Dirty Sexy Politics

Chapter 15 A Bus of My Own

With the convention over I expected things to die down—and get more relaxed. I kept waiting to feel better, and more grounded. It never happened.

The campaign shifted gears all right. Everything sped up and became more intense. Maybe the transition from the primary season, to loopy convention chaos, to general election mode seemed gradual to some people. But for me, our entire world had ramped up and hyped up, almost overnight.

New Hampshire was a faraway dream, a beautiful memory that was fading in the nonstop noise of now.

But there was no going back. Only forward. But forward was a place of insomnia and anxiety. The tension at headquarters was in evidence everywhere—in the voices of staffers, in the tone of e-mails and orders, in the way decisions got made. Nothing was ever calm or quiet.

Unless you had been acclimating yourself to this kind of environment over the preceding months, I’m sure it would have seemed impossible to survive it at all—like being thrown in a room where, instead of music blaring, it was the sound of an extended scream.

I spent a couple weeks in New York and Los Angeles, doing a few campaign events with my parents and going on TV to talk about a children’s book that I had written, My Dad, John McCain. I was so nervous beforehand, I couldn’t sleep or eat. It was such a big deal to me. I went overboard and wore the most conservative suits too. The journalists were all pretty sweet, and treated me with kid gloves. In the end, the campaign was surprised I survived it. I made some mistakes on TV—bumbled a few lines—but nothing as dramatic as the mistakes the campaign thought I’d make. The campaign’s biggest fear, I later learned, was that I’d say the F-word on morning TV.

Looking back now, I can see that after the convention I was worn down and running on fumes. I’m sure you know how it is—I can’t be the only person who gets cranky and negative when she’s tired and stressed out. Wherever I looked, I saw problems and irritations and people I didn’t like. The campaign became the focus of my animosity.

Sometimes I believed that Steve Schmidt was making me nuts. Then I would think about the Bus Nazi and Blond Amazon, and so many other campaign staffers who drove me nuts, and I had to admit that the entire campaign was getting to me. The problem was, I had seen too much, and I knew too much. After fourteen months on the road, familiarity had truly bred contempt. At one low point, I remember wishing that, once the election was over, I would never see any of these people again.

Luckily, I never stay in a bad mood for long. Sometimes all I have to do is remember to be grateful for being alive and healthy, and for all the opportunities I’ve been given. I remember the people I love and the causes that I care about. There was so much more in life to be thankful for than to complain about. But after the convention, when I tried my tricks for adjusting my attitude, I found it wasn’t so easy.

You know the expression “Now is the winter of our discontent” from Shakespeare’s Richard III? Well, my winter came a few months early, like the middle of September. I just couldn’t shake it.

It’s not like I had an enemies list or anything. It wasn’t individuals so much as types that bugged me. And while I hate being put in a box myself, or categorized as a type, I have to recognize how difficult it is to not do it to others.

Political fleas were one type that bugged me. These were staffers who had jumped off the dead dogs like Giuliani and Romney and hopped on my dad at the last minute. Maybe fleas is too negative—it sounds like they were feeding off my dad and sucking his blood. The relationship is obviously more symbiotic. Amoebas might be better. It was like a bunch of foreign amoebas from different campaigns joined ours and suddenly we were a much bigger amoeba ourselves.

A lot of the new amoebas were former Bush White House people, too. This troubled me a lot more than it seemed to trouble anybody else. Let’s face it. That administration didn’t have its act together.

Most of all, the résumé-polishing flea/amoebas bugged me. They showed up to add a line to their résumés and didn’t really care about my dad. Loyalty was foreign to them, because everything was just about their own career enhancement. One guy on our campaign, who bragged endlessly about his MIT degree, told me two days before the election that my dad had a 30 percent chance of winning. I wanted to deck him. It turned out Mr. MIT had been sending his résumé around for a month already, looking for a job. His lack of integrity was really stunning and I wish he could be driven from politics. But there’s no chance of that. All of this will be forgotten in 2012, when he joins up to work for the next Republican nominee. And trust me, he’ll wait until the last minute to jump on board. He doesn’t want too many losers to foul his résumé.

As far as the media was concerned, even at this point, my father was looking like the man not to watch. Maybe from a campaign’s perspective, there is no such thing as balanced, satisfying coverage. But you didn’t have to read too closely between the lines to assume that the entire country was in an Obama-loving craze, even when the polls showed that the race was close.

I was done with the media, in any case, and just as sick of the political beat reporters as I was of our campaign staff. The behavior of many campaign staffers and advisers and reporters during the final months of the campaign appalled me. These people were grown-ups? And this is what a presidential campaign looks like?

AS IT TURNS OUT, EVERYBODY WAS SICK OF ME, TOO. IF you thought my basic popularity levels couldn’t sink any lower than during the convention, guess again. Almost as soon as the general election process ramped up, I couldn’t do anything right.

Everywhere I turned, and for everything I did, I was either ignored or berated for bad behavior. At the back of the Third Bus, where Mr. Burns the Bus Nazi always put me by now, if Shannon and Heather and I danced to music or got slaphappy and laughed too much, people were appalled.

Suddenly it was a huge crime if I gave random people—volunteers and fans we’d meet on the road—tours of the Straight Talk Express. I loved showing people what the buses looked like inside, giving them a peek at history, and watching them light up in huge smiles. But I was told, point blank, to stop.

My swearing was the final straw. I tried to stop—I really did—but in high stress situations, the F-bombs would just launch out of me like hiccups. When word got back to my parents about it, they were embarrassed and called to talk to me about it. I felt so bad, and problematic.

Word went out that we weren’t supposed to swear in front of the Palins, or at least, all the little Palins. But I never did, anyway. But at the same time, I had to wonder why there was a seven-year-old girl riding on a campaign bus, whether staff were swearing around her or not. Piper is an adorable daughter-of, as well as being a sweet girl, but I didn’t get how traveling on a campaign bus in pivotal moments of a national election was good for her or good for the campaign.

I was raised very differently. My mom and dad have strong feelings about not exposing their kids to the nitty-gritty world of campaigning—or even politics. Bridget was seventeen and my parents were both pretty protective of her. When asked why he kept his family out of the limelight, Dad always said that he wanted us to be independent and have our own lives. He never wanted to look like he was using us to warm hearts or gain some kind of emotional advantage.

We were never urged to join Dad on the campaign trail. He seemed content that his oldest three kids, my half brothers and half sister from his first marriage, lived full lives of their own and had no interest in whistle-stops and waving on stage. When I made it known that I wanted to join the campaign as a twenty-two-year-old college graduate, I had to convince my dad’s advisers, not just my parents, that I was planning to contribute, be responsible for myself, and not get in the way. If I didn’t toe the line and cooperate, my dad had no plans to bail me out.

Clearly, the Palins didn’t see things the same way. Maybe I’m not being sympathetic enough to working moms, or to little Piper, who seemed to enjoy wandering to the back of the bus or plane to butter up the media. Sarah Palin was the campaign’s secret weapon—on the surface, anyway. Supporters were going nuts for her, and Middle America, and far Right donors, too. Women appeared to be almost obsessed with her—thousands of them, cheering and even crying at her events. Record-breaking crowds turned out for her events; it was amazing and beautiful. We finally had Obama-sized appeal.

Dad was thrilled with her—and appreciated what she could do, and all the attention and energy that she brought to the campaign. He told his advisers that he loved doing events with her—“We’re so much better together than we are apart!”—but the Groomsmen convinced him that it made more sense to split them up. That way, they could cover twice as much ground, and do twice as many events, in a day.

The media was falling for her too. Sarah was a beauty, seemed kind of groovy, and had sex appeal, too. Ratings went up when she came onscreen. But my father’s advisers, as happy as they were by the excitement over their VP pick, were a little spooked by the fascination and popularity that Sarah drew to her. The big gamble they’d made by choosing her was causing a whole lot of stress. I called her “the Time Bomb.” I was waiting for her to explode. There was a fine line between genius and insanity, they say, and choosing her as the running mate was starting to seem like the definition of that line.

The brighter the spotlight, the more difficult a mistake would be to handle. Dad’s advisers wanted Sarah to look prepared and worldly—and from what I could tell, there was a massive effort to outfit and educate her. I sympathized with how difficult she must have found this Pygmalion process, and dealing with Steve Schmidt—ugh—couldn’t have been fun. He didn’t seem to have a gentle side or a soft touch.

I had never felt comfortable complaining about Steve to my parents. I’m sure Sarah didn’t either.

I’D BEEN IN CALIFORNIA FOR A WEEK WITH MY BLOG staff when the campaign finally made its mind up about me: Don’t come back. I was a distraction, too controversial, and not playing well with others. The blog could go away too, for all they cared. It just caused complaints. My personal stock had sunk so low, staffers didn’t want their pictures on it anymore.

I was given a choice. It wasn’t a nice one, either.

I could quit and go home or else I would be effectively banished to the heartland on an extended tour of regional McCain campaign headquarters for five weeks. It didn’t take a genius to do the simple arithmetic: They wanted me out of their hair until a few days before the election, when they would trot me out again, like a circus animal in a suit. Stand. Wave. Smile.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I’d been ruminating about how the Palins weren’t “ready for prime time” when, in fact, it was me all along. I was such a prodigal daughter-of that nobody wanted me around.

Home.

It was starting to sound pretty nice.

Home.

I could barely imagine it.

No more tyranny from the Groomsmen. No more seating assignments from the Bus Nazi. No more having to watch the antics of the media circus and its gaga behavior over the Obamas and strange lust for the Palins.

I could live in my jammies and UGG boots, watch TV and YouTube videos all day, and eat healthy food. I could go for days without worrying about my hair, or even washing it. What if I stopped brushing it altogether?

I would be free to be me, say whatever, and drop F-bombs all over the house. I could swim in the pool, pork out on Mexican food, and hang with my Scottsdale girlfriends who didn’t care about politics.

Or, I could have my own bus.

Are you serious?

My own bus for six weeks? And it was going to be one of the nice buses with comfy seats and clean upholstery, a new bathroom where there weren’t cigarette burns on the toilet seat, and AC that didn’t blow out pure mold.

I could fill the mini-fridge with Diet Pepsi and Starbucks frappuccinos. I could fill the drawers and cabinets with M&M’s and Luna Bars, Swedish fish and Doritos.

I could lead as many tours of the bus as I wanted, play any music I liked, sing as loudly as possible, and express myself as colorfully as I could—even if every other word would have been inappropriate for Piper.

The road was calling.

And I answered.