Interface

"Do you think he looked presidential?" asked a reporter from a rabidly conservative Catholic magazine.

McLane shrugged. "People say I'm a hothead," he said. "People say I'm out of control and that I can't handle the pressure of the campaign. So maybe I shouldn't be the one to talk, but I've learned that the world is full of crackpots who will shout crazy stuff at you. I mean, they are everywhere. And you can't let them get under your skin. If you're going to physically assault every lunatic who babbles some nonsense to you, then you're not going to make much of a president - and if that's how you handle a nut case, then how are you going to deal with foreign leaders?"

55

Tuesday, October 22, two weeks before Election Day, the standings looked like this:

COZZANO 59%

PRESIDENT 8%

MCLANE 18%

UNDECIDED 10%

OTHER 5%

An obscure Washington D.C.-based organization called the American Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths staged a press conference at which a videotape was shown to the press and then disseminated to all of the networks. The videotape was a series of outtakes from Cozzano's campaign, a blooper film if you will. It started out with some excerpts from an interview in which he was still suffering from some speech impediments. From there it moved onward through the campaign, showing Cozzano during commercial breaks, bantering with reporters on airport runways, walking down the aisle of his campaign plane to the bathroom, doing sound checks before debates, and so on. The one thing that all of these takes had in common was that, in each of them, Cozzano did something wrong: slurred some words or tripped over his own feet. One particularly striking clip showed Cozzano working a crowd at a rally in Newark. A woman handed her baby to Cozzano for a kiss and he nearly dropped it, seemingly overcome by a temporary seizure. "I-I-I-I'm sorry," he stuttered, and handed it back to her. The conclusion reached by the experts of the American Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths was that Cozzano was still suffering from "severe neurological deficits" and was not fit to be president.

Excerpts from the videotape were broadcast repeatedly on virtually every television news program in the United States, in many cases as the evening's top story.

Wednesday, October 23:

COZZANO 51%

PRESIDENT 10%

MCLANE 21%

UNDECIDED 13%

OTHER 5%

In Chicago, a press conference was held by Tommy Markovich, a venerable Chicago sportscaster who had been well known to sports fans in that city during the late sixties and early seventies. He had retired in 1980. Markovich said that his conscience had been troubling him about something. He showed an excerpt of a Bears-Vikings game from the year 1972. Late in the game, the Vikings were leading by ten points and the Bears were driving from their own thirty with only one minute left in the game. William A. Cozzano, who was a tight end, went out on a screen pass, caught the ball, and found himself out in the open with nothing between him and the goal line except for hard-frozen turf. He ran unobstructed all the way to the Viking ten, where, inexplicably, the ball squirted loose from his arms and dribbled back upfield for a few yards, where a pursuing Viking fell on it. It had been a famous gaffe at the time, not so much because it was significant to the outcome of the game (it wasn't), but because Cozzano was known for being a steady and reliable sort of player who didn't make mental mistakes.

Now, a couple of decades later, the shriveled old man who had called that game on TV wanted to point something out: the Vikings had been favored to win that game by ten points. By dropping the ball, Cozzano had preserved the point spread.

Thursday, October 24:

COZZANO 45%

PRESIDENT 12%

MCLANE 25%

UNDECIDED 14%

OTHER 4%

In an exclusive interview with CBS Sports, a noted author of books on the Mob said that Nicodemo ("Nicky Freckles") Costanza, an important Chicago Mob figure who ran a huge illegal sports betting operation during the sixties and seventies, had made something like twenty million dollars off the 1972 Bears-Vikings game - money he would have forfeited if William A. Cozzano had simply held on to the ball long enough to reach the goal line.

A local TV reporter for one of the network affiliates in Chicago released the results of a two-month investigation into co

The Cozzano campaign issued a press release stating that the American Association of Physicians, Surgeons, and Osteopaths had not existed until some two weeks previously, and appeared to have a membership of three, all of whom had shown up at the press conference two days ago as experts urging Cozzano to withdraw from the race. One of these three was a former Army doctor who had been discharged under other than honourable circumstances. One of them no longer practiced because he could no longer obtain malpractice insurance. The third had declared bankruptcy after fifty of his patients filed a class-action suit against him complaining of botched breast implants.

The Cozzano campaign also issued a blooper reel of its own, showing the incumbent President and Tip McLane tripping over their shoelaces and slurring words, and suggested that these two might want to have neurological exams of their own.

Finally, a video expert was trotted out to state that the videotape of Cozzano nearly dropping the baby in Newark had evidently been doctored; other videotapes made of the same event did not show him doing anything unusual.

Friday, October 25:

COZZANO 40%

PRESIDENT 14%

MCLANE 29%

UNDECIDED 13%

OTHER 4%

Acting on an anonymous tip, a reporter for a Chicago network affiliate tracked down Alberto ("Stitches") Barone, ninety-six years of age, who was living in a dingy convalescent home on Chicago's south side. Stitches agreed to have the nurses unbutton his shirt so that he could display the numerous scars that he had received during an epochal knife duel with John Cozzano, William's father, some sixty years earlier, for the hand of the fair Francesca Domenici. Over time, the scars had contracted and become even more grotesque than they had been to begin with. Stitches Barone, fortified with a few injections, managed to sit up in bed and deliver an unrehearsed, four-hour statement to the TV cameras, telling the entire story of his ten-decade life and times. Of these four hours, one hour was devoted to his childhood in Italy, one hour to his heyday in the Al Capone organization, one hour to his physical ailments, and one hour to recounting the antics of his favorite dog, Bozo, who had died of vehicular trauma in 1953. The reporter took the videotape home and culled the one sentence devoted to the subject of John Cozzano: "he was a vicious man who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, and I was afraid of him."