Or maybe I was the one under the illusion. Maybe Marcus knew exactly who he was dealing with and what he was doing, from the beginning. Maybe he was just wearing the mask we wanted to see. Maybe to those who possess it, ambition is an instinct as natural and unconscious as any other, the same kind of winnowing characteristic that led one ancient organism to crawl out of the water while another stayed behind, awaiting extinction. Perhaps Arch recognized in Marcus a kindred spirit.

It was Marcus, after all, who came forward with the tool Arch needed once again to hack away at a deficit which had begun to seem insurmountable.

We were listening to Walsh read down the day’s agenda the morning after the first debate. Arch hadn’t done poorly, exactly, but Baird had come off much better. The primary election was shaping up to be a referendum on poise and experience. Not only was Dan Baird a physician and a congressman, but he’d been a national champion in policy debate at Montgomery Bell. Arch did fine, but he looked like what he was: young, opportunistic, inexperienced. The outsider card didn’t help him much, given that Baird had walked away from Congress to serve God and save Africa. Arch’s charm and intelligence couldn’t compensate for the facts.

Goldberg had been boiling his brains and burning up the phone, looking for some liability in Dan Baird, some soft underbelly where he could slide in a knife that might disembowel the good doctor’s righteous image, but nothing had yet to yield. Dan Baird, it seemed, was that rarest of all things: an honest man, true to his principles. His only apparent shortcomings—being absurdly rich, detached from the reality of life for underclass and minority Tennesseans, lockstep alignment with GOP policies that favored the rich at the expense of the poor, etc.—were just as true of Arch.

Goldberg was lamenting this very fact when Marcus came in, holding a copy of the New Yorker. How many fifteen-year-old kids from the projects killed time reading the New Yorker? The question itself confesses the inherent bias which made us all so smitten with him.

“I was just reading Jeffrey Toobin’s new piece,” Marcus said. “Have you been following the Carrie Benvenuto situation?”