Dirty Sexy Politics

Chapter 12 Un-Conventional

They tell me that the Republican convention was in the Twin Cities of St. Paul–Minneapolis. I don’t have any reason to doubt that. But if you said we were in Kansas City or Kalamazoo, I would believe that too.

It was a life indoors, a life unreal. My memories are dreamlike, nightmarelike. I felt like I was underground—or trapped in a giant closet. If there were windows, I never looked out of them. On my way from one place to another, I had to tunnel through an obstacle course of body traffic and security snafus. Passes weren’t left for me, security clearances were held up. Secret Service kept forgetting who I was. I could have worn the special Secret Service pin that was given to “family members” so they could be identified, but the pin bothered me and kept damaging my tops, and I started feeling rebellious about it.

Forget the pin.

Remember my face.

Could you do that?

But that seemed too much to ask. Shannon and Heather and I were always standing to the side, waiting to be cleared by security, or waiting for our passes to turn up. Our names should be on that list. Can’t you call somebody and clear us? And the schedule kept changing. I would hear about an event I was supposed to attend after it had started. Or I would stand with wet hair at the door of the hair-and-makeup room, hoping for some help before a magazine shoot, but the chairs inside were filled by the Palin children. Even little Piper, age seven, was getting blowouts.

The weirdest thing was how time flew, like the convention was a black hole that sucked up all the minutes and hours around it. It sucked up all your sanity too. It is blurry now—a big, blank, blurry thing in my brain.

The weather seemed to manifest the swirl of chaos indoors. Hurricane Gustav was moving toward the Gulf of Mexico—a reminder of Katrina and how badly the disaster had been dealt with by a Republican administration. Not a good sign. I thought it was strange, and a little bit of poetic irony, that a natural disaster was going on, as if to remind us that no matter how prepared everyone tried to be for anything, the universe had other plans.

The announcement of Sarah Palin had thrown me off course. I was still reeling from the news and was fighting a mix of strong emotions, but mostly head-to-toe anxiety. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t thinking straight.

All conversations returned to their beginning.

Who is she?

We had fought like crazy, so long, so hard, from state to state, town hall to town hall. We had gone from broke and tired to flush and ecstatic. We were humble underdogs who had won so many primaries it was becoming hard to distinguish them. We were jubilant, committed, and in a groove. My dad had shaken so many hands, walked in so many doors, talked to so many people. Miles and miles of people. And suddenly he seemed to be staking this whole thing that meant so much to him on her.

The way she was chosen—in secrecy—and the way she was abruptly tossed at the country, just five days before the convention, had thrown the media into a feeding frenzy. The investigative reporters didn’t know where to begin. The press phones rang nonstop, day and night, and suddenly our ragtag Pirate Ship was bulging with new people, new stories, and dozens of unconfirmed rumors. It was like Wac-A-Mole. Just when one had been beaten down, another popped up.

The Palins seemed like nice, regular people. They were low key and traveled light—with small overnight bags of casual clothes, jeans and sweatpants, regular stuff you’d buy at Macy’s or JCPenney. They were definitely shell-shocked but holding it together.

The campaign had intended to stun the world with a surprise running mate, and thought this would get the Republican Party fired up. But this strategy seemed wrongheaded to me. I was starting to see that the American public—or the American media, at any rate—likes to be eased into things. Human beings like routine, predictability, and being able to have expectations about how things will go. Brash, fast, unexpected news is not comforting—or comfortable. From what I could tell, the Obama campaign had mastered the “easing effect.” We had not.

Also, I believe if Sarah Palin and her family had been given more time to get to know the campaign, and us, there would have been more trust in our overall organization. Sarah hadn’t seen us when we were down and out, before the primaries. She hadn’t seen how far we’d come, or the beauty of our struggle. She had no idea of where we had been—or even what we were about. All she knew was our big, polished machine—big planes and big stress—and our bullying campaign manager, Steve Schmidt.

With less secrecy, and more time to get to know each other, there would have been more loyalty and cohesiveness. But, instead, from the minute Sarah arrived the campaign began splitting apart. And rather than joining us, and our campaign, she seemed only to begin her own.

And the media drama that ensued, immediately, began to stir up doubts and fear within our ranks. Uncertainty has a way of doing that. Within two days of the announcement, I had seen a report on an Internet gossip site that Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol was pregnant. This had to be false, I figured, just like the rumor that Sarah Palin’s infant son, Trig, wasn’t her baby.

But then I remembered how Bristol had stood so quietly, so timidly, at her mother’s announcement at that Ohio high school. She was covering her stomach with a big blanket… I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

WE WERE ON THE BUS TOGETHER IN OHIO, THE DAY after the announcement. Even in the sweltering heat and humidity, Bristol was wearing a big sweatshirt, which I thought was weird. She was aloof, or very shy. Maybe she was just freaked out by her mom’s announcement, I thought. Freaked out by suddenly being in the national spotlight, and seeing the clusters of cameras wherever she went. I had had lots of preparation for the strange cardboard existence of daughter-of. But why was she wearing a sweatshirt?

Somewhere in Ohio, I got off the bus and found Brooke Buchanan, who was doing press for the campaign. Brooke was smoking—she was a chain smoker during the campaign—and I entered her cloud of tobacco smoke, close enough to come right out and ask her if the rumors were true that Bristol was pregnant.

Brooke moved her head up and down. Her eyes were covered by her giant Oliver Peoples sunglasses. She was exhaling smoke and just kept nodding.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“We’re dealing with it.”

“How?”

Brooke looked so stressed out. She isn’t much older than I but, unlike me, is steady and solid and totally unflappable. Nothing rocked Brooke—normally. But that day, she looked ragged and overwhelmed. And this scared me.

In politics, you are supposed to take pride in having things under control, tested to perfection, and managed. Every location where you campaign is supposed to be scouted, and studied, ahead of time. Not just for security reasons. You don’t want surprises. Surprises are your enemy. And situations. That’s why remarks are prepared ahead of time, schedules are followed. Control is key. And above all, never look rattled or confused or uncertain.

But this was a situation of epic proportions. How would the campaign handle it? How would Sarah Palin? And more than I worried about my dad or the outcome of his campaign, I wondered how it could possibly be okay—in any interpretation of that word—to put a seventeen-year-old girl who had accidentally gotten pregnant in such an awful, public position.

I got back on the bus and stole a look at Bristol. She was sitting in her seat, sweating in her sweatshirt, just staring into space.

Miraculously, she was keeping it together. But she had to be dying inside. I knew what seventeen was like. My little sister, Bridget, was exactly that age. And here Bristol was, the poor girl, I thought—having to cope with the media, the rumors, and all these weirded-out campaign strangers like me, who were now staring at her, and whispering. Oh, eventually we’d all be nice. Of course we would. And the campaign would protect her. But people were going be cruel. I knew they would.

What a world politics is. What an awful world sometimes.

MY BIGGEST FEAR IN LIFE, WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, was getting pregnant. When I was fourteen, a reporter had asked my father what he would do if I got pregnant and wasn’t married. He famously answered, “That would be her decision.” This comment had created a mild media storm. I was just fourteen and hadn’t had sex, but suddenly I was in the news as a daughter-of in a terrible hypothetical situation. That hypothetical had become my nightmare.

I don’t think abstinence until marriage is realistic these days. For one thing, it could drive you into getting married too young—or drive you into marrying somebody with whom you had no physical chemistry. Why would you marry somebody that you hadn’t had sex with? Isn’t sex monumentally important to a relationship? Why would you keep it a big mystery until the wedding night—when it was too late?

Abstinence doesn’t seem practical to me. It seems like a way of avoiding reality and real conversations about complicated things like pregnancy and STDs. Abstinence sends a message that sex is wrong or dirty. It isn’t wrong or dirty to me. Also, these vows are usually ineffective—studies have shown that more than half of the young people who take a vow of abstinence until marriage don’t keep it, and go on to break it within a year. This heat-of-the-moment change of heart often happens when no contraception is being used.

I am as passionately pro-life as you can imagine. And because of that, I am as passionately pro-contraception as you can imagine too. This is the part of the equation that I don’t think conservatives have addressed enough. In fact, it seems completely missing from the sermon they are preaching. They go on and on about how evil and wrong abortion is, but don’t like to talk about how easy it is to not get pregnant.

Bristol was the newest and most unprepared daughter-of that I had ever seen. And she was literally living my worst nightmare.

The campaign was “dealing with it,” according to Brooke. But how? And what on earth did Steve Schmidt have to say? He was so tough and unemotional. Boy, I had messed up plenty on the campaign, and Steve Schmidt had been hard on me, and demanding. Would this news affect how the country accepted Sarah Palin?

“What are you going to do?” I asked Steve, a couple days later.

He shrugged. It was all taken care of.

“People will relate to her more,” he said.

This is the essential job of a daughter-of. We are there to make the candidate more human. But in this instance, the price seemed kind of steep.