Carol's Failure

Word Count:713


“Mrs. Johnson, please explain how you would erase the deficit in the country’s budget,” The garishly dressed moderator asked. How the hell was I supposed to know how to balance the budget, wasn’t that what accountants did? I wanted to be President of the United States, not some pencil pusher. “What programs do you plan on defunding? Or do you plan on raising taxes?”

“Deficit? This is the government, we have all the money in the world. I’d simply print more money to make sure that we can pay all of our bills,” I answered, the light shining brightly in my face. I held my hand over my eyes and looked out into the crowd, the audience seemed flabbergasted by my answer. “That’s the only solution that makes any sense right? When I can’t pay cash for a top at Saks Fifth Avenue, I take out my credit card and pay. Thus I create more cash to pay for what I want.”

The gasps that came from the audience told me that they didn’t like my answer, but I had no idea why. It was a well thought out answer that my team had thought was genius. In fact they had thought it was so good that they begged me not to use it during the debate. I glanced over at my opponent, and even he was smiling. He knew that it was a good answer. The moderator looked at me, she seemed stunned. I knew that I was giving a good answer but I had no idea how good it really was. “Miss Johnson, would you like to elaborate on your previous answer.” She turned to my opponent and said, “Sir, I know that it’s highly unusual but I think that maybe we need clarification in this case.”

“So what I mean is that sometimes you just have to make more money to pay for the things you want. Like we want a nice, big military, so we need to come up with the money to pay for it,” It seemed as if the audience was sitting on the edge of their chairs, just waiting for me to reassure them that the first answer had not been a fluke. “So I would have the mint just print off more money in order to pay for the military and for everything else we need.”

“Er, uh, moving on.” My answer was so ingenious that The Moderator wanted to give my opponent a fair shot at answering a question just as well. It upset me a little bit but I understood that I had to spread the wealth around, at least a little bit. “Mr. Smith what is your position on going to war with Afghanistan?”

He gave some long drawn out answer about how we had to do whatever it took to protect freedom and everybody yawned, or maybe that was just me. The moderator turned to me, and with a puzzled smile on her face she said, “Your retort, Miss Johnson.”

“Well I don’t think that there should be war. I mean think about it, aren’t we just doing the same thing that we are accusing the other countries of doing, by going in by force and bombing Afghanistan? Instead of doing that, I think that we should have a cocktail party with world leaders and work out our differences that way.”

The rest of the debate went by in a blur. Everyone had laughed, which meant that they knew my idea was good. Or so I thought, until Jeff came up to me. “Carol, your performance tonight was appalling. There is no way anyone in their right mind will vote for you. In fact I just got the fast stats back in from the debate and you scored a historic zero!”

“Historic? That’s good right? That means people will remember me,” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that it wasn’t good. There was no way that I was going to be President. Not even vodka could fix this problem for me. No I needed something stronger, something that people always turned to in bad times. I needed tequila. “Can you we go to a bar or something? I need to figure out what to do next.”