A Woman First- First Woman

by Selina Meyer

  And so, my irrepressible spirit sought a new challenge and, sure enough, found one. As is so often the case in life, this new opportunity was right outside my front door, staring me, as it were, in the face. And though some might have deemed it Quixotic, for me the question was not “Can I do it?” but rather “How can I live with myself if I do not?”

  Conrad Boyle had represented the 14th Congressional District of Maryland for thirty-two terms and was now approaching his ninetieth year. While many of Conrad’s supporters insisted that he had not lost a step, there were others—though out of respect for his long service they were not vocal about it—who felt otherwise. During his final two decades in the House, he had become known for highly eccentric interrogations of witnesses during Congressional hearings, principally on personal issues such as how much they weighed (he believed that he could reliably guess someone’s weight to within a pound), what sort of car they drove, and the names of their pets. He would claim that these seemingly unrelated details could help him determine if the witnesses were telling the truth or, in the case of nominees for political office, whether they were suited to be undersecretaries or ambassadors. But after a time, his colleagues on both sides of the aisle wearied of Boyle’s hectoring, feeling that he tended to derail the momentum of hearings with his bizarre lines of questioning.

  Though many believed it was time for him to go, no one seemed willing to make a decisive move against a legislator with Boyle’s seniority—especially one who had served as a Navy cook in the Aleutian Islands during World War II and was always ready to roll up his pant leg to show off the scar from an war wound he had received while attempting to use a cooking pot as a kind of a water ski—and so it was that he died in the midst of an extended and rather heated discussion with a nominee for a federal judgeship about two dogs he owned that, despite being different breeds, had very similar names.

  With Election Day just weeks away, there was an immediate mad scramble to succeed Congressman Boyle. The oddsmakers predicted that either Boyle’s wife or son would inherit his seat, but since the son was in his mid-seventies and his wife was in her early twenties, age was an issue for both potential candidates.

  The first step in any campaign is to put together a team of “wise men” (or women!) to serve as counselors and also, one hopes, donors. For advice, I turned first to my “rabbi,” the senior partner in my law firm, Abe Blumfeld. As always, Abe was refreshingly candid. He told me that while he would be more than happy to arrange a leave of absence for me from the law firm, he did not think I had what he called a “Chinaman’s Chance” of winning in the primary, much less the general election. “Bubbeleh,” he said, “Come and sit on my lap.” After I had settled myself, he went on, “Those goyische schmucks want a mensch to vote for, someone they can have a beer with. You, you’re like a little china doll. Have you seen the women who go into politics?” And then he spat. “They’re like dogs! Disgusting, every single one of them. They look like they smell! What’s this?” This last question was in reference to a roll of postpartum fat on my stomach that he was pinching.

  As I left Abe’s office, I faced my first real moment of doubt. Was I simply too attractive for politics? Abe had declined to make a campaign contribution, saying that he was giving me something even more precious: good advice. But as we all know, campaigns run on money the way cars run on gasoline. Good advice is more like windshield-wiper fluid or maybe that deodorizing liquid that you sometimes see on the dashboard in taxis. Facing this stern reality, after addressing my primary responsibility by hiring a wonderful caregiver, Inez or, maybe, Carmen, for my baby, who was proving to be quite a handful already, I began what would become the familiar routine of pounding the pavement asking for money.

  For the next seven months, I knocked on hundreds of doors, made thousands of phone calls, and sat on countless laps. If I had ever had any fear of rejection, I learned to get over it in a hurry. I also quickly came to appreciate the truth of what Abe had told me about the voters’ need to relate to politicians both as ordinary “people like them” and as godlike superhumans—haughty and beautiful and with an unconcealed disdain for people whom they viewed as “not as good” as they were, which was pretty much everyone.

  I had the second part down. But I struggled to “relate” to people who were so different from those I had grown up with, gone to college with, raced yachts against, and come out with at debutante parties. First of all, there was the problem of their ugly houses with weird smells and their terrible taste in décor, clothing, and hairstyles. Campaigning door to door was truly an eye-opening experience, or really more often an “eye-closing” experience for me because that is usually what I wanted to do as soon as I got a peek inside the front door: close my eyes.

  There are, as I rapidly learned, a few simple tricks for successful campaigning. The easiest one is to replace the word “horrible” with the word “delicious.” For example, if you feel an impulse to exclaim, “Good Lord, what a horrible smell!” you instead say, “Good Lord, what a delicious smell!” If you, being perhaps a more subtle, interrogative type of person, feel inclined to ask, “Oh, my God, what is that horrible smell?” you instead ask, “Oh, my God, what is that delicious smell?” It even sometimes works for non-olfactory issues, as in “Look at those delicious children!” or “I can truly say that I cannot recall when I have had a more delicious experience.”

  The problem with the horrible/delicious switcheroo (and also why I don’t mind telling you about it, even though you might be inclined to steal it to use yourself), is that sometimes when you tell someone that their cooking smells delicious, they will offer you some of whatever they are cooking. And then you’ll really be up a certain well-known creek. In those cases, there is only one recourse: to claim to be allergic to whatever is being cooked. To this day, on certain blocks in Baltimore, I am known in one house as “the lady who is allergic to stew” and right next door as “the lady who is allergic to our national dish made from rotten seafood.”

  Funny story: While a conversation about food and cooking may seem like a good ice-breaker with the kind of people who can’t afford to go to restaurants, there are times when it has the opposite effect. Back in those pre-crystal meth days, in certain neighborhoods, sometimes what was cooking wasn’t even food at all, but rather crack cocaine.

  Although it has since faded from popularity, crack cocaine* was once all the rage, especially in places like inner-city Baltimore, part of which lay in my district. By way of a quick refresher, I should explain that to make crack cocaine, you mix powder cocaine with water and a base such as ammonium bicarbonate, ammonium carbonate, or, most typically because it is so readily available, sodium bicarbonate, which is otherwise known as baking soda. When heated, the mixture liquifies with the freebase cocaine forming an oily layer on top. The layer can be skimmed off and, once cooled and dried, it can be rolled into a crack cocaine “rock” that has the appearance and consistency of hard plastic.

  The great advantage of crack over powder cocaine is that the drugs reach the bloodstream faster when smoked than snorted, as powder cocaine is. The addition of the baking powder and the cooking process also serve to increase the potency and purity of the drug, and some believe that it also acts as a sort of “Hamburger Helper” by turning a small amount of powder cocaine into a rather larger amount of “rock.”

  The downside of crack cocaine, of course, is that cooking it can be a very smelly process indeed and that, while the smell is sharp and pungent, it does not really resemble a cooking odor but rather that of a dry-cleaning shop with very poor ventilation. I’m sure many readers are already a bit ahead of me in seeing the problem that this created for me as a novice campaigner. Having made my “horrible/delicious” substitution process second nature—almost a reflex—I would sometimes impulsively tell voters who were cooking crack and not food that I thought it smelled “delicious,” which they would understandably think was a rather broad hint that I wanted some.

  I have never
been one to judge others, so I will simply say that I’ve never developed much of a taste for crack, but if others have, well, more power to them. But after offering my standard demurrer I quickly became known in certain households and crack dens as “the woman who is allergic to crack.”

  There were many times in that first campaign when it seemed like we were barely managing to keep our heads above water. Despite a tremendous effort on my part, we still had not managed to raise much money outside of the crack-dealing community, which had adopted me as a sort of pet. What money we did raise was quickly consumed by our expenses. My husband, Andrew, bought an Alfa Romeo sports car that he thought would save us time and enable us to make more campaign stops by virtue of its speed and maneuverability. Unfortunately, it proved to be a delicate machine, and Andrew was often away coping with the latest breakdown. Also, since it was a two-seater, even on the rare occasions it was working, the rest of my team was obliged to follow in Mike McLintock’s 1977 Chevy Caprice station wagon, which he had purchased in college.

  Mike loved that darn car.

  They say that there are as many different kinds of love as there are words for love: adore . . . and others. Mike loved that station wagon the way you can love an ugly dog or a wayward child. He loved it for its virtues, sure: It was reliable, the backseats folded down to create enough space to carry an adult’s bicycle, and it had a working cigarette lighter. But he also loved it for its flaws: It was unreliable, it would not start on especially cold days or especially warm days, and a previous owner had spilled a large quantity of milk in it, which had soaked into the carpet under one of the seats with predictable consequences.

  At American University, Mike had been what’s known as a “joiner,” participating in intramural sports teams, social service organizations, and as many religious groups as there are religions. A strapping six-footer with a full head of ginger-red hair, Mike was regarded by men and women alike as a person of exceptional charm. Though not conventionally handsome, his warm and sensitive manner and a genuine interest in others won him countless friends and, by his senior year, the exalted post of class secretary, charged with recording the official minutes at meetings of the class president, vice president, and other officers.

  It was through this early experience in college government that Mike caught the “politics bug.” When he learned through a friend that Selina Meyer was looking for a real go-getter to join her communications team, he jumped at the opportunity even though, because it was an unpaid position, he was forced to continue working at his temporary job as a short-order cook at Bubba’s Subs, a popular local sandwich shop. Though he found holding down both positions exhausting, he had negotiated a sweet deal with Amir, Bubba’s owner, to use the storeroom as a makeshift residence of sorts in exchange for ten additional hours of unpaid work every week. By putting a camp bed between two shelves laden with large cans, bottles, and boxes of condiments (the actual primary ingredients for the sandwiches, mainly cold cuts of different types, were stored in a large walk-in refrigerator that would have been dangerous to sleep in though arguably much quieter), I was able to make for myself a cozy redoubt, a word the meaning of which I have never entirely understood and still don’t to this very day.

  Did you ever notice how you always wind up giving those great old cars you love a special name? A blue car might be “Bluey,” a brown car might be “Brownie” or “Brown Car.” While Mike never actually got around to naming his station wagon before the malfunctioning cigarette lighter caused it to burst into flames, it was very much the sort of car you would give a name to, if that gives you any idea of the kind of car it was.

  Although my many years in politics have been by and large a blessing, I would be doing a disservice both to the reading public (though the reading public and other egghead types have often disappointed me on Election Day) and posterity if I did not concede that there have occasionally been dark clouds surrounding some of the silver linings. The most persistent and most damaging of these are sexism and misogyny. While I was aware, of course, that these things existed, I had largely been spared the full brunt of them in my legal career, where many of my co-workers treated me much like Abe Blumfeld did—as a beautiful and delicate china doll to be nurtured and stroked and hugged and cuddled, not in any way abused or taken advantage of. Sure, call it sexist if you like (my male colleagues only rarely got compliments on their legs, breasts, or rear ends) but it was the kind and gentle sexism of bygone days that I think most women, even, you know, certain annoying “modern” types, would find flattering and even nurturing.

  But during that first campaign, I was to learn that sexism can sometimes have a dark side. In my case, this came in the form of the vicious smear tactics that my opponent, Porter Marshall, leveled against me. He began by attacking my summa cum laude degree from Smith, claiming that, instead, I had not actually graduated from Smith because I still owed a paper or two and that, had I graduated, it certainly would not have been with honors of any kind. He went on to cast aspersions on my law degree by pointing out that since I hadn’t actually graduated from Smith, I must have lied on my law school application. He told people that, contrary to what was asserted in my official biography, instead of being on the law review at Yale Law School, I had, in fact, not been on the law review. He threw everything but the kitchen sink at me, using all the ugly little tricks men have employed for centuries to keep women down. He crowed about my having had to take the bar exam so many times, on how few actual clients I had and how rarely I had prevailed in court, and most underhanded of all, he convinced the Baltimore Sun to run an article about my DUIs and featuring a very unflattering mug shot.*

  The fact that everything he was saying was true did not make it any less disgusting, any less insulting, and any less an affront to the standards of dignity and civilized discourse that have been a hallmark of American political engagement ever since that overrated play about how Burr shot Hamilton first premiered on Broadway. This double standard worked against me. If a man had been running and his opponent brought up his DUIs, it would have counted as a positive, especially if the candidate was a Kennedy. But in my case, people were all “women can’t hold their liquor” and “women are so much less attractive than men when they’re drunk.”*

  To say that this first bruising encounter with the proverbial “Old Boys’ Club” was a wake-up call would be an understatement. Andrew, chivalrous as always, wanted to hunt Porter Marshall down and, in his words, “punch him in that stupid matinee-idol handsome face of his” and “punch his f-cking face” and “punch that f-cking guy.” Andrew never got the opportunity but I, too, resolved to fight back. In politics one is constantly faced with the difficult choice of whether to take the high road or the low road. Sadly, as our political norms have collapsed and the discourse has coarsened thanks to that Hamilton play, many politicians have fought their campaigns in the mud of the low road, and it is hard not to believe that, as a society, we are very much the poorer for it.

  At first glance, there were no visible chinks in Marshall’s armor. A self-made multimillionaire who had married his high school sweetheart while he was working his way through college on a football scholarship and now had a picture-perfect family with three children, one of whom had special needs (which is solid gold from a political standpoint. My daughter, Catherine, had many many special needs, especially a need for attention, but none of her needs were “special” in the special way that helps a candidate, which is just so typical of her), Marshall was poised and personable. He was also a veteran who had received the Silver Star for bravery, was a regular churchgoer who taught Sunday School, and had devoted countless hours to the community through various good works and acts of selfless public service. Plus, he had built a dozen orphanages in Haiti, one of which, Grace de Dieu Children’s Home in Carrefour, had won “Orphanage of the Year” for three years running at the annual Haitian Orphanage Awards, or “Haities,” as they are known. And he had graduated first in his class from Harvard Law S
chool where, unlike me, he had also been the for-real editor of the law review. We had hoped that he had made the law review thing up like I had, but we checked and he had in fact been the editor. And he was a teetotaler. We tried attacking him on the grounds that this made him boring and not the kind of person you would like to “have a beer with” because, since he didn’t drink beer, you would be having a beer by yourself while he drank some Gatorade or maybe an Arnold Palmer, which is half lemonade and half iced tea. But no sale. Moreover, he had two decades of experience as a special aide to the governor, where he had worked with governors of both parties to make government run more smoothly and be more responsive to the needs of Maryland’s citizens. In this capacity, he had balanced the state budget and created a business-friendly environment that caused Maryland’s economy to grow by a remarkable 15 percent per annum on average, all while expanding social services. For this work, he had accepted a token salary of $1 a year, which he made a little show of donating to the United Way. What’s more, he had three rescue dogs, all extremely friendly golden retrievers that he brought with him on all his campaign appearances. I had a dog, too, but mine was a purebred shih tzu, Charlie Chan Chinky Chinky Chinaman, or “Charlie” as we called him, and we found that, despite having won Best of Breed at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show earlier that year, Charlie did not take readily to the campaign trail, snarling and biting passers-by, especially children in strollers. To this day, I refuse to believe that Charlie did not like children. I am certain that it was the noisy, rolling, sometimes rusty strollers that scared him and, for that, who can blame him?

  I won’t lie to you. The fruitless quest to find ways to attack Porter Marshall was one of the most frustrating episodes in my early political career. For the life of us, we could not find any mud to throw at the guy, and if we had found any, we weren’t at all sure it would stick.