Dirty Sexy Politics

^{Chapter 7} Heartland Headaches

My dad is incredibly superstitious. My whole family is, probably because of him. His superstitiousness is infectious, and if you spend time around him, you wind up collecting good luck charms and participating in lots of good luck rituals. That’s why, right after Iowa, where my dad trailed behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, somebody sent in a little statue of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, to campaign headquarters. He was supposed to bring us the juice.

I’d been on the road for half a year by then, posting on the blog every day for the last four months. It was brutal, a hamster wheel. The blog was like a wild animal that is always hungry, never satisfied. Every day it needs more. After two weeks straight of feeding it and scrambling around like a crazy person to make sure the blog was as good as it could be, I’d take four days off, usually a long weekend vegetating at home in Phoenix to unwind. Actually, it wasn’t really enough time to relax, but you could do laundry, repack, and sleep in. Mostly I lived in my pajamas and UGG boots, ate takeout, and went to movies with my normal Arizona friends who weren’t obsessed with the election.

Before long I was itching for the madness of the campaign again—for the laughs, the boring bus trips, the roller-coaster rides of emotion. Instead of becoming drained by the campaign process, or dispirited by our loss in Iowa, or that the campaign was running out of money again, I became more and more charged. I was so excited to be on the campaign, and so sure we’d win, at night I could barely sleep.

To me, we were never a lost cause. Even after Iowa. But to most everybody else, particularly the media, Mitt Romney was the man to watch.

Saint Jude was a little guy, about eight inches tall, the size of those little plastic Jesus figures that people put in the back windows of their cars. And wouldn’t you know—he did have the juice. Once he arrived, we won and kept winning. He was given a place on Rick Davis’s desk at headquarters and nobody was allowed to move him.

I LOVE THE IDEA OF THE HEARTLAND, AND LIKE TO think of myself as a heartland girl, but being in Iowa, before the primaries began, made me think twice about that. The state is so flat, so endlessly flat, and the air smells like farms and fertilizer. I’m sure rotting manure is a really good smell for some people, all that natural waste and decay. But to me, it just smells like manure.

Events were miles apart and the bus rides went on and on.

I’ll tell you what did delight me in the flatlands of Iowa—the crazy hotels. They appear in the middle of nowhere, outrageous and imaginative, like mini Vegas attractions. I remember specifically a fabulous hotel in Des Moines that had a waterslide as a centerpiece. The floors leading to the hotel rooms are covered in Astroturf and each room has a fantastically tacky tropical theme—along the lines of National Lampoon’s Vacation. I loved every single room I saw, and Heather took tons of pictures. We still joke that my next project should be a coffee table book of the most creative hotels throughout the country.

You get to be a connoisseur of weird hotels on a campaign—and accustomed to things that would otherwise bug you or even repulse you in other phases of your life. For instance, after six months on the road, whenever Shannon and Heather and I checked into a cheap hotel where the campaign was staying, we just assumed that there would be pubic hair on the toilet seat, or on the side of the bathtub. We had a technique for dealing with it. We used a blow-dryer to blow the hairs off, if the electrical cord was long enough.

It became second nature to us. We almost stopped making a big deal out of it, and stopped hopping up and down and screaming because we were so grossed out. We just went into the bathroom, plugged in the blow-dryer, and went to work.

The worst hotel that I remember was in Iowa as well—a hotel so bleak, and so do-it-yourself, that my dad had to help us haul our big suitcases up two flights of stairs to our room. Out in the hallway, there was an ancient vending machine with cans of Coke that looked twenty years old. Our room was so terrible, there wasn’t even a closet, just a bar on the wall where you could hang your clothes, but the hangers were soldered onto that bar, so nobody could steal them. The lightbulb in the bathroom was just that—a bare lightbulb and a chain. Who says politics is glamorous?

A couple hours after checking in, we found a box with a half-eaten pizza on the floor of the hallway outside our room—and this disgusted us completely. What jerk would leave old pizza on the floor? And why was it in front of our door? We invented a scenario in our heads, and then convinced ourselves it was true: The journalist in the room next to ours had dumped the old pizza there. What a slob! We couldn’t believe it! In retribution, we put a plate of hard-boiled eggs outside his door, hoping he’d step on them as he took off on his daily run at dawn. And we were stumbling in hysteria the next morning when we saw that he had. Victory!

But upon climbing aboard the bus, my dad perked up when he saw us. “Hey, how’d you like the pizza I left you last night?”

I SHOULD PROBABLY EXPLAIN, FOR THOSE WHO DON’T know, that Iowa doesn’t have a primary. There’s a tradition of a “caucus” instead, something that dates back to the dark ages of 1972. It’s a controversial and a completely different animal from a primary. Rather than going to the voting booth, as you would in a general election, and quietly voting by yourself, each county of Iowa elects delegates to cast a vote for all the eligible voters living in their district. It is much more time-consuming than a regular primary, to the point of being ridiculously inefficient.

The Iowa caucus for Republicans is historically very conservative, almost radically so. We all suspected that Romney would win. He and his sons had traveled to every county of Iowa in their damn camper—something they bragged about every chance they got. They hit Iowa hard, just as they should have. That was a smart strategy. But then Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, swooped in with all his folksy mojo and beat him.

I have a lot of complaints about Mike Huckabee—he could be an entire chapter—but I’ll give you the two main reasons why he is a Republican I could never vote for. Number one, he thinks being gay is immoral and perverted and equivalent to bestiality. Number two, he came up with a plan in 1992 to have all people who were HIV-positive sent to one area of the country by themselves, isolated from the general population like lepers in medieval times.

That kind of thinking is not just backward, it is dangerous. And I never, ever have been able to wrap my head around Mike Huckabee’s appeal.

And the fact that Mike Huckabee eventually won in Iowa is, to me, just more evidence that our country’s electoral college and primary system is outmoded. Particularly for Republicans, the process no longer is an adequate lens into the party as a whole. The states of Iowa and South Carolina, where primary trends begin, are specifically very conservative. And I have to worry that, down the road, in 2012 or 2016, with a split widening between moderates and hyperconservatives, that the party will be forced to go even more conservative than in the last election, because the system now favors a very conservative Republican nominee.

The drawbacks to this are enormous. The country does not seem to be riding a particularly conservative wave right now, and young people, especially, are not enamored of a hyperconservative agenda. After all, the country just elected the most liberal presidential candidate possible in the last election. The conservative pundits may scream that my dad isn’t “conservative enough,” but what other Republicans are electable? If you don’t believe me, just give Mike Huckabee a try in the next election cycle and see a bloodbath ensue. A hyperconservative candidate has no chance of winning against President Obama. That is why the Republican party has to start being open to new people, new blood, and new ideas.

DON’T GET ME WRONG. WE SPENT LOTS OF TIME IN Iowa, even though it was a slog. But New Hampshire mattered in a different way. My dad was beloved there—partly due to his big win in 2000, and the stories about the South Carolina primary that followed. If Romney won in New Hampshire, we were cooked. It wasn’t just my dad’s strategy. It mattered to all the candidates, since historically a good number of individuals who win the presidency win in New Hampshire first.

So while Romney and the Five Brothers were appearing in every inch of Iowa, my dad spent more time in New Hampshire, and had more events there, which seemed to piss off the people of Iowa. I guess you couldn’t blame them.

We persevered, although it is hard not to have a bad impression of a state when its residents don’t like your message, or your dad.

What carried us through was an awareness of our strategy and that New Hampshire mattered in a way that Iowa didn’t. There are lots of strategies for winning the presidency, of course. The all-time dumbest was Rudy Giuliani’s in the last election. His tactic was to completely bypass Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and to concentrate on one thing: winning Florida. Because Florida has more electoral college votes than the first three states combined. But staying away from those early states means you don’t have momentum and a domino effect going for you.

Some people thought Giuliani was crazy like a fox—and a bold experimenter with the basic game plan. But mostly what we talked about on our campaign was how tan Giuliani was. All the other presidential candidates were sallow and pasty from spending the fall and winter in New Hampshire and Iowa, but Giuliani had a tan to beat all tans. In the end, that’s all he had.