Kingmaker (7)
When I told Dongho senior that I’d been to Go Hyeon-ji’s birthday party, he looked genuinely shocked.
“Whoa! Seriously? You should’ve taken me with you.”
“Do you like parties?”
Well, I supposed it was about time this senior made his debut at upper-class parties, too.
“It’s not just the party. They say Go Hyeon-ji is insanely pretty, right? Prettier than most idols or celebrities?”
“You sure know your stuff.”
“Of course I do. Who wouldn’t know Go Hyeon-ji of the GL Group? She’s supposed to be the most beautiful face in the whole business world, the number one pick. I saw some gossip tabloid once saying she was dating the third son of Daeyeoncha Group. Is that true?”
“How would I know?”
I had no interest in other people’s love lives.
“So what was she like in person?”
“Well, she was pretty, I guess.”
“Compared to Sung Yoon-ah?”
“……”
Why was he comparing them?
If I had to choose, though, I’d give the edge to Sung Yoon-ah.
Seniority mattered! My onboarding class came first!
“So what did you do at the party?”
“A few things happened……”
I told him about what had gone down at the party the day before, and Dongho senior listened with keen interest.
“Hahaha! If they’d known you were the owner of Continue Capital, everybody there would’ve fainted.”
That was exactly why I hadn’t told him.
As the story moved into its latter half, Dongho senior’s eyes widened and his jaw practically fell open.
“What? You made Go Hyeon-ji cry? You made a girl cry!”
“I didn’t make her cry, exactly……”
Dongho senior shook his head with absolute certainty.
“No, anyone looking at it would say you made her cry.”
“……There are always different interpretations of the same matter.”
That was why cross-checking existed.
Right on cue, Kim Beom-seok arrived as the conversation was winding down.
“Oh! The popular singer’s here?”
“What do you mean, popular singer?”
He sounded like he was teasing, but in truth Kim Beom-seok’s popularity was enormous.
With his outstanding musicianship and vocals, plus the fact that he worked at Continue Capital, he’d become even more popular than he had in the first timeline.
I’d heard that music shows and all kinds of variety programs were practically begging him to appear. Apparently even financial news channels had asked him to come on.
Dongho senior seemed to remember something and said, “Oh, right. I saw that you beat Jiyu to number one on the Mango Chart this time.”
Kim Beom-seok smiled faintly.
“You saw that, too?”
“Yeah. Who do you think you are, standing in the way of our Jiyu?”
“……”
Kim Beom-seok stared at Dongho senior with an expression that clearly said, What the hell is wrong with this guy? Then he turned back to me.
“More importantly, I got a call from the public relations team at Yuseong Electronics yesterday.”
“What did they say?”
“They want to use Magic Castle as the background music for an advertisement.”
Dongho senior jumped in immediately.
“Don’t tell me you lobbied for that?”
“Me?”
“That’s right! You bribed JaeTiger with a backroom favor, didn’t you?”
Well, I had met them and talked, sure……
I shook my head.
“Of course not. Think about it. Would a global company like Yuseong Electronics just grab any old song that had nothing to do with its brand image? They chose it because the song was good.”
That was why they’d used it in the first timeline, too.
“Nah, I don’t think that’s it. Otherwise they’d have picked a girl group song instead of his.”
“Then go listen to girl group songs.”
Come to think of it, seeing Kim Beom-seok after such a long time reminded me of something I’d wanted to ask him.
“You graduated from Silla University, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Then do you happen to know Assemblyman Namgung Seok?”
At my question, he nodded.
“Yes. He was a professor at our school.”
Dongho senior asked, “Did you ever take his class?”
“No. I wasn’t even in a science department, so there’s no way I would’ve taken a physics professor’s class. And he’d already quit before I enrolled.”
“Well, fair enough.”
“Still, I heard a lot about him from the seniors.”
I asked, “What kind of things?”
“Why he went into politics, how he got elected, that sort of thing.”
“Tell us about it.”
“Hmm, I’m sure it’s all stuff you already know……”
Kim Beom-seok then told us the story of Assemblyman Namgung Seok.
* * *
Namgung Seok, a physics professor at Silla University.
He became a tenured professor in his forties, still young by academic standards, and poured his energy into teaching his students.
He had seen many talented students crushed by financial hardship, and he believed that if science was to advance, students needed an environment where they could study and research without worrying about survival.
So he kept arguing for the abolition of merit-based scholarships.
“Scholarships, by definition, are money given to encourage learning. That money should go to students who actually need it.”
The students’ backlash was fierce.
What about the students who had studied hard while everyone else was out having fun, only to earn good grades—what were they supposed to make of that?
But Professor Namgung Seok saw it differently.
“Good grades are the reward for diligence. Money cannot be the reward for good grades.”
In the end, his argument prevailed. Silla University abolished its merit scholarships and changed its system so that all scholarship money would go to low-income students.
Professor Namgung Seok loved teaching and research, and he had never once imagined a path that didn’t involve physics.
What pushed him into politics was a single incident.
The dormitory project.
At the time, Silla University announced plans to build a dormitory for students on school property and allocated a budget for it.
Then a problem arose.
The local residents rose up in opposition.
It would make the neighborhood noisy. It would block apartment views. Traffic would get worse. It would hurt the business of nearby studio apartments. Crime might increase. It would be bad for children’s education. Just make a park instead. No, just no. Absolutely no. No matter what, no.
They came up with every objection under the sun, and even the sitting lawmaker from the district, who was thinking about the next election, jumped in to support them.
“Forcing through a dormitory when the residents oppose it is basically administrative violence. I think that’s very wrong. The proper order is to persuade the residents first.”
So the university held a public hearing to listen to the residents’ opinions…… but it never even got off the ground, because the residents opposed it so fiercely that the hearing itself collapsed before it could begin.
In the end, the district office revoked the permits it had already issued, and construction was halted before it even properly started.
Professor Namgung Seok was stunned.
Students who had come up from the provinces were suffocating under Seoul’s brutal rent. Some of them were working several part-time jobs just to keep up with monthly payments.
The school says it’ll build a dorm on its own land to solve the housing problem for students, so what in the world is there to oppose?
He soon found out this wasn’t just a Silla University problem. More than ten universities in Seoul alone were unable to build dormitories because of resident opposition.
Professor Namgung Seok even went in person to the lawmaker’s office and the district office to try to persuade them, but they wouldn’t even meet with him.
The media showed little interest, either.
Professor Namgung Seok felt that the world needed to know.
And then, just as fate would have it, the general election season arrived.
Enraged, Professor Namgung Seok announced that he would run as an independent.
Korean politics had already hardened into a two-party structure.
Unless you were a well-known celebrity or a powerful incumbent politician, an independent candidate’s chances of winning were close to zero.
Professor Namgung Seok himself never once believed he would win when he entered the race.
He had only one goal.
He wanted to bring attention to the need for student dormitories, and if possible, get promises from both major parties’ candidates to build them.
After paying the deposit required to run, he didn’t have enough money left to build a campaign organization, so he went out and campaigned on foot.
But who didn’t run for office to promote a policy, or simply to gain name recognition?
At first, Professor Namgung Seok attracted almost no attention at all.
Kim Jae-hee of the New Korea Party, the incumbent lawmaker, was in first place, and Choi Hong-jae of Our People’s Party was second. Out of the seven candidates in the district, Professor Namgung Seok was dead last in support.
Then……
Right before the election in earnest, trouble hit candidate Choi Hong-jae.
He was caught having an affair with the wife of one of his campaign staffers.
The husband threatened to expose him to the press if he didn’t withdraw immediately.
The election was already as good as over for him.
But even so, a candidate from the main opposition party couldn’t just quit without some kind of excuse. He needed a plausible pretext for withdrawing.
Min Su-chan, who was serving as campaign chair, came up with a clever move.
“There’s a professor named Namgung Seok in that district. He’s running on a platform of building dormitories for students. Meanwhile, Assemblyman Kim Jae-hee is opposing dorm construction. If we back him and withdraw, we can salvage the party’s image.”
Following this campaign strategy, Our People’s Party candidate Choi Hong-jae declared his support for Professor Namgung Seok and withdrew from the race.
That suddenly made Namgung Seok’s reason for running a hot topic.
[Professor Namgung Seok enters the general election to build student dormitories]
[Why did Namgung Seok, the respected scholar, become a politician?]
[Interview with independent candidate Namgung Seok. “I don’t think I’ll win. But dormitories are absolutely necessary if students are to focus on their studies.”]
But his opponent was Kim Jae-hee, a three-term incumbent from the ruling party.
Professor Namgung Seok made a public proposal to Assemblyman Kim Jae-hee.
“If you withdraw your previous remarks and say you’ll do everything you can to support dormitory construction, I’ll withdraw immediately and support you.”
Universities aren’t like middle or high schools, where you go to the one closest to you. You choose one based on your grades.
How many students with voting rights would there be, really? At best, only ten to twenty percent of the student body.
By contrast, local residents and studio apartment landlords were all precious voters.
If you had to choose between the two, the answer was obvious: the latter.
Besides, even though his fame had grown and his support rate had risen, Professor Namgung Seok still had almost no chance of winning.
So Assemblyman Kim Jae-hee flatly rejected the proposal.
“Let me say this again: my position is that the dormitory issue must be handled by collecting the residents’ opinions.”
Then something no one had anticipated happened.
The district where Professor Namgung Seok was running was Seoul’s largest concentration of universities, including Silla University and Hancheon University, as well as four junior colleges.
Once they heard why he was running, students sprang into action all at once.
Without being told by anyone, they volunteered in the campaign and held support rallies for Professor Namgung Seok on campus.
“Let’s send Professor Namgung Seok to the National Assembly!”
At that point, most people still thought it was just a storm in a teacup.
But the campaign fever gradually spread in a direction that was downright bizarre.
- It doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman, conservative or progressive, from a four-year university or a junior college! At this moment, we need to set all our differences aside and unite as students!
- Change your registered address to your studio apartment and vote in this district!
- You only need to change your address before the voter rolls are finalized!
- What if my landlord won’t allow the residency registration?
- That’s illegal. Even if it’s written in the lease, just do it.
- Students living in other neighborhoods or districts, please move your registration to a friend’s studio apartment if possible and vote there.
- Even if the dorm gets built, most of the current students will graduate before they can use it. But at least our juniors can study in a good dorm without worrying. Let’s show our love for the underclassmen with our votes!
- Let’s persuade our parents and relatives, too!
- This isn’t just our university’s problem. There are universities all over the capital region that can’t build dorms because of resident opposition.
- Let’s show them with our votes this time!
- Vote to cheer them on!!
- Send Professor Namgung Seok to the National Assembly!!!
As students enraged over the dormitory issue began organizing collective address changes, Assemblyman Kim Jae-hee was stunned.
“A mass change of registered addresses before Election Day is organized election fraud and a serious criminal offense involving false residency registration.”
He wasn’t wrong.
But since neither the candidate nor the campaign staff had instructed them to do it, it was difficult to investigate and punish every student who was doing it voluntarily.
The unprecedented sight of students changing their registered addresses en masse drew public attention.
As the university dormitory issue emerged as the biggest point of contention in the election, Professor Namgung Seok’s support numbers kept climbing, while Kim Jae-hee, who had opposed dorm construction from the start, found himself backed into a corner.
And by then, it was too late to suddenly change his tune just to win student votes.
Once the election’s over, this issue will die down anyway.
Assemblyman Kim Jae-hee focused on his campaign and avoided the dormitory issue as much as possible.
The result was shocking.
78,371 votes to 78,382 votes.
By a margin of only eleven votes, the smallest difference in any district, Professor Namgung Seok was elected to the National Assembly.
A professor who ran as an independent, saying he would build dormitories for students, had defeated a three-term incumbent and become a lawmaker!
---