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1995-12-30
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59 lines
Copyright (c) 1995
HOSTAGE CRISIS
by
Michael Hahn
The shutdown of the federal government had gone on too long; sooner
or later, someone was going to do something drastic. Too many people
had been out of work, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, and tensions were
runing higher and higher. Finally, it happened.
Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Phil Gramm were meeting to plot
strategy in the Speaker's office when the man with the gun burst in. He
waved them to a corner, forced them to sit on the floor with their
backs to the wall, and settled in for a long siege.
Within minutes, word had spread far enough that police now
surrounded the building, the police lines mirrored by a wall of media
trucks a few dozen yards farther back. Crowds gathered still farther
back, some people clumped together as one special interest group or
another. The anti-gun groups were there, the furloughed federal workers
were there, and even both sides of the abortion lobby were there.
Outside the room was pandemonium; inside the room was a man with a
gun and three very worried hostages. Their actions had precipitated
this event, and each of them accepted that fact in the privacy of his
own thoughts. They knew that their stand was strictly political, driven
by the need to score points with the public and their colleagues before
the Presidential election of 1996. They had pushed people into very
uncomfortable positions for little more than their own popularity polls.
The myth of the balanced budget was something none of them actually
believed in or intended to see implemented. It provided a convenient
fiction, though, a rallying point behind which each felt he could climb
to the top of the political heap. Dole and Gramm were declared
candidates, Gingrich a "stealth" candidate for the Presidency. The idea
of a balanced budget was attractive to those they considered their
constituencies, but their constituencies rarely looked past the surface
to the rhetoric to the awful truth beneath. What worked for
corporations didn't work for governments, and each of the three knew
that.
That knowledge hadn't stopped them from pushing the President into
a corner, using the federal workers as the hapless pawns in their
political chess game. As the weeks, then months, dragged on, they had
managed to turn the workers and the President who supported them into
objects of derision. The heat of early summer had made the picket lines
in front of the still-closed offices hellish.
The Republican convention was a little more than a week away, but
it was beginning to look like some of the principals might not attend.
It all depended on the man with the gun, and the willingness of the
three to cooperate.
That's what he wanted, the man with the gun. He wanted an end to
the stalemate. He wanted an end to furlough, and he wanted his life to
return to normal. That's what he told the three men, and that's what he
told the police department's negotiator. He knew, he told them, that
his career was over, but he wanted to get past this standstill. He
wasn't the only one being hurt by it, he said.
He waved the gun as he spoke. His hostages listened, mostly
because of the gun, but at least partly because when the President
talked, you were supposed to listen.
-end-