up at the friggin' White House. Then I married the girl from the Easy-Break 2020® ads."
I asked if he thought the travel put a strain on his marriage. "Hell no. I'd bring back a present from everywhere I visited, and when I came back, it'd be like we were like newlyweds." A sigh. "But the mandate said I was no good. I told Sharon we could pay the fine, but she said she didn't want to be breaking the law. But I think she really got concerned that she was married to someone that experts thought wasn't good enough. So we got a divorce."
When I relayed Jim Leonard's story to Professor West, he was skeptical. "That's possible, but it's not our fault he and his wife acted irrationally. They could have paid the penalty and gone about their lives. The law is strictly amoral: we don't care if people choose to pay the penalty instead of getting married. It's not our fault when people put too much emphasis on following the mandate. All we can do, as people of science, is render our best judgment."
One influential person who took Leonard's story far more seriously was the President's former political director, David Axenbar. A prominent supporter of the law, he claims that he spoke out early and often in internal meetings about the need to loosen the Adequate Partner Requirements.
"I was reading the headlines and watching the top stories on the news," he tells me over dinner at the Monocle, a clubby restaurant on Capitol Hill. "The APRs were just killing us politically. Every day there'd be another story about some guy offing his wife because she was going to leave him because he flunked the APRs, or some lawsuit alleging corruption in the setting of the APRs, whatever. When I brought that up in the planning sessions, people kept telling me, 'Don't worry about it, the expert panels know what they're