"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

invitation to vote him out of office if they did not like it. But they did. Like a lot of
California politicians who had jumped onto the national stage, his support at
home was strong. High negatives, sure, but high positives, with the positives
outrunning the negatives by about two to one. Now that he was president, the
numbers had only polarized more, in the usual way of American politics, everyone
hooked on the soap opera of cheering for or against personalities.
So a checkered past was a huge advantage in creating the spectacle. In his
particular version of the clich├йd list, Phil had been a reporter for the L.A. Times, a
surfboard wax manufacturer (which business had bankrolled the start of his
political career), a VA social worker, a college lecturer in history, a sandal maker,
and an apprentice to a stonemason. From that job he had run for Congress from
Marin County, and won the seat as an outsider Democrat. This was a difficult
thing to do. The Democratic Party hated outsiders to join the party and win high
office at the first try; they wanted everyone to start at the bottom of the ladder and
work their way up until thoroughly brainwashed and obliged.
Worse yet, Phil had then jumped into a weak Senatorial race, and ridden the
stateтАЩs solid Democratic majority into the Senate, even though the party was still
offended and not behind him.
Soon after that, his wife of twenty-three years, his high-school sweetheart, who
had served in Vietnam as a nurse to be closer to him after he was drafted, died in
a car crash. It was after that that Phil had started his globe-trotting, turning into
the WorldтАЩs Senator. Because he kept his distance from D.C. through all those
years, no one in the capital knew much about his personal life. What they knew
was what he gave them. From his account it was all travel, golf, and meetings
with foreign politicians, often the environmental ministers, often in central Asia. тАЬI
like the Stans,тАЭ he would say.
In his frequent returns to California, he was much the same. For a while he
pursued his тАЬOngoing Work Education program,тАЭ Project OWE, because he
owed it to his constituents to learn what their lives were like. Pronounced ow,
however, by his staff, because of the injuries he incurred while taking on various
jobs around the state for a month or three, working at them while continuing to
function as senator in D.C., which irritated his colleagues no end. In that phase,
he had worked as a grocery store bagger and checkout clerk, construction worker,
real estate agent, plumber (or plumberтАЩs helper as he joked), barrio textile
seamstress, sewage maintenance worker, trash collector, stockbroker, and a
celebrated stint as a panhandler in San Francisco, during which time he had
slept at undisclosed locations in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere around the city,
and asked for spare change for his political fundтАФpart of his тАЬspare changeтАЭ
effort in which he had also asked California citizens to send in all the coins
accumulating on their dressers, a startlingly successful plan that had weighed
tons and netted him close to a million dollars, entirely funding his second run for
senator, which he did on the cheap and mostly over the internet.
He had also walked from San Francisco to Los Angeles, climbed the Seven
Summits (voting on the clean air bill from the top of Mt. Everest), swum from
Catalina to the southern California mainland, and across Chesapeake Bay, and
hiked the Appalachian trail from end to end. (тАЬVery boring,тАЭ was his judgment.
тАЬNext time the PCT.тАЭ)
All these activities were extraneous to his work in the Senate, and time-consuming,
and for his first two terms he was considered within the Beltway to be a celebrity
freak, a party trick of a politician and a lightweight in the real world of power (i.e.