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thing.”
    Gabrielle gave him a disapproving look. “You did come out against it pretty strongly.”
    Same-sex marriages, Sexton thought in disgust. If it were up to me, the faggots wouldn’t even have the right to vote. “Okay, I’ll turn it down a notch.”
    “Good. You’ve been pushing the envelope a bit on some of these hot topics lately. Don’t get cocky. The public can turn in an instant. You’re gaining now, and you have momentum. Just ride it out. There’s no need to hit the ball out of the park today. Just keep it in play.”
    “Any news from the White House?”
    Gabrielle looked pleasantly baffled. “Continued silence. It’s official; your opponent has become the ‘Invisible Man.’ “
    Sexton could barely believe his good fortune lately. For months, the President had been working hard on the campaign trail. Then suddenly, a week ago, he had locked himself in the Oval Office, and nobody had seen or heard from him since. It was as if the President simply could not face Sexton’s groundswell of voter support.
    Gabrielle ran a hand through her straightened black hair. “I hear the White House campaign staff is as confused as we are. The President is offering no explanation for his vanishing act, and everyone over there is furious.”
    “Any theories?” Sexton asked.
    Gabrielle gazed at him over her scholarly glasses. “As it turns out, I got some interesting data this morning from a contact of mine in the White House.”
    Sexton recognized the look in her eyes. Gabrielle Ashe had scored some insider information again. Sexton wondered if she were giving some presidential aide backseat blow jobs in exchange for campaign secrets. Sexton didn’t care . . . so long as the information kept coming.
    “Rumor has it,” his assistant said, lowering her voice, “the President’s strange behavior all started last week after an emergency private briefing with the administrator of NASA. Apparently the President emerged from the meeting looking dazed. He immediately cleared his schedule, and he’s been in close contact with NASA ever since.”
    Sexton certainly liked the sound of that. “You think maybe NASA delivered some more bad news?”
    “Seems a logical explanation,” she said hopefully. “Although it would have to be pretty critical to make the President drop everything.”
    Sexton considered it. Obviously, whatever was going on with NASA had to be bad news. Otherwise the President would throw it in my face. Sexton had been pounding the President pretty hard on NASA funding lately. The space agency’s recent string of failed missions and gargantuan budget overruns had earned NASA the dubious honor of becoming Sexton’s unofficial poster child against big government overspending and inefficiency. Admittedly, attacking NASA—one of the most prominent symbols of American pride—was not the way most politicians would think of winning votes, but Sexton had a weapon few other politicians had—Gabrielle Ashe. And her impeccable instincts.
    The savvy young woman had come to Sexton’s attention several months ago when she was working as a coordinator in Sexton’s Washington campaign office. With Sexton trailing badly in the primary polls and his message of government overspending falling on deaf ears, Gabrielle Ashe wrote him a note suggesting a radical new campaign angle. She told the senator he should attack NASA’s huge budget overruns and continued White House bailouts as the quintessential example of President Herney’s careless overspending.
    “NASA is costing Americans a fortune,” Gabrielle wrote, including a list of financial figures, failures, and bailouts. “Voters have no idea. They would be horrified. I think you should make NASA a political issue.”
    Sexton groaned at her naïveté. “Yeah, and while I’m at it, I’ll rail against singing the national anthem at baseball games.”
    In the weeks that followed, Gabrielle continued to send information about NASA across the