Dirty Sexy Politics

Chapter 10 Gentle Folk of the Media

A GQ piece about me landed on the newsstands ten days after the White House visit. News of it swept through the campaign staff like wildfire and my phone never stopped ringing. Everybody wanted to tell me—in case I didn’t already know—what I’d done wrong. Emotions weren’t just running high. They were bouncing and pinging, ricocheting like atoms splitting inside a nuclear reactor.

If you track down the piece on the Internet now, it won’t seem shocking or make me appear to be as maniacally stupid as it did at the time. That alone is a lesson in context. The backdrop of a presidential campaign has a way of magnifying and distorting all flaws, all bumps, anything out of the ordinary.

But I didn’t feel out of the ordinary. I felt like an ass.

Normally, I am not big on the concept of regret. Or I should say that I don’t believe in sitting around wallowing and wishing things were different. It’s a cliché, but true, that we learn some of the most important things in life by our failures and mistakes. If we never had things that we were sorry we’d done, or sorry we’d said, we would never be forced to take a hard look at ourselves—and make changes for the better.

Even so, I regret just about everything that I was quoted as saying to the GQ reporter, regret spending hours alone with him, regret going bowling with him, regret hugging him good-bye (WHAT WAS I THINKING???), and, most of all, regret allowing the magazine to photograph me working on my laptop while sitting on top of a bed with an open bottle of Bud Light in my hand.

Mistakes were made, is what I want to say. And I learned from every single one.

THE BLOG WAS GATHERING STEAM—AND REACHING A mini boiling point that spring. A number of newspapers had written about it, and political sites had started linking to it regularly. Our regular audience was growing. Obviously, the fact that my dad was winning put me and the blog in the spotlight. After the New Hampshire primary, we had a great stretch of victories. Suddenly the media world was noticing everything we did and said.

Steve Schmidt acted surprised each time we won—which irritated me, I have to admit. He was so hard-bitten and lacking in joy. But I suppose his pessimism was a leveler, and kept people focused. For my family and me, the win in South Carolina was particularly sweet. The voters were gracious and warm and softened the bitter memories of what had happened eight years before. I was able to see that it wasn’t the state or the people of South Carolina that had caused so much pain and disappointment for my dad and all of us. In a way, the smear of 2000 had tarnished the South Carolinians even more than it had my dad—and made them look like mudslinging racists, ignorant and pliable, when the spirit of the state is infectiously warm and generous and kind.

The night of our victory in South Carolina, I jumped around so much during the mass celebrating that the heel of my boot came off. An incredible party ensued at the hotel where the campaign was staying—the most fun primary party of all. Nobody wanted to break it up and head to dinner, so Piper placed a four-hundred-dollar pizza order to be delivered to the lobby of our hotel.

After Super Tuesday in March, when my father won in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont and gathered enough electoral votes and delegates to be the Republican nominee, the campaign regrouped—shifting its focus from worrying about Romney and Huckabee to worrying about the Democrats, and trying to calculate who would be our likely rival in the fall.

It was going to be a tough race. Not much disagreement about that.

The race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was still heated and close. Hillary was winning important states, and to me, she seemed like the one to beat. She was becoming more formidable and a better campaigner with each primary. As a woman, I have to admit that I admired her dogged energy and amazing encyclopedic brain. She won all the debates, as far as I was concerned, while Obama always seemed out of his depth and foggy. Every time Hillary opened her mouth, even if she wasn’t actually saying something serious, she seemed impressive, so articulate and razor sharp.

Being in public life for decades can cripple your spirit—and spoil your spontaneity and openness. I had learned that much from my short life in politics. That’s why so many politicians seem shut down and barely present. Something inside is gone, or no longer accessible. I liked Hillary Clinton but also felt bad for her. I couldn’t help but wonder about all the parts of herself that she had deep-sixed just to keep herself attractive to voters. Maybe my instincts are off about her, but I doubt Hillary really cares about clothes and fashion. It seems almost tragic when I think about all of the hours of her life that she’s had to devote to these things, when she has other matters she’s much more passionate about.

Political life is rough on women, whether you are a wife or daughter or candidate yourself. After eight months on the road, I understood that in ways that I never had before. It made me much more sympathetic to my mom and other political wives—as well as the women who join campaigns to work as high-ranking staffers. You have to be pretty tough to hack it. If you could do guy-talk, and shoot the shit about sports—men’s teams, of course—that was even better.

Looking around my dad’s campaign, it was painfully obvious that politics was dominated and organized by guys. Some of them were nicer than others. Some were more cultured and better educated than others. But whether they were hanging out together, or doing business, they bonded over guy stuff, football and college basketball—stuff that has never interested me for a second.

If you were a woman and wanted to be heard, and taken seriously, you were better off acting like a guy. And no matter what, you couldn’t show any emotion unless it was anger. But not when TV cameras were around.

On camera, and onstage, women in politics weren’t supposed to seem angry, ever. You had to seem soft, sweeter than a guy, compassionate, and at least believably maternal. My mom was all of those things—super-maternal and feminine—but when she got on a stage or gave an interview, she shut down. It was hard for her to open up. I guess you can’t blame her. But it made me sad to see that she didn’t trust or connect with the media. Reporters who couldn’t feel her warmth and big heart assumed these things weren’t there.

When Hillary Clinton shed a tear in New Hampshire, and again on the eve of Super Tuesday, I was impressed that she had let down her guard—and shown what was really going on inside. She was suddenly human, and a woman. The male journalists described it as though she had been sobbing and out of control, when in fact her eyes had just welled up. And when she took a shot of Crown Royal whiskey at Bronko’s Restaurant in Indiana—putting it back just like a guy—I was stunned by the media fascination with it. Every pundit had a comment. The blogs went nuts and the video went viral. A woman having a shot of whiskey? Was this kind of thing allowed?

I was sure that being a man had made things easier on my dad. Not that running for president is a laugh riot. But at least he never had to worry about the shape of his legs, how big his ass was, or whether he was having a bad hair day—the sorts of things that women in public life are routinely pummeled for, if they aren’t paying enough attention to their appearance.

How much time had Hillary Clinton spent considering her outfits and accessories for debates—or sitting in a salon chair getting her hair done? My dad didn’t have things like that to worry about.

Not that he was on easy street. After forty-seven years of serving his country—twenty-four years in the House and Senate, twenty-three years in the U.S. Navy—he had a promising chance of becoming the president of the United States. The stakes were daunting, dizzying. When I thought about it, what he was facing, and taking on, I was amazed by him. He was so strong, and ready for all of it. But the stress was intense. He once told me that he thought the pressures of a national campaign were on par with the pressures of war.

Dad seemed unfazed by the hot glare of media. From what I could see, he had barely switched gears. He was up to the challenge, and the job.

But how ready was I?

WHEN GQ CALLED AND ASKED FOR AN INTERVIEW, I didn’t flatter myself that it was really about me—or I tried not to. The campaign was winning, after all, which made my whole family more media-worthy. My younger brothers, Jack and Jimmy, were both in the military, which forbade them, for the most part, from giving interviews. My sister, Bridget, was too young, from my parents’ point of view, to be in the spotlight. My dad’s sons and daughter from his first marriage, Doug, Andy, and Sidney, were busy professionals with their own lives and families. I was the lone McCain kid on the road, and visible. I didn’t know a thing about giving an interview, but I was eager to help my dad in any way I could.

Political kids are supposed to be an asset, which is why campaigns usually find ways to expose them, even exploit them, in order to humanize the candidate. Kids remind the world, and the voters, that—no matter how canned and phony a politician may seem—he or she is a real person with real stuff going on.

My dad’s campaign seemed a little slow to jump on board with the family stuff. Even at the beginning of the summer going into the convention, I remember reading a poll showing that a majority of voters didn’t realize my dad had children—and although they must have assumed he was married, they didn’t know much, if anything, about his wife.

My mom is private by nature and holds her cards close in a new situation. Once she warms up, she is almost as much of a free spirit as I am. Would voters ever get a chance to see that? Would a member of the media be able to see and describe her clearly, rather than just writing about her faraway stare?

As for me, I am not guarded by nature, and the prospect of being interviewed didn’t make me too nervous. I assumed that all I had to do was “be myself” and the media would get me, and maybe even like me. That was basically my public relations strategy, anyway. Did I need media training? I didn’t think so. Just the word training made me imagine being led around on a choke chain and leash by one of those weird dog handlers in the movie Best in Show. I didn’t want to be a scripted daughter-of, or flatten myself into a boring cartoon.

If I kept it real and didn’t bullshit people, I assumed that somehow I would be understood and appreciated.

Like I’ve said, I don’t believe in secrets—or all the work that goes into trying to keep them. With me, what you see is what you get. Why should I act like somebody I wasn’t? Being open and unguarded is how I have always made friends and bonded with people, even in work environments and paid internships. I believe that, at the end of the day, my personal connection with somebody is most important. It didn’t occur to me that a relationship with a member of the media would be any different.

My mom and I didn’t have a press person assigned to us, in any case. The campaign found us one after I screwed up, embarrassed everybody, and generated enough heat to set off all the campaign PR fire alarms.

THE YEAR BEFORE, SOME NEWSWEEKLIES HAD DONE roundups on the grown children of candidates who were working full-time on a campaign. These were ensemble pieces, each daughter or son getting a line or two of description, and maybe a quote. The Five Brothers would be grouped together, or the daughters like me, Cate Edwards, and Sarah Huckabee. We were all college-age or older, still single, and for the most part, on the road. Compared to Chelsea Clinton, a major celebrity who declined to participate in all interviews, or even talk to a ten-year-old reporter for Scholastic, we were all relative unknowns. In a group setting, the exposure for us was kind of gentle. The format didn’t allow for media gotcha.

I’d already managed to embarrass myself, though. My first big on-camera interview was one of these group portrait pieces, by CBS News, about daughters-of. We were a campaign’s “secret weapons,” as the piece called us, and the story featured Sarah Huckabee, Cate Edwards, and me.

Cate Edwards looked gorgeous on camera, in her very East Coast way, with perfect straight brown hair, jeans, and suit jacket. She sounded even better—talking about how people relate to her, and in that way, relate to her father. Her ability to weave in the talking points of the Edwards campaign was stunning. To make the whole thing even more impressive, the backdrop of the interview was Harvard, where Cate was attending law school.

Then Sarah Huckabee came on-screen—and, like Cate, sounded and looked amazing. As I watched the piece, when it aired, I remember thinking how very classy she was in her suit and perfectly understated makeup. She talked about campaign strategy; she had been on the ground in Iowa, literally putting up signs and helping strategize.

Then… cut to me. I was wearing a knee-length black sequined skirt that looked way too glitzy, like it belonged on a Broadway stage. I was wearing tons and tons of makeup too—heavy eyeliner, layers of mascara, loads of blush. It took me a while to learn the art of applying makeup for TV and what I produced for that first interview was a recipe that would scare animals and small children.

Worst of all, every other word I said was like.

“Just because you, like, watch The Hills, doesn’t mean, like, you can’t, like, be involved in politics.”

I giggled really fast, as if I were auditioning for a part in Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Like the nasty stream of online comments that my blog generated, the online reaction to the CBS interview was vicious—mostly about my Hills comment, and how bad my makeup was, and that I needed to stop bleaching my hair like a Vegas stripper. The other daughters were lauded—Cate for her brains, Sarah for her noble deeds, literally “out in the field” working for her dad.

I couldn’t help but remember all the other things I had said to the reporter of the CBS interview, things that (in my memory, anyway) were smarter and less peppered with likes. The producers of the segment could have shown me in a better light—if they’d had a reason to. Maybe it was better television, better entertainment, to make me look like an idiot.

But did I have to make it so damn easy for them?

After all the money spent on my education, and hours studying at Xavier College Preparatory in Phoenix, a Catholic girls school, and later at Columbia University, and after all the various social and political events that I had been privileged to attend, and brilliant people I’d been lucky enough to meet, you’d think that I could find a way to talk or dress like I’m not straight out of a mall in Scottsdale.

No offense, Scottsdale.

Malls either.

Well, you know what I mean.

THE GQ PIECE WAS ONLY A SHORT PROFILE—AND WAS going to run with a photograph of me. This didn’t seem so hard, or complicated. The writer, a small guy who described himself as “nebbish” during the interview, flew to Phoenix to interview me. We talked for about an hour, drove to lunch at Garduno’s Margarita Factory, and then we went bowling.

It seemed like my job was to provide him with as much information as possible, since he’d flown all the way to Arizona to see me, for God’s sake. I had no idea that it was unusual for a candidate’s daughter to be left alone for hours to gab with a feature writer. Nor did I expect that he would find a way to use every single semi-outrageous thing I said in order to make the piece as spicy and edgy as possible.

But if you are me, and you talk to somebody you like for four hours, you are going to wind up saying enough semi-outrageous things to fill up the entire issue of GQ, and maybe Esquire too. Even worse, when the magazine called to arrange a photo shoot, and I was on the road, it didn’t occur to me that being photographed in my jeans and a black T-shirt on a hotel room bed with my computer on my lap and an open bottle of beer in my right hand, would make me look “slutty,” as one staffer put it, or like one of those troubled political family members who is sliding down the slippery slope to catastrophic embarrassment.

What was forgotten—and left in the reporter’s notepad and recorder—were hours of conversation about the campaign and my life outside of politics. The shreds of conversation that were used, babble and sputtering, became tantalizing nuggets. I made a remark that Barack Obama was “sexy,” said that I loved to watch a bisexual dating show on TV called A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, and that I was a fan of the burlesque stripper Dita Von Teese.

A political gaffe is almost necessary in this kind of profile, apparently. I had unwittingly supplied that too. I said that I hoped Mike Huckabee wouldn’t be my dad’s running mate, and that he was better off running the evangelicals in the country instead.

Yes, I said all of those things. Mea culpa and all that. What is most noticeable is how painfully naïve I am in the interview, and how trusting. I thought the writer was just being really friendly and liked me, not just pretending that he did in order to manipulate me into providing juicy quotes. What a dope I was.

The cover of GQ said it all: “Is the White House ready for John McCain’s daughter?” And the article was entitled “Raising McCain,” a reference to the expression “raising Cain,” meaning to raise hell, raise the devil, and basically cause drama.

Well, that much was true. The reaction to the GQ article was crazy. It was like that scene in the movie Office Space, when Ron Livingston’s character gets inundated with e-mails and phone calls because he forgot to fill out his TPS report. Suddenly everyone in my path wanted to comment on my mistake and make sure I understood what I had done.

I was just twenty-three years old and had already won kudos for my blog, which I was funding entirely on my own, but suddenly the campaign was treating me like I was an irresponsible harlot who had released a sex tape with the president of Greenpeace.

When I look back on it now, it seems comical—as if my father wouldn’t become president because of a story in GQ about me. The overreaction was stunning. Even the word irreparable was used to describe the damage that I had caused. The interview was deemed “scandalous” and the accompanying photo was DEFCON 5 for headquarters.

I thought the piece was perfectly fine, when I first read it. But after hearing the reaction, I quickly descended into shame and apologized to my parents. Most of all, I took a giant red pill and woke up to reality. Most journalists only care about pleasing their editors, making a name for themselves, and coming up with the juiciest possible story. Maybe the collapsing industry of publishing has made things even worse—and journalists feel greater pressure to create sensationalized material.

Here’s what I learned: Journalists do not care about the person being interviewed. And if they seem to, it’s an act. So whatever happens, don’t hug them good-bye.

The photograph still haunts me, not because I think I look that bad or trashy. It haunts me because I see a young girl, beautifully naïve and open and trusting, thinking that reporters are just people, just new friends.

I will never be that girl again.

First impressions are important. And the birth of my media persona wasn’t so wonderful. Thousands of people were introduced to John McCain’s daughter this way. I seemed to be a dummy with a big mouth and a beer bottle in her hand.

The funny thing is, I don’t even drink much.

But I guess I do have a big mouth.