Dirty Sexy Politics

^{Chapter 1} How Things Went Badly

The night before it was announced that Sarah Palin would be my father’s running mate for vice president, I went to sleep joking with Shannon and Heather about what it would be like campaigning across the country with five married Mormon men and all those baby grandchildren of Mitt Romney. My roommates and I had lots of jokes about the Romneys, who seemed doomed to join the campaign any second. They were all so handsome, in a tooth-whitener commercial kind of way, and so seriously wholesome. We wondered whether the Five Brothers, the nickname for the Romney sons, could handle the constant drinking and swearing that went on in our campaign—the press corps included. Not to mention all the tawdry stories about crazy-sex that you never read about.

Crazy-sex, in case some clarification is necessary, is a category of sex on its own. It is sex with somebody who is extremely bad for you. Somebody you probably don’t even like that much. But on the road, things have a way of changing. You don’t have regular contact with friends. You don’t see your family that often. You start to miss them both, and your comfortable bed at home. This causes you to look at the world differently, through what we called “campaign goggles.” It was just like “beer goggles,” when people around you seem more fascinating the more you drink, except it’s caused by prolonged contact. Each day of togetherness on a campaign, stuck on a bus or airplane, listening to one more stump speech, brought you closer and closer until, very slowly over time, even the most boring campaign drones and journalists started to seem attractive. Campaign goggles can distort reality very powerfully and are the cause of almost all crazy-sex and other campaign hookups.

Stories abound, and I’m sure you’ve heard some, about how wild and raucous and lusty political life can be, especially during a presidential election. When the stakes are high, the behavior gets really low. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m immune to bad behavior. But while my father was making a bid for the presidency, I didn’t have a death wish—which meant absolutely, positively, no crazy-sex for me. It was the kind of decision that has “survival skills” written all over it.

The night before the announcement, I had a nice big king-sized bed all to myself. It was late and I was having trouble settling down. I swilled Red Bull and Diet Coke all day on the campaign, gorged on pizza and donuts, and at night, after all that sugar and caffeine, it was hard to decompress. Shannon and Heather—my friends, angels, and colleagues who took videos and still photographs for the campaign and my blog—were in an adjoining room. I could hear them laughing. On the road, we were always together, our days spent mostly in transit, on one of the three campaign buses that took everybody around the country. At night, we shared connecting rooms in Holiday Inns—very rarely anything nicer. One room had a king. The next room had two twins. We always took turns getting our own room.

When I finished college, I told my parents that I didn’t want to go to graduate school, or open a clothing boutique, as previously discussed. I wanted to join the campaign. They said that I could come along if I paid my own way. The campaign was a sinking ship, or at least financially sunk, when I joined in July 2007. There was no money for extras, and no money for me, or my blog, or the people I’d need to help me produce it. My father’s campaign manager, Terry Nelson, and the campaign strategist, John Weaver—who was one of my father’s closest friends, and like an uncle to me—had run the operation into near bankruptcy. Poll numbers were slipping. Fund-raising had stalled. Our spirits were low and it was hard to be optimistic, but my dad wasn’t resigned to another loss.

And neither was I. I would do anything for him, and relished the thought of a front row seat on the campaign. To bankroll myself and the blog, I used the money that my grandfather had left me, even if, by the end, I had spent every dime. It was a better education than graduate school and more worthwhile to me than opening a boutique. As far as I could tell, the Republican Party was hopelessly unschooled in lots of things, but particularly in its efforts to attract young people by using the Internet, in spite of all the millions of dollars spent on “web consulting.”

By being independent, and not paid for by the McCain campaign, I’d be free to write what I wanted—or so I hoped—while revealing a more personal side of my dad and my family (the campaign, for all its experts and big thinkers, seemed particularly bad at this). But my blog had led to conflicts, a big ugly mess of them.

IN MY HEART OF HEARTS, I’D ALWAYS HOPED MY FATHER would pick Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Aside from being a brilliant politician, Joe is one of the kindest, friendliest, and funniest people I have ever met, not particularly common traits when it comes to the famous and powerful. Always in good spirits, he never seems affected by the fray, or criticism. Sometimes his jokes alone kept me sane during those endless bus rides throughout the country.

Probably even more important, Joe Lieberman is one of the people whom my father can relax around—always. For me, this counts for a lot. Like everything else in my life, the personal and the professional are hard to pull apart, and usually I don’t want to. If I like somebody enough to be friends with them, that’s exactly the kind of person I want to work with.

Politically speaking, picking Lieberman seemed like a brilliant move too. He is a former Democrat, and was previously the running mate of Al Gore. I have to admit, I loved the idea of having two independent-leaning politicians on the Republican ticket against the steadily left-leaning Barack Obama. I thought this would pull moderates like me—there were thirty million or more of us floating around the country—in the party’s direction.

But by the time I went to bed on the night of August 28, 2008, I had already been told that Joe Lieberman and Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, hadn’t made the final cut. That left me assuming—to the point of certainty—that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, would be chosen. There was a slight possibility it could be Tim Pawlenty, who had a great head of hair. But aside from this fact, and that he was the governor of Minnesota, I knew nothing else about him.

My focus had been on Romney for months. He was a minor obsession of mine, I have to confess—the politician whom I most loved to watch and ridicule during the primaries. He’d given me so many sublime moments of laughter. It was incredible how he kept switching his story, and backpedaling, and making my father out to be an old has-been and tired Washington insider.

YouTube had an irresistible Romney clip that we’d all seen and laughed over. It showed a heated squabble between the governor and a chubby, semi-dorky AP reporter named Glenn Johnson at a press conference inside a Staples office supply store. Johnson is rumpled and sitting on the floor of Staples, legs stretched out, his laptop attached to him like a college student. Romney is standing over him, super-erect, his hair gelled and perfectly black. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and a Windbreaker, and like so many of Romney’s “spontaneous” moments on his campaign, he seems so unnatural.

From his spot on the floor, Glenn Johnson keeps drilling away with questions about Romney hiring Washington lobbyists on his campaign, while Romney becomes more and more frustrated.

Romney’s campaign manager eventually loses it, and pulls the reporter aside. “Don’t be argumentative with the candidate!” It’s truly priceless, and I loved how Romney, who always came off as slick and unreal, had been undone by such a visual mess of a guy. I’d seen the clip at least fifty times and laughed every time. (Much later, I ran into Glenn Johnson on the street in New York and told him how much I loved his YouTube clip. For the record, he’d lost an extreme amount of weight by then and looked great.)

It was hard to adjust to nice thoughts about Romney—or to stop laughing at him. But that’s politics. You could loathe somebody during the primaries and then, suddenly, consider him a good guy and shrewd politician as soon as you’ve beaten him and he’s joined your team. Just a few months earlier, Romney’s campaign and ours were intense rivals. But now that we were supposed to be the best of friends, I needed to put jokes aside and focus on the tremendous positives Romney would bring to the ticket. He was handsome, smart, and extremely experienced in matters of the economy, an issue that would eventually become lethal to my father’s campaign. Also, I had met the governor and some of his campaign operatives and have to admit that they were a lot more easygoing and real than I ever thought possible.

Let’s be honest. We needed Mitt Romney. He made perfect sense. We could put down the sword because, at the end of the day, we were fighting for the same political ideals. We were all Republicans—and fought for individual freedom, smaller government, a strong defense. These ideals were things that we cared passionately about, and were supposed to be more important than cultural or religious divides, more important than what kind of clothes we wore, or whether we had sex before marriage—or even whom we had sex with.

That’s how it was supposed to be, anyway. But increasingly, the more conservative wing of the Republican Party wasn’t accepting of moderates like me. It wasn’t enough that we all shared a conservative philosophy that we cared passionately about. It seemed like you had to prove you were conservative enough. It made me uneasy. And, like all humor, my jokes about Romney shielded something very real. It wasn’t so much that I disapproved of the Romneys. I worried they’d disapprove of me—my bleached hair, my swearing, my “edgy” clothes, not to mention my gay friends. Would they accept me or scorn me as some kind of closet liberal who didn’t fit in?

Being a Republican was sometimes difficult if you had any wayward ideas or attitudes, or if your lifestyle wasn’t conventional—even though what was “conventional” had eroded to the point of being unrecognizable, or didn’t exist anymore. Republicans seemed to yearn for the golden era of the Reagan eighties, when AIDS wasn’t discussed, along with so many other things. Now, in an effort to pretend nothing had changed, the party seemed like a secret sect, a membership that you had to prove yourself worthy of.

But what about the less “conventional” people who hated groupthink and just wanted to live life without big government breathing down our backs? And what about me? I am passionate about individual liberty. I believe in God and the church, but am as adamantly pro-life as I am passionate in my support of gay marriage. What worried me much more than the Romneys or Huckabees disapproving of me personally—I could deal with that—was how moderates like me would ever fit into their idea of what a Republican was, or should be. With these exclusionary attitudes, in ten or twenty years there would be no party left.

But it was too soon to go down this road. We’d given up a shot at Joe Lieberman, and had most likely moved on to Mitt Romney. This would bring changes to our Pirate Ship, as our campaign was lovingly called. We’d have to clean up our act a little bit. Not that I really drank much, or ever took drugs. And I was celibate as a nun. But I suspected my days of swearing like a sailor and dancing in the bus aisles were over.

The future was full of unknowns. But I had learned a few things on the campaign already, and knew that change always brought complications and chaos—and sometimes a little entertainment. Drama was inevitable on a campaign and created almost out of thin air. Tempers were always flying, and feelings were always being hurt. There was no question that a running mate would add to the confusion and upset. There would be less time for fun. But I couldn’t have predicted just how serious it was going to get.