AH Vignette – 'Impossible Promises'

IMPOSSIBLE PROMISES
(with apologies to Meadow and Agent Boot)


Des Moines, Iowa
Wednesday 9th November 1960
04:08 CST


It was over. The phonecall had been made, and so too had the concession speech (and a damn fine one it had been, too, even if she was unsurprisingly biased). There were still people in the building – some distraught supporters, a bunch of staffers tying up loose ends or finding ways to drown their sorrows, and a legion of reporters generating a great deal of heat and noise against the forlorn backdrop of a new beginning that had turned out to be a stillbirth – but she and her husband had retired to the private suite in the depths of the Bryson Hotel, far from the prying eyes of cameras and politicians, to watch the last rites.

Her husband was sat in front of the TV set, watching the whooping crowds in Dover picked out in garish colors. She remembered that surreal moment on the campaign trail in Los Angeles when the presidents of the three major networks had proudly told the assembled candidates that they would be able to broadcast the election in 'living color' for the very first time; he just hadn't been able to resist attempting a folksy comeback.

“Well, it won't make much difference to me,” he'd said to the waiting cameras, grinning manically, “but I'm sure my wife will love it!”

It hadn't gone down well. It was true – he couldn't stand to sit and watch something for so much as half an hour, whilst she could be glued to it almost endlessly if the mood and the content caught her – but that didn't matter to most decent Americans, apparently, who felt he was condescending to their recreational habits and demeaning to their wives. And that had stung him, she knew; he disliked being cast as the stuffy, humorless, puritanical lawyer against the dynamic man of the people from Delaware, and he liked taking chances to subvert that narrative. The problem was that it just didn't work. Maybe if he'd rebelled against his handlers a little more... substantially. Shown himself to the American people as the decent, sober man she had married. Instead, he'd allowed the RNC to cast him as 'the hero' – the hero of Iceland, of Galway, of the Republican Party. Not only the man the nation needed to stand against Red Europe, but the man America deserved. She had wondered at the start, in the privacy of her own head, if he had actually believed it; but she knew him too well, and such hubris would have mortified him. He did not believe it – but he wanted to believe it, because he was a good man, and he felt the hopes and dreams of the Free World on his shoulders, and it would take a heart of stone not to want to live up to their expectations.

A sudden crescendo of noise dragged her attention back to events in Delaware. The next President of the United States, leader of the free world, former used-car salesman and one-time Army mechanic was taking to the stage.

Well, it's morning in America.” She knew it was coming – had known it, in some dark corner of her mind, since that awful little man with the goatee had muttered what became her husband's Presidential campaign slogan through his permanently-gritted teeth, the night they won the Illinois primary – but it still stung. In Joe Biden's mouth, of course, it sounded perfectly natural – which only made it all the worse.

Biden didn't look like a president; he looked somewhat like a low-level gangster (although that had changed slightly over the campaign, not least because he'd been buying suits that actually fit), and rather more like, well, a used car salesman. Mostly, though, what he looked like was an ordinary man – 'the kind of guy everybody wanted to live next door', in the dreadful terminology of the commentariat.

It still astounded her, quietly, that the American populace could be so easily swayed by an argument of ordinariness; never would she have thought, in all her years, that she might see the world's last great democracy succumb to such base populism. There had been numerous occasions over the last three months when she had wanted to grab the nearest voter by their lapels and ask them if they really, truly wanted their next door neighbor to be President.

Or maybe she was still the petit-bourgeois snob she had been when she arrived in Iowa City twenty years ago, fleeing with her parents from the Blackshirts and their Teutonic allies. The dream of returning to Albion Restored, flourishing as it had in her girlhood, had been something to cling to in those dark years of dislocation and war; she worried sometimes, in her darker moods, if she might be clinging to it still, even with a home and a family here in the Land of Liberty, even with Old England swept away forever by the red hordes of the Commonwealth. Still, at least the Biden campaign hadn’t attacked her for being a foreigner. Well, not much. After the first few weeks. When they realized it wasn’t working. Directly.

On the screen, Biden was warming to his themes. He gestured to his son, stood beside him onstage.

Now why is Joe Jr the first Biden in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because his predecessors were thick?” He arched an eyebrow, knowingly – the crowd, playing to him, laughed on cue. “Of course not. It was because there was no platform on which they could stand.

Oh, yes – Joe Biden's infamous self-proclaimed desire to be the 'education president'. She could understand the desire to send more high-school graduates to college – but at a time when the Communists were once again throwing their weight around in the Sea of Japan and the St George’s Channel, surely it was far more important to get them into uniform and send them to stand beside their allies imperiled by the hordes of Bolshevism, be they in Dublin or Tokyo or even the backward capitals of Africa.

It did not occur to her, as it had not to her husband – or indeed any but a vanishingly small number of individuals in the entire Republican campaign machine – that this kind of rhetoric held no appeal to the American public, worn down by seven years of sons, husbands and fathers coming home in bodybags from pointless scuffles in Guinea or the former Philippines, in the face of the Democratic promise of a ‘trans-oceanic shield’. Instead of escalated deployment, they favored vast batteries of nuclear weapons pointed direct at the belly of the Red Menace from their island allies on the opposite sides of the Atlantic and Pacific to deter aggression and keep their boys safe. They both would realize, in time, and it would be helpful when they did – but that would not dull the pain of tonight.

Biden seemed to have moved on to the same point – she heard him cry “No more pointless spillages of American blood!”, which was answered by a chant from the audience of “Bring our boys home!” It seemed almost inevitable that the Biden administration would spend the next four years dismantling the American military for cheap electoral gain, and she could hardly bear to watch.

She had just made her mind up to go to bed when she heard a grunt from the armchair – the first noise he had made since he left the podium after delivering his concession speech. He was staring at the screen, his lips thin, his eyes blazing.

“Impossible promises,” he sneered, “I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of an American president – an American president!…” He was struggling for words, she could tell, but they betrayed him; for the first time since she had met him all those years ago in Iowa City, Nile Kinnick was dumbstruck.

“We can’t let him do this,” she said, softly. He turned those soft, strong eyes to her.

“No, Hilda, we can’t.” He looked back to the television, to the crowds of people who had the gall to celebrate tonight’s events. “We won’t.”

She felt her heart swell at that, seeing him hurt and bloodied but unbowed. Maybe, just maybe, things could be all right.

“Hilda,” he said quietly over the grumbling of the television, “could you get me a pen and paper please, darling? I’d like to make a few notes before I go to bed.”

Margaret Hilda Kinnick was already reaching for her handbag.

*

President Joe Biden Sr (1961-1965) was responsible for the most sweeping reform of the American education system of the twentieth century, and began the process of legislative equality that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1971. However, his re-election campaign was sunk by the Manx Missile Crisis of 1964.

President Nile Kinnick (1965-1969) is the only presidential candidate since the Founding Fathers to win the presidency after losing a previous election.
 
I'm sorry I missed this at the time, but it is very good. The "with apologies" subtitle, combined with the female viewpoint actually threw me off the scent completely. The succession of little reveals manages to avert the usual tropes - of which I am quite guilty myself - common to this type of vignette. President-elect Biden had me scrolling back assuming I'd misread the opening date stamp, and I'd initially assumed that the viewpoint was TTL's nominee, rather than their spouse. Add in the 2016 and Clinton dynasty parallels and it's a satisfying blend of misdirection and allohistorical irony.

Good use of both hipster President Nile Kinnick and the quotes of OTL Neil Kinnock too; fitting the latter into the reactions of both candidates is especially amusing.
 
Good use of both hipster President Nile Kinnick and the quotes of OTL Neil Kinnock too; fitting the latter into the reactions of both candidates is especially amusing.

That was actually the initial inspiration for the piece; putting Kinnock quotes in Kinnick's mouth. Once I realised I could do the same with Joe Biden (just not that Joe Biden), it was simply a case of squeezing as many in as I possibly could.

Thank you, everyone, for your kind comments on what I must confess is very much a bit of fluff.
 
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