A Woman First- First Woman

by Selina Meyer

  The Capitol is made of marble, some incredible amount of it, too, like five hundred tons, which symbolizes the strength and endurance of our great nation. Like America, marble can never be broken, except by relentless hammering or with a kind of vibrating saw that goes through it like butter.

  On the left side as you face the building (but on the right side if you are looking out from inside it or are outside but facing the back of the building) is the House of Representatives, the B-side to the institution, which has expanded far beyond the space originally alloted to accommodate the representatives of America’s ever-growing population. Listen, I am all for immigration and for Americans having babies, but what it has done to the House chamber is a total disgrace. On the rare occasion there was a rare occasion that all the Congressmen had to attend, such as the State of the Union Address or some kind of ceremonial event, we were crammed in like sardines, and the breath problem, in particular, became extremely acute.

  “A woman’s place is in the House”—you’ve heard that, right? I even used it on my campaign poster, even though it doesn’t quite work—the expression is “a woman’s place is in the home”—but whatever, good enough for a campaign, I suppose. Not too highbrow, just very slightly witty in the way that makes dumb people feel smart when they read it. And, as any politician knows, winning elections is all about dumb people. But here’s the thing: It turns out it’s not true, because I was in the House, and I wanted to get out of there. My dissatisfaction with holding office as a Congresswoman caused a genuine personal crisis. I had reached the promised land and found it wanting. Where could I go next?

  The answer was right in front of me, or rather to the right of me if I were standing in front facing the Capitol or to the left if I was looking at it from behind. That’s right. You guessed it. It was the U.S. Senate.

  Ask yourself, which would you rather have: a job where you have to get elected every two years, you have no power, and there’s more than four hundred gross dweebs and small-town nobodies fighting for attention, or a job as a senator? Like Julius Caesar had before he became Caesar back when he was Julius Senator? I knew I had to get to the Senate, and fast.

  One of the worst aspects of elective office is the “elective” part. You have to run for the godd-mn things, which means you either have to dislodge an incumbent, which is next to impossible, or find an open seat and win it, which, though slightly easier, is still extremly hard. You have to raise money; you have to hire people and recruit volunteers; you have to meet the disgusting voters and talk to some of them; and you have to get the support of the party establishment. Everybody wants something from you, whether it’s influence, loyalty, or just some of your time, and believe me, if you do get elected, they will not be shy about coming to claim it. Still, I knew that the Senate was better than the House, and I didn’t really feel like returning to private life just yet. I mean, sometimes I did, but I’ve always been moody and whimsical, and the important thing is that I know that about myself.

  As luck would have it, at just about the same time as my “get me the f-ck out of here” panic attacks about being stuck in the Hellhole of Representatives were becoming unbearably acute, the senior senator from Maryland, Bobby Esposito, was shot to death by his wife after he had attempted to blame a corruption scandal involving kickbacks for federal infrastructure construction grants on her, and also f-cked her sister. That left an open seat with just a short time to go before Election Day.

  I waited a decent interval to allow the party elders time to come to me and ask me to run, and when they did not, I went to them. I pride myself on a particularly acute sense of emotional intelligence, and from their restless milling around and early departure, I could tell that they were less than enthusiastic about my candidacy. I understood their hesitancy, I really did. I had been in the House for a little over three years and, because of lingering sexism, had not made much of a mark.

  Nevertheless, despite not having their blessing, I went ahead and took all the steps necessary to run, eventually announcing my candidacy at the Glory Hole, a Western saloon-themed bar in Bethesda whose owner had taken a shine to me and had guaranteed me a full house by offering two-for-one backbar shots. The optics were pretty good, at least until things got utterly out of hand, and the subsequent press coverage of the wave of disorderly conduct arrests that followed kept me in the news and the public eye. At least twenty others threw their hats in the ring, which also helped, and when the dust had settled on Election Night, I had beaten the party’s annointed candidate, a lifelong public servant with an extremely lackluster personality, by a handful of votes and won the election with the smallest number of votes in Senate history. Still, I was making history, and that’s what is important.

  The move to the Senate from the House was a comparatively simple one, akin to shifting one’s locker between high school grades. But, though separated only by a long hallway with even more ugly paintings in it, the Senate was a world away from the huddled masses of the House. Cool, clean, and comparatively empty—and mostly off-limits to the press—I still recall breathing my first cleansing lungful of healthy air, untainted by the decay that lingered in the discount dental work of the denizens of the House. The senators, too, were a breed apart. They carried themselves with a certain hauteur that made an immediate impression—a very, very good impression.

  As those who study these things know, the real power in the legislative branch is vested in its various committees. As a junior senator without much in the way of a popular mandate or even prior government experience, I could not be expected to have been appointed to any of the real good ones, like Finance or Intelligence, at least at first. But I also wasn’t expecting what I got, which were Rules and Administration, Small Business Entrepreneurship, Indian Affairs, and Veterans’ Affairs, which anyone could tell were all sh-t committees, not to mention not involving anything I knew or cared about. It looked like the empire of sexist white males had struck back at Selina Meyer, and not for the first (or last) time.

  Still, it was better than being on the Select Committee on Aging, which, frankly, pretty much all the senators I saw were highly qualified for.

  Yet in many respects it was déjá vu all over again. I had obtained something I thought I wanted—membership in the exclusive club of the Senate, sometimes called “the most exclusive club in the world”—and yet once I had gotten admitted, I couldn’t help but think of that club in Ibiza that Andrew and I had gone to one summer during law school, where everyone was insanely attractive and raging on ecstasy, a precurser to MDMA and molly that now seems as quaint as quaaludes. Now that was an exclusive club, and compared to it, the Senate quickly started to seem almost as drab as the House. I attempted to put my nose to the grindstone and feign interest in the affairs of Native Americans and veterans, and looking back on it now, there were a few moments of levity and even, dare I say, fun—if no actual honeymoon—during my first few months in the Senate.

  It’s not widely known, but senators, perhaps by dint of their longer terms and greater job security, are incurable pranksters and cutups who never miss an opportunity to crank call each other, spend a few hours inventing some kind of fake joke bill to try and get others to sign onto, or farting loudly in the “senators only” elevator. And, of course, as has been the case for two centuries or more, the drinking and consequent drunkenness is completely out of control.

  In those days, people would often say to me, “Wow! You have to be really smart to be a senator!” and I guess it’s easy to see why lots of stupid people believe this. Senators often look smart, and on television, though almost never in person, they can sometimes even sound somewhat smart. But are they smart? Most of the time, no. The thing about being a senator as opposed to a mere congressman is that you get a much larger staff budget, meaning that you can hire a bunch of smart people (often for next to nothing) and get them to do the work for you and even take most of the tedious meetings with lobbyists and constituents, leaving you plenty of time to dri
nk and play practical jokes on one another.

  In addition to the larger staff and larger salary, there a few other ways that being a senator is demonstrably better than being a congressman. One of the best perks is the small hideaway office in the Capitol that each senator gets, which eliminates the need to travel on the Capitol’s adorable but breakdown-prone special subway. As the name suggests, it also serves as a “hideaway” from others, and by immemorial custom, a senator is never disturbed in his or her hideaway except in the case of a vote or a bomb threat. I readily adapted to the daily routine while the Senate was in session of napping in my hideaway when not voting or being evacuated. I have always been a napper and still to this day prefer napping to most other activities, but of all the naps I have ever taken in all the many places I have been in my life, none were deeper or more restorative than those I took in the Senate in my hideaway office in the soundproof depths of the Capitol. I can feel my eyes starting to close just thinking about it.

  Don’t get me wrong. The last thing in the world I would want is is to seem cynical about the great work of the United States government and my own part in it. Did I attend hearings while I was in the Senate? I most certainly did. Did I sometimes ask questions during those hearings? Of course. Did I vote on things? You bet. What about bills—did I sponsor any of those? Absolutely. But when all was said and done, I just felt like the Senate was not exactly the right fit for me. The pond had gotten smaller, sure, but I was still just one of a hundred fish and by no means the biggest of those. I still enjoyed governing when I had the chance to do it, but I often felt like the other senators were in my way and preventing me from really being heard on what I thought needed to be done.

  Yet again I found myself asking “Is this all there is?”

  And, yet again, the answer, fortunately, was no.

  * Also known as atari, base, bazooka, beamers, beemers, bebe, bee-bee, berry, bing, bolo, bomb, boulder, boulders, butter, caine, cane, Casper, Casper the ghost, cavvy, chemical, chewies, cloud, cloud nine, crills, crunch and munch, dip, famous dimes, fan, fish scale, fries, fry, glo, golfball, gravel, grit, hail, hamburger helper, hubba, ice cube, kangaroo, kibbles and bits, kibbles, krills, lightem, paste, patico, pebbles, pee wee, pony, raw, ready, ready rocks, redi rocks, roca, rock, rooster, rox, Roxanne, scud, Scotty, scramble, scruples, seven-up, sherm, sherms, sleet, snowballs, stones, teeth, tension, top gun, tweak, ultimate, wash, white cloud, work, yahoo, yay, yayoo, yeah-O, yeyo, yeo, and yuc.

  * Just to be clear, Marshall wasn’t saying or doing any of these things personally but there is no doubt in my mind that he was behind it all.

  * I happen to agree with the second one but that doesn’t make it any less hurtful—in fact it makes it somewhat more so.

  * Illustration missing due to copyright and budget restrictions.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Heartbeat Away—The Vice Presidency

  The telling of the full story of the Meyer vice presidency, complete with historical context, must await the future judgment of historians, in particular the sort of historians who, for some reason, study vice presidencies. I think any sane person would have to wonder what to expect from someone with such a peculiar interest and the sort of self-defeating lack of ambition that would cause them to end up spending their lives in such a dreary intellectual and academic backwater as the study of vice presidents. My greatest anxiety in this regard is that anyone who becomes a distinguished scholar of the vice presidency would be the sort of wiseass who would devote themselves to picking unusual viewpoints and uncommon pursuits as a way of annoying other people and making themselves seem more interesting than they actually are. And, as a result, that they might try to pull some bullsh-t on me. Of course, basic principles of logic dictate that one not complicate explanations beyond necessity, so it’s more probable that a historian of the vice presidency is just a second-rate historian who didn’t have what it takes to be a historian of the presidency.

  Like many of my predecessors in the Rectangular Office, the winding path that led me there started when, having grown increasingly bored and disgusted with the Senate, I decided in the spring of 2011 after a series of conversations with close friends and advisors, to look for something better. Although I had been in the Congress a comparatively brief time, there was, nevertheless, a strong temptation to cash out by taking some sort of lobbying job and getting paid to pester my former colleagues. The problem is that—because I tend to be discriminating in my friendships and was never part of the back-slapping, bottom-pinching, hooker-punching culture that prevails in Washington’s good old boys’ club—I was not sure that I would have an open door when, as an outsider, I returned to lobby. Also, as an officeholder, I had become adept at avoiding lobbyists (who are almost as big a nuisance as constituents) and was worried that, once the tables were turned, I might be similarly avoided by others.

  Plus, well, lobbying simply isn’t “me.” I’ve never been one to beg, to plead, to go cap in hand to others to ask for favors or special treatment. And, as is well known, lobbyists sell their services to the highest bidder just like prostitutes and, increasingly, really good electricians, at least if you want them to work on a weekend.

  On the other hand, the money was good, and that was a particularly important consideration at this time in my life. I had recently become a single mom when, after twenty or so years of marriage, Andrew and I had agreed to separate, reasonably amicably. Like millions of other Americans, Andrew, he and I had learned, suffers from a disease, specifically, an addiction, more specifically, an addiction to sex, and most specifically, an addiction to sex with women who are not his wife. I am not one of those old-fashioned women who considers a husband’s occasional whoopsie to be unforgivable. In fact, as a thoroughly modern woman with contemporary attitudes, I understand that men (and women!) have certain needs that they may wish to gratify outside the marital bedchamber, so to speak. A steady, stable relationship with a discreet, age-appropriate woman who was more willing to do certain kinds of things in bed and elsewhere than a wife might be even if she had once been willing to do them back in the early days of their relationship—well, I think nine out of ten wives would regard that sort of arrangement as acceptable, even desirable, as long as the woman had no designs on actually marrying the husband and having additional children with him, which might dilute the inheritance of any children from the first marriage, no matter how unworthy of inheriting anything they were.

  Unfortunately, as with so many of his other business dealings, Andrew seemed unable to successfully come to an understanding with the sort of worldly and attractive-but-not-too-attractive mistress of the kind that are generally considered acceptable in this day and age. And, also as with his many businesses, he seemed unable to govern his impulses and enthusiasms and took up and discarded lovers at a dizzying pace to such an extent that these outside relationships often overlapped. Quite frequently, I would learn about them because of some kind of jealous spat between two or more of his girlfriends, which would require the intervention of the police and yet another implausible cover story as to why Andrew had a black eye or most of his hair burned off.

  Like many young fathers, Andrew had an insatiable weakness for nannies and au pairs. Of course, one doesn’t have to be some sort of bullsh-t psychologist or social scientist to figure out why. A young, nubile caregiver living under the same roof while the baby’s mother is coping with the horror and depression that comes with giving birth is, of course, going to be sexually attractive. I never made the mistake of breast-feeding, as some women do, but, as I waited patiently and then impatiently for my milk to dry up, I will admit that the discomfort that God had decided to punish me with for having a child may have made me somewhat irritable.

  And so, when Andrew proposed the notion of a live-in au pair, I was receptive, imagining a Mary Poppins type who could take the screaming baby far away to dance on a rooftop or something. Andrew being Andrew, after considerable internet research, found instead an ag
ency that specialized in Scandinavian girls and that included a photograph and their measurements in the list of their qualifications. Liberal attitudes toward sexual matters have prevailed in those countries for centuries because, frankly, what else is there to do?

  Andrew’s recruiting of Scandinavian au pairs led to a half-dozen Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish teenagers (plus one Icelandic girl, but I’m not sure if she counts) taking advantage of him. No sooner would I fire one than the agency would send another, even more attractive, to take her place. It was undoubtedly during this period when we were on the “Au Pair Train” when Andrew’s sex addiction took root, and for that I will always blame myself a bit. By the time we had realized the nature of the problem and spent some time coming up with solutions, he was perhaps too far gone. An affair with Rosa, the sixty-three-year-old El Salvadoran woman we had hired to put an end to the cycle of temptation and giving into temptation that the Scandinavian girls had initiated, was the last straw. I told Andrew that he had to leave and that he could take Rosa with him, as long as she had finished the ironing. To this day, Andrew maintains that Rosa was the only woman he ever really loved. Other than me, of course.

  So, there I was, bored out of my skull in the stupid Senate, feeling that special kind of disappointment you have when you expect something to be great and everything you’ve always wanted and it turns out instead to be Suck City. And yet lobbying seemed equally if not more disgusting. What about teaching? Don’t make me laugh. And yet, I did need to earn some sort of a living because my mother, a notorious cheapskate, had declined to provide me with any sort of support in the form of even a modest trust or allowance. Faced with this sh-t smorgasbord of unpleasant options, I chose the least unappealing one: running for president.