by Selina Meyer
As every school child—or at least every schoolchild who is not at a sh-tty inner city public school—knows, one of the vice president’s weighty responsibilities is to preside as the president of the Senate, which means that every so often you get to break a tie (woo-hoo!) but also that once a year, you welcome the actual president to the Senate to deliver the State of the Union address. So I would see Hughes then (and learn anew what was so great about sex with twenty eight-year-olds) and now and again at something like a pope-welcoming. But otherwise, the partnership I had been promised never materialized. Yet again, I was being reminded that everyone had it out for Selina Meyer, and if she was going to accomplish anything, she was going to have to do it entirely on her own.
John Nance Garner, who was vice president at some point, famously described the job as “not worth a pitcher of warm p-ss.” In my stock speech as vice president, I would open with this quote and then quip, “Well, at least it was warm!” That always got a laugh or a chuckle or a favorably disposed silence, even though, between us, I have no idea what I was talking about. There’s no reason that warm p-ss would be that much worse than cold p-ss, and it would probably be considerably better than scalding hot p-ss.
I resolved on my first day in my office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a drafty Victorian pile next door to the White House, fittingly named after our dullest president, that I would try my darndest to make the vice presidency worth more than a warm pitcher of p-ss. Much more! I was young, I was shapely, and I was determined. After reviewing the many areas of interest that had occupied my time in the House and Senate, I decided that my first big signature effort would be to start a Clean Jobs Initiative, a partnership between business, labor, academia, and government to encourage the creation of well-paying jobs in the alternative energy sector and other environmentally forward-looking businesses. To kick it off, I decided to recruit a task force of leaders in all these fields who could identify some marquee projects that were shovel-ready so that we could make a splash quickly and get the attention of the media and generate excitement among the general public.
And here I had my first experience of running into the brick wall that President Hughes and his advisors had seemingly built around me. Somehow, every move I made, every plan I wanted to announce, every person I wanted to consult bumped up against something they were doing already but hadn’t had the courtesy to tell me about. I can’t say for certain that his team was doing it deliberately, although they were. After six or seven thwarted efforts, I figured out what was going on. Underneath his avuncular, hail-fellow-well-met exterior, Hughes, like so many politicians, was vain, petty, and vindictive. He just couldn’t bear the idea that I would steal a tiny corner of the limelight from him for even a second. When he allowed me to do anything at all, it was only to gather up the most humiliating and trivial crumbs from under his table. The events he sent me to as his surrogate were always so stupid that, by sending me, he seemed to be making a statement about how unimportant they were. It can be difficult to be placed in social or diplomatic situations in which your very presence is intended as a calculated insult. That’s how I saw it, and I’m sure that many of the audiences I appeared before felt the same way. Some clearly didn’t, but the level of enthusiasm shown by D-listers was its own sort of insult, in this case to me. “What kind of weirdo would want to be liked by these people?” I often asked myself.
As a senator, I had had some experience with the filibuster, an arcane procedure by which a few senators could use Senate rules and customs to thwart the will of the majority. It seemed pretty crazy to me—or, at least, very confusing—and I never quite got the hang of it. As president of the Senate, as well as a former senator, reforming the Senate’s procedures seemed like a natural sphere of activity for me. A few months into my first year, I had a bill drafted for filibuster reform that quickly gathered a large number of sponsors. It was a terrible disappointment to me when it was voted down almost unanimously with all of its sponsors voting against it, something that had never happened before. I had hoped, at least, that if it wasn’t going to pass, at least it would be because it was filibustered, but sadly that didn’t prove necessary.
There were some fleeting glimmers of success. A task force on obesity, to which President Hughes was kind enough to appoint me as chair, issued a report and some guidelines that were featured on one of the morning news shows—the second most popular one, if memory serves. The task force’s recommendations included the utilization of a furry mascot called “Cookie Monster” who encouraged kids to make comically poor food choices. It turned out that a very similar character had been copyrighted by some rapacious show business people who, seeing an opportunity for some free publicity for their own character, served us with a cease-and-desist order. But I wasn’t so easily defeated. Cookie Monster was to see life a few years later when, renamed Derwerd the Fur Nerd, he would testify before Congress on a different but related topic.
As people like to say about the weather, the post office is broken but nobody seems to know how to fix it. I am very proud that, despite an almost total lack of support from the president, as the head of the Postal Reform Commission, I was able to reduce the operating deficit of the U.S. Post Office from $65 billion to just over $62 billion.
Nevertheless, as someone who prides herself on honest selfassessment, I can say that my notable successes as vice president were not as many as I might have liked, though still more than other vice presidents, I’m sure.
But as I was struggling to try to do what I always try to do—change ordinary people’s lives for the better through wise and compassionate government—Stuart Hughes was having troubles of his own.
A devastating series of losses in the 2014 midterm elections caused our party to lose its majority in the House, which put most of Hughes’s legislative agenda into deep freeze. Ha ha. Now he would see how it felt.
More devastating still was the Uzbek hostage crisis, which began later that year. When it became clear that Hughes had known all along that one of the hostages was actually an American spy and that he had overridden my plan to avoid a government shutdown in order to distract the public’s attention from the crisis, his favorability rating cratered. His support from the senior leadership in the party evaporated, and his opponents began whispering about possible impeachment.
As these various dramas played out in the public arena, behind the scenes, Edna Hughes, who had never been on a terribly solid psychological footing, had taken a turn for the worse. White House gossip had it that, since her appearance at the inauguration, she had rarely left her room, preferring to stay in bed watching an endless cycle of Law & Order reruns. Since new Law & Orders are always being made and so many had already been made, Abigail believed that she would never run out of new ones and this, it was said, was a source of great comfort to her. For his part, Hughes concocted some sort of cover story about her having an inflamed cyst in some sort of private area, which the press, in its wisdom, chose not to probe further.
What Hughes didn’t count on was the fact that, if you watch them for fifteen hours a day, even Law & Order reruns eventually run out. Around Christmas of that year, for the first time Edna saw an episode of Law & Order she had seen already, and it drove her ’round the bend. She attempted suicide by drinking a yogurt beverage belonging to one of the White House maids that she had found in a cleaning closet and mistakenly believed to be drain cleaner. She was rushed to the hospital, had her stomach pumped, and survived no more the worse for wear than before, which was pretty bad to begin with. It was the last straw for the beleaguered president. On January 24, 2016, President Stuart Hughes resigned, making Selina Catherine Meyer the forty-fifth president of the United States.
That’s right. Me.
CHAPTER NINE
The Meyer Era Is Inaugurated—A Blind Date with History
“So, what’s it like to be president?” That’s what people often ask me when I get stuck next to them in a stalled receiving line. Suc
h a dumb question. I have experimented with various answers over the years and have yet to find one that is perfect for every occasion. For a while I tried, “It’s like being an elevator operator. It has its ups and downs.” But the sad, century-long decline in manned elevators made this riposte more confusing than witty. The “ups and downs” thing, of course, works with other premises, e.g., “it’s like riding a donkey’s d-ck” or “it’s like riding an orangutan’s d-ck,” but most of them are not all-purpose, being inappropriate for, for example, church groups or a PTA.
When my longtime associate Kent Davison brought me the news that President Hughes was resigning to tend to his ailing wife, I was at a union hall in New Hampshire doing some early campaigning for the 2016 presidential race. Although I had always believed it was my destiny to be president, I was, nevertheless, stunned by the news. The fact that I was campaigning to be president in the future and yet had become president in the present made the whole even more mind-boggling and confounding. There are a bunch of good sayings about answered prayers, and here I was, my prayers having been answered, ready to prove the validity of some or all of them.
As a candidate, I had begun to outline what I would do if I were elected president, emphasizing many of the priorities that have been front and center throughout my political career: clean jobs, healthy eating choices for children, others. I would now have a window of opportunity, albeit not a very long one, to push my agenda forward. Not only that, I would be much better situated for my presidential campaign as the incumbent president than in the always faintly ridiculous role of vice president. In short, I was jubilant. Becoming president of the United States was unquestionably a career high for me. The satisfaction in having proved the haters and the naysayers wrong, in having the last laugh over those who had called me “superficial” and “incompetent” and “too beautiful to be president,” was, well, hugely satisfying.
“Blah-blah-blah, get to the good stuff,” right?
Is Air Force One cool? Oh my God, yes. Later on, when the charm of being president had somewhat worn off, I never ceased to enjoy flying around in my own giant airplane with a queen(!)-size bed and a real shower, not just one of those hand-washer things like they have on bigger yachts. If you suffer from jet lag, as I do, as well as that sort of gritty, dirty feeling you get after longer flights, well, let me tell you that having Air Force One at your disposal takes care of both of those problems right quick. Plus, no more airport security lines, no more customs, no more flight delays. In fact, the Secret Service will actually delay other flights in order to make sure that the president takes off in time.
How is the food on Air Force One? It’s great! It’s not just, you know, Air Force food, it’s actually prepared by a real chef who will make whatever the president wants. And it’s served on real china, even if that adds some weight and requires a little more fuel to fly around than paper or plastic. Come on, man! This is Air Force One! The first time I flew on Air Force One, they offered me a choice of possible meals and snacks but, after a while, they began to know my preferences and would just have the necessary ingredients on board. That’s the kind of service you get on Air Force One. Is 24/7 access to Air Force One the best part about being president? Unquestionably yes. Any president who tells you otherwise is straight-up lying. In fact, for presidents of the Air Force One era, I think it’s safe to say that, though they may run for president for other reasons, if they run for reelection four years later, Air Force One has a lot to do with it.
Maybe you’ve flown on a private plane once or twice in your life. I’m not talking about someone’s dinky Cessna or Beechcraft. Everyone’s done that. I mean a bigger plane with a bathroom. And maybe you think that’s what flying on Air Force One is like. Well, it’s not. Or maybe you think it’s like a better kind of private aircraft that movie stars or billionaires use. Well, guess what? It’s even better than that. Look, this conversation isn’t really going anywhere. You just don’t seem to get it. Air Force One is much better than any plane that anyone else has anywhere. You can start a nuclear war from Air Force One. That’s how great it is.
Okay, what’s the White House like? It’s a dump! In its defense, it was built a long time ago—more than a hundred years ago—when I suppose standards were different. We all know that great story about President Taft and the bathtub. But while standards of luxury, as well as standards of living generally, may have improved very considerably since the White House was built and considered “luxurious,” the people “in charge” of the White House, whoever they may be, seem to have made little effort to keep pace. The best you can say about it is that it looks sort of like someone’s grandma’s house, which is pleasant enough if you like your grandma, which I didn’t particularly. To give you some idea, the White House is not remotely comparable to a Four Seasons in a big city like New York or Chicago or a foreign capital. Recently, though, I’ve noticed that the Four Seasons people have become very promiscuous in their relationships and have opened hotels in lots of second- and third-tier cities, like St. Louis and Houston. That’s sort of what the White House is like. Like a franchised Four Seasons hotel in an American city with a population of less than two million people.
The Four Seasons, though, has famously comfortable beds due to, I’m told, a particular brand of mattress they use. The White House beds are nowhere near as comfortable, or at least they weren’t as comfortable until I told the stewards to get some good mattresses like they have at the Four Seasons.
The mattress situation is emblematic of my early days in the White House. Even some of the simplest things I wished to have done proved difficult, with the stuffy establishment proving stubbornly resistant to my earnest efforts to make revolutionary change in the “business-as-usual” climate that prevails inside the Beltway.
Okay. But we’re getting off track. What about the other perks? The president’s helicopter, Marine One, is terrific. It’s no insult to the Marines to say that it’s good but not as great as Air Force One. It’s a helicopter—what do you expect? It does have a proper toilet. And lots of the other stuff is very nice. When you’re in the White House, you can ask for food at any time of the day or night. And if you’re bored or restless, there are always people there to talk to. The Situation Room, for example, is manned at all hours by liaison staff from the Department of Defense. The downside is that most of these people are extreeeeeeeemely dweeby kids in their late twenties and early thirties in the kind of cheap J. Crew and Banana Republic officewear that just makes you want to kill yourself. So they are not exactly a lot of fun to talk to unless you’re interested in, you know, global flashpoints and that kind of thing.
Can you call anyone, anywhere? Yes! Almost everyone is happy to get a call from the president of the United States, unless, of course, you’re calling them to say how sorry you are that their son or daughter was killed in some kind of military silliness somewhere. And, honestly, that kind of call is one that you have to make more often than the fun kind when you call the queen for her birthday or that kind of thing.
What about the hotline to Moscow? No. That’s long gone. I’m told they took it out after Nixon kept drunk-dialing Brezhnev in the middle of the night. And the “football”? The nuclear launch codes? The “button” upon which the president has his or her finger? That, actually, is all real.
Perhaps no symbol of presidential power is as potent as the nuclear “football” that enables him (or her!) to start a nuclear war at any time of the day or night. It’s called the football, but it’s actually a briefcase, a bit larger than normal, carried by a uniformed military aide (way to be subtle, military!). But what exactly is in the briefcase? Well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s mostly a bunch of cheap-looking loose-leaf notebooks along with a very goofy-looking EMP-hardened cell phone that supposedly enables the aide to communicate with the Pentagon or NORAD in a time of crisis, but honestly, I wouldn’t count on it. The basic idea is that, if the president feels like starting a nuclear war, he or
she calls over the aide and asks them to get a general or admiral on the phone and then reads them a code from one of the notebooks and then boom!
I won’t deny that the power to annihilate the earth’s entire population and turn the planet into a lifeless, radioactive wasteland for millions of years has a tendency to go to one’s head. By the way, that business about cockroaches being the only creatures that would survive a nuclear holocaust? I can put that canard to rest right now. Although it may have been true when I took office, I had the bomb yields adjusted so that cockroaches would all be killed as well. I can’t stand cockroaches or, as we used to call them in Palm Beach (my mother, who died while I was running for president, by the way, had a great house on the Intercoastal in Palm Beach or, technically, Gulf-stream), palmetto bugs.
Along with the excitement about what I could do came the unpleasant realization that, other than kill everyone or swap out the White House mattresses (as well as the one on Air Force One—I said that it had an actual bedroom, right?), there was surprisingly little that I could accomplish on my own initiative. I had spent three years in the vice president’s office imagining that I was being excluded from momentous decision-making, but I had failed to learn a rather obvious lesson that was staring me in the face the whole time. Hughes had proved unable to accomplish pretty much anything significant in office. All those meetings that he had kept me out of had amounted to nothing more than a lot of empty d-ck-measuring sessions.