Chapter 1305: Chapter 1304: Passage of Time
"I’m going to take the party leader’s place?"
The President couldn’t help bursting into loud laughter, laughing until his eyes were almost watering.
"It really is a good joke, but first you need to have a brain, you get that?"
He gradually stopped laughing and let out a long breath.
Laughing is tiring too. Shaking his head with the receiver in hand, he said, "You’ve got one thing wrong: in the Federation, no one can be party leader and President at the same time."
"The Charter doesn’t allow us to do that. By the time I can take over that position, it’ll already be two years from now. We can’t wait that long."
"And they won’t allow the Progressive Party’s leadership to sit vacant for two years either, so the more likely outcome is that they’ll find someone else, not me..."
After they chatted a bit more, the President hung up.
Ever since this month’s Progressive Party meeting began, this was already the fifth person to call him and say the committee chair had hinted that the President was to serve as party leader.
"Just like I said, it’s impossible!" He spread his hands and shrugged, his face still wearing an expression that couldn’t accept the idea.
Mr. Truman was sitting across from him, a cigarette between his fingers and a trace of lingering amusement still on his face.
Flicking off some ash, he nodded. "Yeah, and Lynch has a pretty good relationship with us. He’s not stupid enough to think that being party leader is better than being President!"
They knew the whole story. Although the President hadn’t personally attended the meeting, he was very clear on everything that had happened there.
He also understood that the person Lynch had mentioned was definitely not him. He was the Progressive Party Development Office’s first chief.
Any party that wants to grow has to have someone dedicated to that work. Especially for a ruling party like the Progressive Party, it can’t rely solely on people who spontaneously decide to join to maintain the party’s size and base.
The party itself has a strong desire to expand, and that’s the Development Office’s job.
They look for promising young people and bring them into the Progressive Party as members.
Anyone who can do that job definitely can’t be some grim-faced, severe type. That would only make people feel intimidated and reluctant to get too close to the Progressive Party.
This was also why Mr. Douglas had previously been chosen as one of the people to "exchange views" with Lynch.
The President lowered his head and thought for a moment. "The Development Office has done fairly well these past few years. Of course, the broader environment helped, and some people think he still hasn’t done enough."
A mocking smile showed on his face. "So someone has to be shifted out of the way!"
The President had plenty of shortcomings, and of course some strengths too. But either way, he was never some ordinary man who could be easily fooled.
He was the President. Whatever his background, he’d climbed up from the city level, one step at a time.
That meant he had at least a decade or more of basic political work experience. To succeed in such a complicated environment, he could not possibly be mediocre.
He was very smart, with keen political instincts. It was just that his current status no longer required him to show too sharp an edge, and that was the version of him people saw.
But that was absolutely not his real self. The Federation needed a President like this right now, and he was simply responding to the nation’s and everyone’s expectations by playing the part.
If anyone truly believed he was exactly what he appeared to be, that person had to be crazy or stupid.
Mr. Truman was also a Progressive. He frowned. "This man... he has the connections now, but he still lacks prestige."
"The party leader isn’t just any internal position. If his standing across the Federation isn’t high enough, forcing him in as the Progressive Party’s leader is a bit... too much of a stretch."
The President now had a different view. "That’s not really a problem. People in the Federation are very quick to accept new faces. With just a bit of work, we can make him known to the majority."
"The key point is that, for us, he’s the most suitable choice right now."
Mr. Truman didn’t continue to weigh in on the candidate. What had happened to the leader was truly an accident—so unexpected that when it happened, the Progressive Party had no contingency measures at all.
At this point, pushing someone out to fill the vacancy first was probably the top priority for the Progressive Party’s upper ranks.
After all, no one wanted to be the one thrown into that position. They only hoped it would be someone else.
And the real "protagonist" here couldn’t really say whether he was happy or unhappy about it.
He was an old gentleman nearing sixty, well-proportioned, with the particular kind of good looks middle-aged and older men sometimes have.
A lot of people think that once you’re old, you just get frail and ugly, never better-looking.
Maybe that’s true for most, but there are always a few people in this world whom the Lord favors.
Some people, the older they get, the gentler and more appealing their bearing becomes.
The first chief of the Party Development Office clearly needed to have that quality, and he was indeed handsome.
Though he was quite advanced in years, with some gray in his hair, anyone would still give him a fairly high mark.
Right now he was staring blankly at the beef on the plate in front of him, a little dazed. He himself hadn’t expected something like this to land on his head.
But for some reason, he was feeling very conflicted right now.
"Does it not suit your taste?" his wife, sitting across the table, asked, and his son and daughter also looked over at him.
This is the good thing about having money: only when you have money can a family actually live together.
If life is strapped, a family will split up early, each person carrying the burden of their own life.
If you see some girl in need of help on the streets of the Federation, please don’t be stingy with your assistance.
Most of them are girls living alone, who have to shoulder their own living expenses and also need other people’s help.
Rich people don’t have such troubles.
The richer you are, the more so; this is probably also why the more a person is a star, a politician, a celebrity, the more they stress the concept of "family."
"Me?" He looked up at his wife and children, shook his head with a smile. "I was just thinking about some things."
He began to work on the steak on his plate; his current job also put a certain amount of power in his hands.
There is no shortage in this world of those who arrange their work and life properly: what test scores to get, what kind of person to date, whether after graduating to go into the workforce or consider going into politics.
If it’s politics, is it the Progressive Party or the Conservative Party, or the Socialist Party?
After joining the Progressive Party, where do you start?
He had authority over that; he could "develop" people into the kind of members the Progressive Party needed, and then assign them basic jobs.
Though the pay for basic work is all about the same, the follow-up prospects of being an ordinary worker versus being on a big shot’s secretarial team are completely different.
This also made his own life quite good; every year around graduation season, there were always people enthusiastically sending him some local specialties or souvenirs.
As for becoming the leader...
He chuckled, which surprised the family sitting around the table; in the end his wife asked, "Is there something we should be celebrating? Just now you were laughing out loud while eating your steak."
The highest-ranking official in the Development Office was also a bit surprised. "Did I really laugh out loud?" He had thought he was only laughing on the inside, and hadn’t expected it to come out.
He put down his knife and fork, swallowed the food in his mouth, and nodded. "You can’t exactly call it good news, but you can’t call it bad either. It’s possible they’ll put my name forward to serve as leader of the Progressive Party..."
After a brief moment of shock, his family fell into a kind of ecstasy!
The young girl even cried out something like, "My dad is going to be leader of the Progressive Party!"
Looking at the delighted expression on his wife’s face, at the delighted expressions on his children’s faces, he suddenly felt... actually, this wasn’t all that bad.
Besides, he also believed the chairman of the committee would give him some compensation; after all, he was still "young," and retirement was still a long way off!
As the governors of the various regions formally settled into their work, the Federation’s populace, who had gone crazy for two months, finally ended their winter carnival.
They began to settle back into their jobs, and the events organized by the Workers’ Union also scaled back at this time.
No election, no capitalists sponsoring the Workers’ Union so that it could hold events "for the purpose of supporting certain politicians."
Every piece of free fried chicken eaten by the workers, every glass of free beer they drank, in fact all had a price!
The workers didn’t know at what price the Workers’ Union had sold them; they only cared that it was free!
So the simpler a person is, the easier it is for them to get more happiness.
The whole world seemed to have restored its calm. Now and then people could still see in the newspapers what difficulties Gafura’s reforms had run into, and how their Prime Minister had resolved them.
Sometimes they would also see the mainstream media’s smears of Peng Jieao. From the moment there was any historical record of it, it was as if this country and its people existing in this world at all were superfluous, even a kind of sin.
The whole world just kept turning, with no great waves.
The second issue of Vanguard used Severa on the cover, once again forcefully impressing readers with the "substance" of the magazine.
Everything was just so... ordinary!
In March, there was some movement on the television-station front: a local TV station in the state was struggling to operate and was about to reach its limit.
Competition in television was actually very intense as well. When the Federation’s signal-network companies practically half-sold, half-gave away their signal lines, they would also install a small device to record and report back what programs users watched.
This was all written into the contracts. Although most users had no idea, they had signed their names, so this prying into personal privacy was perfectly legal.
How much viewership different channels had at different times every day was a very straightforward set of numbers.
Advertisers only liked TV stations that had ratings, not those that were getting worse and worse.
This TV station very quickly became part of Lynch’s business empire.
And Darkstone Media’s television business was about to go online as well.
