The Servant of the People

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There were things that robots could do as well as people. But there were also, Congressman Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O'Hare believed with pride, things that required the special human touch. One of them was sitting in the House of Representatives. For him, every election year, the campaign started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. It was a tradition. It was traditional for the Congressman, anyway, feisty little seventy-plus-year-old who liked his own traditions and didn't much care what anyone else's were. The summer was his own and his lady wife's, and when he started to press the flesh and hunt the votes was at the League of Women Voters televised debate and not a minute before. So at six o'clock on the evening of the eighth of September there was Carrie O'Hare one more time, straightening the fidgeting Congressman's tie, dabbing a blob of the Congressman's shaving cream off the lobe of the Congressman's fuzzy pink ear and reassuring the Congressman that he was wiser, juster and, above all, far more beloved by his constituents than that brash new interloper of an opponent, the Mayor of Elk City, could ever hope to be. "Quit fussing," said the Congressman, with his famous impudent elf's smile. "The voters don't mind if a candidate looks a little messy."

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