Forging America: My Campaign Manager is Roosevelt-Chapter 44 - 35: The Saint’s Chink

Sarah was highly efficient.

She quickly assembled a small team of four volunteers.

They were all students from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in sociology, political science, or computer science.

Like Sarah, they believed in Leo’s ideals and were disillusioned with the current political landscape in the United States.

This small "opposition research" group set up their temporary war room in an unused storage room at the community center.

They started with the money.

They downloaded all of Alex Cortes’s public campaign finance records.

Then, they traced the source of every single donation.

But the results were disappointing.

Cortes’s campaign funding sources were, just as he advertised, exceptionally clean.

He hadn’t accepted any donations from corporate political action committees.

All his funds came from small individual donations.

The team cross-referenced all his donations but found no shell companies acting as fronts for special interest groups.

"The guy is practically airtight financially," a computer science student in charge of data analysis told Sarah, frustrated.

The money trail was a dead end.

They had no choice but to turn to his words.

The team began a sweeping search for Cortes across the internet.

They combed through every post he had made on social media over the past few years, every video of his speeches at public events, and every news report about him.

Again, they came up with nothing.

Cortes’s public statements were watertight.

He always stood with the working class, always spoke up for minorities and disadvantaged groups.

His image was as perfect as a political idol meticulously crafted by a PR team.

The days ticked by.

There were less than three weeks left until the day of the party primary.

Representative Murphy’s campaign team called several times a day, urging Leo to deliver on his promise as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Cortes’s approval ratings continued to climb.

The atmosphere in the research group grew increasingly oppressive.

Just when everyone was on the verge of giving up, an intern in charge of sifting through old materials—a freshman named Ben Carter—made an accidental discovery.

He had expanded his search from the public internet to the internal archives of the elite private university Cortes had once attended.

It was an expensive liberal arts college in Massachusetts called Amherst College.

In the university’s digital newspaper archive, Ben Carter found a term paper Cortes had written during his sophomore year for a course called "Introduction to Urban Economics."

A scanned copy of the paper had been preserved in the archive as an exemplary student essay.

Ben Carter downloaded the paper and sent it to Leo.

Leo opened the PDF file.

The paper’s title was "Creative Destruction: The Sole Path for Post-Industrial Urban Transformation—A Case Study of Pittsburgh." 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

After reading only the first paragraph, Leo’s breathing began to quicken.

The entire paper’s viewpoint was the complete opposite of the pro-labor, radical-left stance Cortes now projected.

In the article, a young Cortes, in a cold tone full of neoliberal elitism, heaped praise on the economist Schumpeter’s theory of "creative destruction."

He argued: ’For old industrial cities like Pittsburgh, the demise of traditional industries unable to adapt to global market competition, such as the steel industry, is a historical inevitability. Any government effort to protect this outdated production capacity is an obstruction to the city’s progress.’

He even cited a large amount of data to argue that ’strong Union organizations and excessive labor benefits are shackles that drag down a city’s economic vitality and reduce corporate willingness to invest.’

At the end of the article, he concluded,

’Pittsburgh’s future lies in attracting highly educated knowledge workers to develop the finance, healthcare, and high-tech industries. In this process, the unemployment of a portion of the traditional working class is the painful price the city must pay for its rebirth.’

Leo presented the paper to Roosevelt in his mind. Roosevelt’s voice was filled with the thrill of a hunter discovering his prey’s tracks.

"Got you, you little fox!"

"This is his Achilles’ heel! A radical politician who rose to power on the votes of Rust Belt workers, yet deep down, he believes these same workers are a burden that should be eliminated by history!"

"His approachable image, his posture of championing the working class—it’s all just an act to trick people into voting for him!"

"How should we use this material?" Leo asked.

"Just release it to the public?"

"No," Roosevelt immediately objected. "That would be a waste, and far too crude. We need to turn this into a public issue, a political event that can continue to ferment."

Roosevelt laid out a detailed plan for Leo to detonate the bombshell.

"Have Frank immediately arrange for one of our own, someone absolutely reliable. He should look like an ordinary steelworker, but be clear-headed and articulate."

"Have this person attend one of Cortes’s upcoming community town halls."

"Get him a chance to ask a question during the final Q&A session. Then, have him pretend to casually quote a line from this paper and ask Cortes a question he can’t evade."

"What question?"

"Have him ask this: ’Mr. Cortes, I read an article you wrote in college about Pittsburgh’s economy. I’d like to ask, do you truly believe that for the future of Pittsburgh, we steelworkers are a price the city must pay?’"

Leo immediately understood the viciousness of this move.

"So how will he answer?" Leo asked.

Roosevelt smiled.

"He only has two choices."

"If he admits it, then by the next day, every worker in Pittsburgh will know what he really thinks. He’ll instantly lose all his blue-collar votes, and his political career will be over on the spot."

"If he denies it, or even lies and says he never wrote such an article, then the next day, we package the full text of the paper, along with his student photo from his time at Amherst College, and send it to every media outlet in Pittsburgh."

"We’ll paint him as a hypocrite who would betray his own beliefs and blatantly deceive voters just to get elected."

"No matter which path he chooses, he’s guaranteed to lose."

Everything was ready. All they had to do was wait for Cortes’s town hall in two weeks.

But late that night, Leo’s phone suddenly rang wildly. It was Frank, his voice filled with panic. "Leo! Something’s happened! Our construction site... it’s on fire!"