Running as an Independent who was “not beholden to any special interests,” Wrightman benefited from the disarray in both parties. With the lovely, oft-blushing, and unthreatening Charisma at his side he ran a feel-good campaign mostly free of specifics other than I’m not the other guys. With his campaign song, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,” playing in the background, he had been appropriately sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed renewable energy workers, he had stood next to dour farmers whose silos were filled with rotting corn, potatoes, and soybeans, and he had been supportive of congressional efforts to pump money into the system while proclaiming himself fiscally conservative.

He was folksy when necessary, admitting sheepishly to voters during the first debate that it was Charisma who had urged him to get into politics after he had sold the family publishing empire, “mostly because she wanted to get me out of the house, where I was spending way too much time disagreeing with Judge Judy’s verdicts.”

As he had done in the Senate, during the campaign he mostly laid back and let his opponents destroy each other, busying himself shaking hands, kissing babies, and reminding voters that “America’s future is still ahead of us.” People believed Wrightman was a nonentity who slipped into office because of the disdain voters had for both political parties. But the actual key to his success turned out to be twenty-four-year-old wunderkind Raymond Munchmeyer, a lanky, quirky cybermarketing genius who teamed with veteran pollster Nolan Noyes to create the social media effort that shaped each of Wrightman’s images. Reign Man, as Munchmeyer was known inside the campaign, lived by the motto “You are what you share.”

Noyes’s polling data determined what people wanted to hear and Munchmeyer’s manipulation of social media fed it to them, making it possible for Wrightman to simultaneously be all things to all voters. To young people, for example, he was the sometimes forgetful but lovingly supportive dad, even when befuddled by technology; to Southerners, he was a down-home guy who loved banjo music, William Faulkner, Friday-night football, NASCAR, and the American flag; to Northerners, he was the egghead who sang along with Springsteen, recommended Walter Mosley, and loved his daughter’s rescue labradoodle, NBA basketball, and the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution as symbolized by the American flag.

It was a marketing technique that worked equally well for selling diapers and electing a president. According to various media, his inauguration marked “a new dawn,” “a new beginning,” “a new era,” “a rebirth of the American spirit,” and “a new day” on which “it is time to turn the page” on the “darkest moments in our history” and “bring forth a renewed spirit of cooperation” or “a rebirth of American democracy.”

Admittedly I had been as guilty as anyone else in creating that positive atmosphere. A couple of those phrases had come from my computer, which makes it difficult to deny I wrote them. It is amazing how easily we all bought into that. All of us. I understand the general public falling for this—after all, campaigns spend millions of dollars to accomplish that—but me? On Inauguration Day I had written that the voters had “saved democracy.” I admit that; those were my own words. But as the immortal Eric Stratton pointed out in Animal House, “You fucked up. You trusted us.”