The President’s first deployment of his semilegal forces was against the now-illegal Emergency committees. This was a stroke of brilliance, because the Emergency committees were universally detested, and even more feared than the proles. Besides, the Emergency committees had lost all their legal backing, and were already on the ropes. Attacking a newly illegal force with a newly legitimized, formerly illegal force struck the American public very favorably. The maneuver had a nice unspoken symmetry to it. It was a player’s move. The President’s ratings went up sharply. He was accomplishing something tangible, where nothing had been accomplished in years.