelt rebuked him sternly: "You studied me for four years, wrote hundreds of thousands of words in your paper, and this is the stupid conclusion you came to?"
"Leo, have you been blinded by the success you've been enjoying lately? Or have you been misled by Sara and the others' flattery?"
"What do you think sustains my independence? Courage? Faith? Or some vague sense of justice?"
Roosevelt's voice deepened, carrying an almost brutal honesty.
"My mother, Sarah Delano, came from the illustrious Delano family, a wealthy commercial family that amassed a fortune through trade in the Far East."
"My father, James Roosevelt, was a director of the railroad and coal industries."
"Not to mention my cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, who was already sitting in the White House governing the country when I was still studying at Harvard."
"I was born in Hyde Park Estate on the banks of the Hudson River, where the land is so vast that you could ride a horse all day and still not reach the end."
"I received an elite education at Groton School from a young age. My classmates were heirs of the Whitney and Morgan families. I studied at Harvard and law at Columbia."
"When I first entered politics, I didn't have to worry about next month's rent, or whether I would starve if I lost the election. I had a family trust fund and a network of relatives throughout New York's high society."
"I can point my finger at those Wall Street bankers and call them 'organized money' because I've eaten at the same table with them since I was a child, I know their background, and I don't need their charity."
"I can ignore the threats from party bigwigs because the Roosevelt surname meant supreme political lineage in America at that time."
"My independence is built upon a century of accumulated family wealth, intricate blood ties, and an extremely high social status."
"That confidence is built with real gold and silver and noble blood."
Roosevelt paused for a moment, then his tone shifted sharply and harshly, pointing directly at Leo's most painful wound.
"But what about you, Leo Wallace?"
"What do you have?"