A Woman First- First Woman

by Selina Meyer

  On the one hand, of course, being elected president is every schoolboy’s and many schoolgirls’ dream. You get to live in the White House and fly on Air Force One and everyone has to be polite to you, blah, blah, blah. But on the other hand, you can’t just become president by wishing for it; you have to campaign for the godd-mn office. And that means getting out and meeting (bad), listening to (worse), and touching (worst of all) lots and lots of ordinary Americans. The formal structure of campaigning requires you to stand up and ask people for something—their vote—which they consider valuable but which you, in thinking about the millions of votes it takes to be elected, regard as almost totally worthless. In exchange for this thing they consider important and you consider pathetically insignificant (I’m just being honest here), they expect you to take a sincere interest in their problems. Actually, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t even think they care much more about what you think of them than you care what they think of you. They just want someone—anyone—to listen to them hold forth on some pet peeve or theory, and since their grandkids have long ago stopped taking their calls (one thing you learn very quickly when you run for elective office is that all likely voters, regardless of politics or party, are old), they swarm like fire ants to attack the only available target and one that, because of our flawed system, is exceptionally vulnerable to their form of self-centered malice: politicians running for office.

  Having run for office before, I embarked upon my presidential campaign with my eyes wide open as far as having to deal with gross, unpleasant voters went. And I had confronted the brutal calculus that every presidential candidate faces, which is that, having developed various coping mechanisms for dealing with the electorate in one’s own district or state, as a presidential candidate one must make a personal face-to-face appeal to mouth-breathers in all forty-eight real states,* or at least a significant subset of them.

  So why bother, you may well wonder. Why spend any time on so-called (and extremely appropriately named) retail politics if every single one of the people you try and humor is going to just spew stupid nonsense about their own problems and do so with my least favorite aromatic accompaniment: bad breath?†

  The reason candidates put themselves through the ordeal of interacting with voters is quite simple, and in this case, at least initially, it played very much to my advantage. I’m speaking, of course, of the media.

  I have nothing but the utmost respect for the fourth estate. I firmly believe that a free press is essential to good government and, indeed, to a properly functioning democracy. This is not to say that I have always felt fairly treated by the media. But I have also always tried to look at the matter of press coverage from the press’ point of view. It must be an abject misery to have to come up with something new to write every day about a situation that mostly stays the same. I mean, can you imagine how boring it would be to be a reporter or journalist and try to arrange the same two dozen words into different stories day after day, week after week? This is why I think the best people don’t go into journalism and why, if they do, they don’t go into political journalism but become, instead, movie critics, which enables them to watch a lot of movies for free or, at least, to expense them.

  In this case, though, the political press—prematurely exhausted by yet another primary season of dishwater-dull white men scrambling over one another in an unseemly fashion to try and distance themselves from Washington and run, during the primary, as outside-the-Beltway mavericks—turned to me as a welcome breath of fresh air or, at the very least, as something new to write about.

  As it happened, I had declared my candidacy without really intending to. The preponderance, yet again, of white male candidates had inspired The Hill, one of Washington’s confusingly unprofitable news outlets, to come up with a list of “outside the box” candidates for the presidency consisting almost entirely of women and minorities and a few people who I guess were gay and maybe not terribly happy about being singled out for being gay in this particular way. To a man—and woman and whatever—they all declared in the mini interview that accompanied their listing in the article that they did not intend to run for president—at least, not in the near future. Ha ha, wink emoji. This is, I guess, what you are supposed to do if you actually do intend to run for president someday in the future but are trying to dog-whistle everyone about what a smart and shrewd politician you are while also appearing to be modest and devoted to doing whatever job you have at present with utmost dedication.

  And that may be all well and good for that type of conventional schemer. In my case, the reporter from The Hill had reached me at a bad time on a bad day when I was having trouble reaching the physician who had prescribed my antianxiety medication for a refill and when I had had to bring Catherine to the office and delegate some staff members to take care of her. As I recall, she was missing Rosa and making a god-awful racket when, having dodged the reporter for a week, I accidentally took the call, thinking it was my doctor who had a similar name. In answer to what was probably a playful question about whether I would ever want to be president, I responded somewhat testily, but also, I thought, in the playful spirit of the question, that anything would be better than being a senator where you didn’t even have your own doctor or your own butler or your own airplane, for God’s sake. The article ran the next day as “Senator’s White House Run,” and considering how dumb the whole Senate thing had turned out to be, it seemed pointless to deny it.

  As luck would have it, the Senate was in the midst of one of its periodic procedural crises over the rules governing the filibuster, which, between us, I’d always considered just a chance for senators to sniff each other’s f-rts while patting each other on the back for their bipartisan restraint. There’s a lot of stupid sh-t like that in the Senate that’s supposed to make it more gentlemanly and statesmanlike than that greased pig rodeo next door in the House, but all those stupid customs always seemed to me like just a chance for senators to relax by exercising an opportunity to show that they didn’t believe in anything in particular.

  Anyway, whether or not some bill or appointment or other would be filibustered and whether the opposing party would respect the filibuster was the topic du jour, though looking back on it now, I can’t recall even the slightest detail. That’s going to be something for those vice scholars of the vice presidency to figure out. My comments in The Hill about how lame the Senate was were seen not as reflecting my frustration with a lack of medication or childcare but rather with the partisan gridlock that, yet again, had ground the nation’s business to a standstill. Media outlets on the left and right took up my banner as the woman willing to shake things up in Washington. My poll numbers soared, and the establishment front-runners began to look over their shoulders at the fast-approaching political dynamo from right out of nowhere.

  Me.

  I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun to go from sitting in (or, more often, skipping) hearings on the seemingly intractable and endless problems of Native Americans and veterans to suddenly being skyrocketed to Washington’s A++ list. The press sorted through my few public statements on the issues and, since I had made so few public statements, generally liked what they saw. What I will now admit was my genuine ignorance or naivete in my questioning of witnesses at Senate hearings was treated as a sort of brilliant Columbo-like fake ignorance or fake naivete. Some of my catchphrases, like “Maybe you covered this earlier” or “Remind me again who you are” were enshrined in some of the first internet memes as statements by cats, honey badgers, and, for some reason, a still picture of JonBenét Ramsey. Among the headlines of the time were “Might It Be ‘President Meyer’?” and “Is This Meyer’s Moment?” (that was a cover of Time, a newsmagazine, which is a type of news thing of the period—a very big deal, I can assure you).

  Still, even to me, it seemed a little fast and, well, soon. For one thing, I simply didn’t have the seasoned, well-qualified staff a viable candidate needs, having hired mostly dono
rs’ kids to work in my Senate office. And the whole “woman who speaks her mind” thing would only get me so far when someone asked me a detailed question about, you know, foreign affairs or, well, domestic affairs. To assist me, I hired Amy Brookheimer, a young woman of a type particular to federal politics who has subjugated her entire ego to that of a politician with the rationale that somehow her sacrifice serves a higher purpose either in terms of her ultimate career goals or the nation as a whole. What women like this (and they are mostly women) don’t realize is that some people just aren’t, if you will, officer material, and a readiness to abase yourself as a slave to another person is certain proof that you’re never going anywhere except to becoming a different kind of slave. (Amy, if you are reading this, I’m sorry if it offends you, but you need to hear it from someone, even if it’s by reading a book rather than in person.) Amy was by no means the best nor most qualified of this type of Beltway Bachelorette, but she was available and a little above mediocre.

  And then, just as quickly as it had started, the whole “Selina Surge” was over. Because I had given them little to work with, the gnatlike attention of the media returned to the horse race among the front-runners and without any ability to raise funds to run ads in primary states, my numbers sank below the margin of error.

  But still I didn’t give up.

  In the course of my rapid rise to national prominence, I had learned something about myself: I preferred the larger stage. In fact, I felt as though I were made for it. So, having appeared on Meet the Press and Face the Nation when my star was at its zenith, I now said yes to any TV or radio show that would provide me with some free media. Along the way, I also picked up some basic skills for dealing with the press that I probably should have learned a long time ago.

  Former president and current Supreme Court justice Stuart Hughes is, as everyone knows, an affable ward heeler of the old school who came up through the ranks of the Chicago party machine. As governor of Michigan, he had forged bonds with key constituencies: public and private sector unions, manufacturers and large service sector employers, activist and civil rights groups, the civically engaged elite, the bottle-of-scotch-in-the-bottom-file-cabinet-drawer print media, and, of course, the party rank-and-file, thanks to his Rotarian good nature in public and vicious back-stabbing in private. Despite this, his reputation as a “good guy” and “someone you’d want to have a beer with” or “someone you’d want to have help you bury a body” had survived unblemished. With solid support from the donor class, Hughes emerged as the front-runner at a perfectly timed moment and seemed destined to sail to the White House even if he had picked Jeffrey Dahmer as his running mate.

  If Stuart Hughes had any sort of an Achilles’ heel, it was his wife, Edna, called “Eddie” for short. When Hughes was a mere governor, it was easy enough for him to keep Eddie under wraps up in her room in the governor’s mansion watching Law & Order reruns and sobering up once a year in springtime to cut the ribbon for the annual Governor’s Easter Egg Hunt. But once Hughes became a candidate for president, there was the usual clamor to know more about his wife and for him to show her off more in public. The more that his staff stressed that she was an “extremely private person,” the louder the gossip grew that she was a complete nutcase or dead.

  Her few attempts at public appearances ended abruptly with him hustling her offstage or pushing her away from a microphone and, like clockwork, the articles began to emerge wondering if Hughes’s treatment of his wife indicated that he had a “woman problem” and, despite his fine words, whether he wasn’t just another instrument or even exponent of the patriarchy.

  And so Hughes came to me, or to be completely accurate, I came to him, because the meeting was in a nondescript hotel room in Lansing, Michigan, a city that has nothing but nondescript hotels. Still, I feel like he really came to me.

  He began by letting me know that he was considering a number of possible running mates and thought that he should meet with me, purely as a courtesy. He asked me where I stood on various issues and seemed very favorably impressed when it quickly became clear that I had few, if any, opinions about anything or, if I did, I wasn’t going to waste time explaining them to a fathead like Stuart Hughes. What the h-ll? At this point, I had little to lose, and I had already seen the value, even if it was just temporary, of standing out from the crowd in order to capture the media’s attention. I made it clear to Hughes that I wasn’t interested in anything less than a virtual co-presidency, with my full participation in every aspect of the president’s ordinary and extraordinary work.

  At the end of our meeting, Hughes told me that, thanks to my plain-speaking, I was now number three on his list of potential running mates. I told him that he could suck my cl-t and that I wasn’t interested in posing next to a fossil for the next five months, even if it did make me look young. He seemed to like that, as well, and five months later I found myself standing on the stage at the Milwaukee Convention Center holding hands aloft with Stuart Hughes as his anointed running mate. Life is funny.

  Sure, running for vice president seemed like a little bit of an anticlimax, but having come in fairly short order from the Senate and, before that, the House, it did seem as though I had been catapulted to the big leagues, with Secret Service protection, gaggles of reporters, and a specially designated bathroom wherever I went. Yet along with all the pomp went surprisingly little circumstance. As is the case for the actual vice president, there really is very little for a candidate for vice president to do other than show up at campaign events and press some disgusting flesh. The beauty part was that the Hughes team quickly decided that I had a special affinity, given my upbringing, for large net worth donors, so elegant and exclusive events in private homes or country clubs quickly replaced visits to diners, factory floors, and union halls. The sole vice presidential debate between me and my opponent, Colonel Abraham Buttrick, consisted mostly of his extended recounting of his time as a POW in Vietnam and the terrible things that were done to him during it, which I was too respectful of the sacrifices of our brave men and women in uniform to interrupt but which didn’t seem to help his side much.

  Hughes and I won, of course. On Election Night, I reminded Hughes of his pledge that I would have an open line to him, that I would be a key player in all important decisions, and that we would, for all intents and purposes, be co-presidents.

  I never saw him again.

  * As brutal as our current system is, no one takes Hawaii or Alaska seriously, although that day may one day come and, if it does, God help the presidential contenders then.

  † To return to the topic of bad breath for just a sec, I want to explain for the benefit of posterity that the reason so many politicians appear to grimace in photographs when they are listening to the opinions of voters is that, because the environment of rallies and rope lines is often a noisy one, you have to draw very close to another person to hear what they have to say. And very often that person will have bad breath, either because they are old or because they live in some semicivilized part of the country that, thanks to our syphilitic forefathers, has more votes in the electoral college than they remotely deserve, or just because they’re the type of weirdo who would show up at a political rally in the first place.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Second in Command

  Of course, that’s an exaggeration. But not much of one.

  I did see President Hughes at our inauguration. We went through the standard routine, taking the oaths of office and then standing in the cold while a seemingly endless parade of military nonsense goes past. Inaugurations are pretty much all the same: a black woman sings a hymn, a choir from the president’s home state performs a patriotic song, and if you’re lucky no one recites a poem. As the first woman vice president, I also achieved another equally remarked-upon “first” when I attended my inauguration as a single woman, despite Andrew having made an enthusiastic attempt to reconcile so that he could attend and, in his words, “make some excellent connections
.” Having been to the inauguration, I can say that had he attended, he probably would have been sorely disappointed by the quality of the networking. Most of the invited guests were just dull government people and foreign dignitaries and, as for the members of the general public who were there, I ask you, who in their right mind would attend a presidential inauguration if they didn’t absolutely have to?

  I took the oath of office on our family Bible, which had been hastily purchased for the occasion at a Georgetown used bookstore. If I had still had a husband, I supposed he would have held the Bible but, since I didn’t, I had asked my daughter, Catherine, then nineteen years old, to do it, and as usual, she let me down. My longtime assistant, Gary Walsh, had purchased a tasteful and flattering pale rose wool Oscar de la Renta dress with a matching coat and hat for her to wear. But Catherine being Catherine, she threw a fit and declared that the dress “wasn’t her” and that she “hated it.” I made it clear that she had no choice in the matter, but somehow she managed to change into a flowery, hippie-ish Betsey Johnson dress that was not only entirely inappropriate for such a dignified occasion but also much too light for the blustery, twenty-eight-degree weather. Catherine’s uncontrollable shivering caused the Bible to shake so much that I barely managed to get through the oath without her dropping it. Way to go, Catherine!

  After I told Catherine to go and wait in the car, I posed for the obligatory official photos with Hughes and Edna, his heavily medicated wife. And here I learned an interesting thing. You’ve probably observed, like I have, that people on these formal occasions often have a bit of small talk that appears to amuse all parties when they greet each other. One person says something to the other and then everyone smiles and laughs. And that’s exactly what happened with Hughes and me at our inauguration. Hughes approached, smiled, and asked me “what’s the best part about sex with twenty-eight-year-olds?” When I looked a bit confused, he continued, “There are twenty of them!” In the nine or ten other times we met during the three years I served as his vice president, he repeated this joke every time. I never learned whether it was something special he did just for me or whether that was his opener with everyone. I was present when Hughes welcomed the pope to America. Hughes, a Catholic, kissed his ring and then said something to him that no one else could hear and they both smiled and laughed. I have no way of knowing if it was the joke about sex with eight-year-olds, but the pope always seemed like an incorrigible pederast, so I’d bet good money that it was.