Fired almost two decades earlier by a democracy he helped keep alive for more than two centuries after being created in 1787 by three of the Founding Fathers, the 233-year-old unemployed Doctor Democracy now lives in a tent near the National Archives. He spends his days wandering the streets using his metaphor of the body of democracy to teach tourists how sick democracy is and what it will take to regain its health. The story opens at midnight with the government shutting down. The doctor then takes a group of cynical teenagers he met in the lobby of the historic Willard Hotel, in town on their senior trip, on a midnight tour of Washington D.C. His goal is to convince them to rise to political power and rehire him so he can help keep democracy from dying of its addiction to the two deadly Ps of partisanship and propaganda.