George stood up. He looked a little nervous, the very image of a simple, honest blue-collar worker.
He didn’t raise any grand political issues like the others. Instead, in a sincere tone, he began to speak about his confusion.
"Mr. Cortes, my na is George. I worked my whole life at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, right up until it shut down."
"A lot of people in my community are big supporters of yours, because we feel you’re the only candidate who genuinely cares about us older workers who’ve been left behind by the tis."
"But," he said, his tone shifting, "I’ve been reading so very complicated economic theories online recently. They say that for a city to have a future, workers like us in traditional industries are a drag, a burden."
"They say that for the long-term developnt of Pittsburgh, our unemploynt is a necessary sacrifice, the painful throes of history."
George looked up, his eyes full of questions, and stared at Cortes on the stage.
"I want to ask you, do you also agree with that statent?"
The question made the entire auditorium fall silent.
All eyes turned to Cortes, awaiting his answer.
Cortes froze for a mont.
He instinctively felt that sothing was wrong.
The vocabulary in the question—"necessary sacrifice," "long-term developnt"—the phrasing was too formal, too bookish. It didn’t sound like sothing a retired steelworker would say.
His gaze swept over the old man in the audience. He looked like a typical blue-collar worker—honest and down-to-earth.
This only deepened his suspicion.
’Is this a trap? Soone sent over from Murphy’s camp?’
He frantically searched his mory. He couldn’t recall ever making similar remarks in any public forum, nor could he rember the long-forgotten paper he had written in college.
But as a well-trained politician, he knew that in a public forum, facing a worker who seed so sincere, the slightest hesitation or evasion would be interpreted as a sign of guilt.
Whether there was a conspiracy behind this or not, he had to give the perfect answer—one that fit his public persona to a T.
He didn’t dwell on it, simply assuming the old worker had probably been confused by so conservative rhetoric.
This was a golden opportunity to display his man-of-the-people stance and solidify his working-class voter base.
He imdiately adopted the fiery, passionate stance he was so good at.
"Sir, thank you for asking that question!" Cortes’s voice brimd with indignation. "As for that statent you heard, my answer is this: I absolutely, one hundred percent, disagree!"
"Anyone who says sothing like that stands in opposition to the people! They are an elitist, through and through!"
"In my book, there’s no such thing as a necessary sacrifice! Every laborer, no matter what their job is, is this city’s most valuable asset! They are not a cost to be casually written off!"
"My goal is to win back the dignity and future that belongs to workers like you! We don’t need sacrifices, we need justice!"
His answer was nothing short of perfect, imdiately earning thunderous applause and cheers from the entire room.
Down in the audience, George nodded again and again, giving Cortes a thumbs-up.
Everything seed flawless.
Cortes felt a flicker of pride at his own perfect improvisation.
He was completely unaware that he had just stepped right into the trap that Leo and Roosevelt had so carefully laid for him.
As soon as the town hall ended, Leo’s team got their hands on a complete video recording of the event.
In the community center office, Sarah watched the video of Cortes’s self-righteous denial. A knot of unease ford in her stomach, though she couldn’t say exactly why.
Leo, however, was ecstatic. He turned to his team and gave the order for the final assault.
"Take the scanned copy of the original paper, Cortes’s author photo from Amherst College, and the video we just got of him blatantly lying, and package it all into a press kit."
"Now. Send it imdiately to every dia outlet in Pittsburgh—newspapers, TV stations, and all those right-wing news blogs."
"And the na of the file for the kit will be—"
"’Alex Cortes: Who Are You, Really?’"
...
The next morning, a dia bomb detonated in the heart of Pittsburgh politics.
The press kit the team had assembled was sent to the inbox of every dia professional in Pittsburgh.
From left-leaning Progressive news blogs to right-wing conservative radio stations, no one could resist a perfect, drama-filled story like this.
A rising political star, a radical who had branded himself the "savior of the working class," was exposed. During his ti at an elite university, he had published cold-blooded comntary arguing that "the obsolescence of the working class is a historical inevitability."
Even more damning, just the night before, he had stood before hundreds of voters and blatantly lied, delivering a self-righteous denial of the entire thing.
On its hopage, the Pittsburgh Chronicle ran the story’s headline in bold, black letters.
"The Two Faces of Alex Cortes: Elite Scholar or Servant of the People?"
In the article, the paper placed the original text of his paper from Kolesk University and the video of his passionate denial from the town hall side-by-side for comparison.
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