by Selina Meyer
Despite those few rocky moments, graduation day 1989 found us still together and pondering our next move as I received my diploma with my father looking on proudly while Andrew flirted with my mother.
* She later became a disciple of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and we lost touch.
* At least, I believed them to be his and treated them as though they were. But looking back all these years later, I wonder if perhaps they might have been someone else’s and whether the little shrine I built was not to Howard’s pubic hair after all but rather to some complete stranger’s.
* And thereby hangs a somewhat cautionary tale: Although we had never really bonded across the vast social and economic gulf that separated us, Barbara had proved to be a good freshman roommate in one particular respect: Her older brothers were able and more than willing to obtain alcohol for us. Barbara didn’t drink, but she did understand that having alcohol for parties, even when they were just hen parties, was one of the cornerstones of popularity at Smith and, I would imagine, college everywhere. I will never know how the resident proctor, a fun-hating engineering grad student from Pakistan or India or one of those places, got wind of the fact that Wendy and I were having gin and tonics with Gigi Pell, an adventurous girl who lived across the hall, in our room one Friday evening freshman year. Perhaps we were making a bit too much noise and playing Steve Winwood too loudly. In any case, when she knocked on the door, we, assuming she was cool, did not bother to hide the half-gallon of Old London Town Gin that Barbara’s brother Rudy had sold us that afternoon at a 20 percent markup. Long story short, when she asked how we had obtained the liquor, Wendy and I, bound by the college’s strict honor code, were forced to turn Barbara in. She was suspended as soon as she got back from the library and eventually forced to withdraw, leaving behind her completely unrealistic dreams of one day becoming a doctor.
CHAPTER FIVE
Adventures in the Private Sector
A frequent criticism of people who work in government is that they lack experience in the real world and, detached from any connection with the daily lives of ordinary citizens, they are unable to effectively address their needs and wants. I bet there’s an old joke or two about this. How many times have you read about some government initiative—a new bridge, a new food stamp program, a new war—and said to yourself, “Why the h-ll is the government doing that with my money?! I don’t want that!” In fact, it’s often hard to think of anything that the government does do that people really like, other than giving them free money in various forms. The counterargument that is often made, along the lines of, “Hey, that road you drove on today when you went to the liquor store? Do you know who built that? That’s right! The government!” just gets on people’s nerves, and they either respond by saying, “F-ck that! I didn’t ask the government to build a road. I’d be perfectly happy walking to the liquor store on a dirt road or by cutting my way through a dense forest, if necessary. A person who goes to the liquor store as much as I do probably shouldn’t be driving anyway!” or by deciding that you’re the kind of as-h-ole or d-ck that no one likes because you’re constantly saying dumb, aggravating sh-t like this.
If you’ve been in the government or really in any kind of responsible position, you know that people are never going to be grateful to you for all the hard work and sacrifices you make. It’s human nature to be ungrateful. Every woman knows a little bit about the author Ayn Rand that she learned from the worst boyfriend she ever had. And while Rand’s books are nothing more than bound j-zz rags for involuntarily celibate adolescents of any age, she was right about people being fundamentally selfish. So, no matter what you do in government, people aren’t going to like it much, and that’s why, if you’re the sort of needy person who requires constant favorable attention and approval from others, you should probably go into some other line of work. Still, you can avoid at least some of the attacks by having spent a little time working in the private sector. Ideally, you would have risen to some position of responsibility so that you can tell the voters that you “know what it means to make a payroll” or “build a business” or some other kind of foolishness. Believe it or not, there are still lots of people out there who think government should be “run like a business,” although the kind of business they seem to have in mind is a big box store with extra-large shopping carts that turns a blind eye toward shoplifters.
On the rare occasion when something genuinely surprising happens in politics, journalists and pundits are quick to fall back on the idea that someone has figured out some new way to scratch the innumerable itches (not to mention chronic pustulent sores) of a group of supposedly “forgotten” Americans. The truth—and I’m going to give it to you straight here—is that they’ve found some convincing way to promise our most worthless citizens that they will get something—probably electronics of some type, most often video games—without having to work for it. I know that may sound racist. I wish it were that simple. But the fact is that 100 percent of Americans consider themselves “forgotten” and, I’ve found, candidates are successful or not depending on how much they “remember” to promise things to the most gullible of these people while “forgetting” to ask them for anything in return.
But, look, I don’t want to get sidetracked.
My point is that lots of people will attribute magical powers to business experience even when they’ve worked in a business or even owned one and should know better. But complaining about how stupid voters are never gets a politician anywhere.
At the time that I embarked upon the world as a newly minted law school graduate, I was not yet thinking of running for office. So I did not assign any particular value to one type of job over another as far as its potential future appeal to American voters. Knowing what I know now, if I had to go back and do it all again, I’d probably have tried to work for at least a few weeks at some sort of demeaning-but-not-too-demeaning job so that I could frame my life story as a classic American success story. Since my first run for office, I’ve claimed to have “put myself through law school,” which I honestly believe is technically true. I mean who else put me through it? Yes, my mother paid the tuition and gave me an inadequate allowance but, unlike in college, I was the one doing all the work, by attending classes and reading books and writing papers and other law school things.
But, having put myself through law school, it was not like I was going to work as a stevedore or in a slaughterhouse, and so I never had the chance to put one of those colorful, supposedly character-building menial occupations on my resume. For a lawyer, the equivalent is to go to work as a public defender or for some kind of activist group that wastes everyone’s time by harassing businesses or the government. Whenever you hear someone say they are an “environmental lawyer” or a “civil rights lawyer,” watch out! These are generally either people who couldn’t get hired at a decent law firm or people who always had their eye on running for office and just pretended to be lawyers for a while. The only thing worse is an “international lawyer,” which even international lawyers have trouble saying with a straight face.
I suppose working as a prosecutor or district attorney is a little above the slaughterhouse level. It looks good on a politician’s CV, plus it can maybe be a little interesting sometimes and maybe even a bit exciting if you get to put someone in jail or the gas chamber. Or so you might think. But I’ve met a few prosecutors and district attorneys in my time, and when you get a few drinks into them (never hard!), they’ll tell you that it’s a lot of work for not much reward and then start talking smack about how feeble public defenders and Legal Aid types are. One thing you can never forget is that everyone likes to have someone else to look down on.
As it turned out, I didn’t spend a great many years in the world of corporate law, but the time I did spend was formative and constructive. A foundation in the law is, I believe, a useful thing for almost any politician, and the ones who come from other fields of endeavor like academia, the clergy, or medicine are always looked at a
skance and, often, with derision. The ones who come from business are even more dubious, since it can be surprisingly hard to tell if they’re actually worth the hundreds of millions of dollars they claim or are secretly broke. I learned from painful experience that anyone who calls himself a “successful businessman” without providing real concrete verifiable details (e.g., “I’m the president of Google. You can Google it.”) is actually a charlatan. Voters, the poor fools, are rarely clever enough to figure this out.
Still, although I have always been mature for my age, like many young people fresh out of school, I wanted to see a bit of what the world had to offer before settling on a lifetime profession. Some young people do this by joining the Peace Corps or by sampling the worlds of art or fashion. So many of them waste time in the world of being unsuccessful actors that you almost wouldn’t believe it. (My daughter actually explored the world of performance art, thereby becoming one of the first people to figure out how to dance naked in front of a bunch of leering men without getting paid for it.) In my case, the world I was interested in exploring was the world of corporate law.
There are almost as many different kinds of corporate law as there are corporations, and there are other kinds of law, such as trusts and estates or white-collar criminal defense, that are often handled by corporate law firms even though they don’t necessarily involve corporations directly. One of the things that appealed to me the most about the venerable firm of Maltby, Pierpont, and Blumfeld, where I accepted a job as a junior associate after interviewing at a number of competitors, was the opportunity to work for a month in each of the firm’s specialty practices. Not all of the other firms were able to offer this sort of enticement or, if they did, they didn’t offer it to me since they didn’t offer me a job. But though perhaps not among the top tier firms, which, back in 1994 were still closed to women except for a certain “type” of woman, Maltby, Pierpont, and Blumfeld was perfectly respectable and, I thought, a good fit for a young lawyer like me who wanted to work hard but not too hard and have a social life and go to the gym. The fact that my mother’s first cousin, my “Uncle” (as I called him) George was a partner and that the firm managed her trust also suggested that Maltby, Pierpont, and Blumfeld was the sort of place where I might fit in and where the other lawyers would be predisposed to see my value.
As I moved around the firm getting practical hands-on experience in dealing with clients such as insurance companies and reinsurance companies, I quickly determined which areas of the law I liked and which I did not. As any lawyer will tell you, many areas of the law are, quite honestly, really idiotic. I had decided on my first day of work that, in order to make my mark, I would never compromise my core value of plainspoken honesty. So as I moved through the first-year associates’ cycle from department to department, I tried in the course of the daily grind to take a moment to stop and carefully listen to myself. Was I enjoying the work I was doing? Was it stimulating? Was I learning anything? I shared my answers to these questions with my superiors, judging that they, too, would wish to constantly reassess the work they were doing and whether it was really worthwhile, as well as their own performance. I had thought that this kind of back-and-forth, give-and-take approach would be something that the law firm as an institution would also support, since the bedrock of the law itself is the principle of giving due weight to alternative viewpoints.
And yet here as so often before and after, I found myself stymied by patriarchal prejudice, with my co-workers stubbornly unwilling to listen to my constructive criticism or overall evaluations. By observing their behavior, I became versed in certain commonplace tactics for delay and buck passing. They would pretend to be interested in what I was saying and then ask me to put my thoughts in writing, or they would begin to cross-examine me about what exactly I found boring about, say, tax practice or maritime law, as though I were some sort of a hostile witness. After a few months of this, it became clear to me that I was wasting my time as a junior associate, and the path that lay ahead toward partnership seemed impossibly long and by no means certain.
The lack of enthusiasm on the part of my bosses for my suggestions might have discouraged a weaker personality, but I resolved that I would never give up fighting the wrongs I encountered in life, whether they concerned the civil rights of under-enfranchised minority groups or aspects of the practice of law that are just extremely picky and dull. For their part, my bosses often found it easier to give me time off than to risk being shown up by a “mere woman.” Fine. So be it. I would use the extra free time to improve myself in other ways and gain a wider experience of the world.
As I endured those difficult years at Maltby, Pierpont, and Blumfeld (along with a delightful interlude in Europe about which you’ll read more later. I could have included it here, but I want to give you an incentive to keep reading), I was also enduring the rigors of daily living. My modest salary and Andrew’s sporadic income imposed upon us a humble existence, living in an unused wing of my mother’s house and obliged to depend upon her servants for meals, laundry, and housekeeping because we could not afford to set up a household on our own. While my relationship with my mother has always been strained, I think Andrew found this time especially hard, since it offended his macho pride not to be able to support me better. Most of the income we did have was invested in his various businesses and at least one invention for finding water using a radically improved dowsing rod, and, as he explained to me, the payoff might be far in the distance. However, there were at least a few times when the possible future payoff seemed to recede so far into the distance as to be altogether invisible, like when one of his businesses would collapse completely, leaving angry creditors in a much better position to recover any future payoff than I.
It was after one of the more spectacular of Andrew’s business failures, a system for franchising the door-to-door sales of poor-quality sporting goods manufactured in Vietnam, that Andrew asked me to marry him. In retrospect, his error had been a rather obvious one. Since no one in Vietnam played football or baseball or hockey, it was understandable, I suppose, that they might not have understood exactly the nature of the equipment required. Plus, their manufacturing techniques, which Andrew had promoted as “traditional” and “handmade,” resulted in an entire order of footballs being made from the skin of the pig’s face, which was the cheapest pig leather one could buy and hence offered the greatest profit margin. The moment when Andrew took delivery of the six thousand footballs with pig snouts and eye sockets clearly visible on them was, I think, the saddest I had ever seen him. Broke, exhausted, and weeping, he fell on his knees and asked me to marry him.
I said yes.
CHAPTER SIX
Climbing Capitol Hill—A Woman in the House . . . and the Senate
Congress, like life, has two halves, and it has been my honor to serve in both of them.
First, the House of Representatives.
When I reflect upon the many difficult decisions I have made in my time on the blue marble we call planet Earth—the decision, for example, to devote my life to standing up against injustice on behalf of ordinary, decent people, or my six abortions—one decision takes pride of place as not only difficult but crucially important in defining both my personal history and also the history of our great nation, the United States of America.
As I think back upon my time honorably serving the people of Maryland’s 14th District (formerly the 22nd District, now eliminated following a census fraud investigation) in the United States House of Representatives, the memories are overwhelming. They appear as a jumbled kaleidoscope of images, many of them crystal clear, others faded with time, some to such an extent that they are now merely partial recollections for which I do not believe I can be sued for libel, since I am not asserting them as facts but rather as things that might have happened. It would be best, I think, for both myself, my aide Mike McLintock, who assisted me in researching this book, and my readers to take what I am about to tell you here and elsewhere in that spir
it.
The year was 1996. Andrew and I, still comparative newlyweds, were living outside Baltimore while I took a break from my thriving law practice in order to have a baby and Andrew was busy building the ninth or tenth of his many businesses, in this case selling a proprietary technology that allowed users to inject powdered ink into used printer cartridges to prolong their life indefinitely. The product relied on acquiring—in bulk and at a steep discount—syringes that, though perfectly functional, were defective in some minor way so that they could not be used on people.
Andrew is one of those rare individuals who sees opportunities where others see only vulnerabilities. His is a sort of restless intelligence that moves lightning fast from project to project and vulnerability to opportunity. Like so many young people, Andrew and I saw the world as our oyster. For me, the pearl awaiting inside the moist, gray flesh with a faintly mushroom-like aroma was high political office; for Andrew it was the invisible beauty of market efficiencies.
Life, however, as they say, “comes at you,” and, sure enough, just when we seemed to have settled into a comfortable routine and despite many layers of precaution, I became pregnant.
I recall lying there in the hospital with my newborn daughter screaming and clawing at my chest like the title character in the movie Alien and thinking, “Is this all there is? What’s next? What’s next for Selina Meyer?” I resolved right then and there that I would run for Congress and begin the next chapter of my life. I had been many things already: daughter, student, graduate student, lawyer, wife, mother . . . and I had succeeded brilliantly at all of them. But it is in my nature to always strive for more, to look beyond the nearest horizon to the one farther away, and then the one beyond that.