An American Story (36 page)

It immediately became apparent that I have no future in party politics. Having never yet encountered a problematic professional situation that talent and hard work couldn't cure, or a poisonous office environment I couldn't remain on the fringe of, I just focused on my work. The money would come eventually. I understood about paying your dues and had no qualms about not starting at the top. Soon, they were promising me the next opening. When Mark Gearan, the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association and a senior Clinton adviser, needed an assistant for the duration of the campaign, I was the only choice. Now I encountered the first problematic professional situation that talent and hard work couldn't cure, the poisonous office environment I couldn't remain on the fringe of.

Yes, I should have realized that a political organization would be intensely political. That everyone, especially in an election year with West Wing offices dangling like luscious fruit, would be mud-wrestling for position. But I was leaving in September, why wrestle with me? Yet the DGA staff barely tolerated me, barely acknowledged my existence. I wasn't attacked or sabotaged, just regarded with great suspicion and frozen out. One, now a big shot at the White House, wouldn't even reply when I spoke to him. It didn't matter that I was DNC staff, not DGA, because access is the gold standard in politics and I had access to Mark and to anyone he had access to if I wanted to play the game. I answered Gearan's phone and had access to his Rolodex (which
did
contain the names and numbers of everyone who was anyone in Democratic politics. I used to flip through it in awe). They must have imagined I was buttonholing George Stephanopoulos and James Carville for private chats and circulating my résumé to their private fax numbers so as to coattail Mark to the White House. I wasn't. I was simply taking messages and totaling taxi-cab receipts while waiting for law school to start. I was just trying to learn whatever I could for my own activist future back in north St. Louis.

The blacks at the DNC dismissed the DGA staff as racist, telling me to watch my back, that the DGA had never had a black staffer. The blacks at the DNC were among the most disgruntled I have ever encountered—most seemed to think everything and everyone was racist, especially the DNC and the Democratic party. In their defense, it is true that while lots of blacks pushed mops and delivered mail at the DNC, few were professionals. On the other hand, one of the few black male staffers, and one of the loudest grumblers about white racism, so thoroughly sexually harassed me (calling me “Tootsie Roll” and “lollipop” while licking his lips), I hated to come to work. There for only a few months and forced to file a sexual harassment complaint against one of the only professional blacks at the DNC? I was too much of a tribalist to do it. (Instead, I went ghetto on him and handled it privately.) But who else has he done that to? What young girl new to the ugly ways of brutes like him? I shudder to think that he may well have pressured some unsteady young woman into being alone with him (he was relentless in the face of weeks of direct requests for him to stop).

My biggest disappointment was that I never had a conversation with anyone there about America, helping people, or ways to fund more Head Start slots, just about ways to advance our own careers. I was as ambitious as anyone on the planet; it just seemed to me that by focusing on the work, both the accolades and the personal satisfaction would come. They saw it the other way around—first get the gig, then think of the work. Everyone talked
politics—
what the Republicans were up to, how Clinton should run his campaign—but few talked about ideas, philosophy, real people's lives. I'd expected idealism but found mostly bureaucracy. Of course, I wasn't trying to make a career there. I could afford idealism.

Still, it was a very cynical place. There wasn't even an 800 number; constituents had to pay to have their voice heard. I let them talk and lied to them that Ron Brown, DNC chair at the time, would personally hear of their concerns. He wouldn't. I sent out canned letters in response to the many we got from constituents, canned letters that were an insult in their nonresponsive bureaucratese.

I helped administer the summer intern program, unpaid jobs at the DNC for college students. It turned out that some are less unpaid than others. One daughter of a famous Southern politician kept calling asking me about her slot and her paycheck. I tried to tell her that those jobs didn't pay and that since I hadn't seen her application, I was pretty sure she wasn't going to be an intern. Frustrated but ever polite, she fretted, “I don't
do
applications. You don't understand!” She was right. I didn't. I was given a few names and instructed to pass them directly on to a senior staffer. That woman and several other children of the rich, famous, and well-connected not only “won” those coveted, hotly contested slots, they were paid. All their fathers were millionaires.

It should have soothed Mark's DGA staff to see that he treated me like office furniture. No one abuses a desk lamp or fax machine, and Mark, a true gentleman and genuinely nice man, never abused me. He just treated me like a desk lamp or fax machine—useful for performing low-level administrative functions and possessing no feelings. I had no qualms about totaling his receipts or fetching him lunch. He was a busy, hardworking man with a lot on his mind; often, I brought him lunch or sodas without his having to ask. He was so busy, in fact, he barely used me. I was bored out of my mind, but all I could do was wait for work. Assistants are always promised that they'll get to do substantive work, and it's almost always a lie; either you do nothing or nothing but scut work. So be it. Frustrated or not, I was in it for the adventure, I still had a place in the HLS class of 1995. Assisting him at the party convention in New York, I told myself, would be reward enough. Surely there would be real work to do there, and what exciting circumstances! In the meantime, I just read the paper, answered his phones, and hung with staffers who were also nice people.

There's a cafeteria in the basement of the DNC operated by an Asian family. I used to go down there just to watch the young black girl they had out front work so hard sweat poured down her face. Toiling away at her dead-end job, she just tried so diligently and cared so much. Mangling her verbs and dangling her participles, she sang out all the regulars' orders before we could speak. She scrubbed tables and counters like they were her own, she unpacked potato chips as if they were for starving refugees. The owners rarely gave her direction, they didn't need to.

All that talent, all that drive, all that willingness to work. No, all that
need
to work. If she were to commit a crime, or smoke crack, or have babies she couldn't support, we'd design programs around her. Instead, she was a ghetto kid who did everything we asked of her—high school diploma, no black marks on her record, backbone of her family and her neighborhood. Her reward? Invisibility. Complete disregard. All her talents left undeveloped. Consigned to the steam table for the rest of her life. How long will it be before the light goes out in her heart? How long before she's snarling at customers from across a DMV counter and scheming to get away with as little work as possible? How long before she “upgrades” to a mailroom or a security guard's uniform and the midnight shift reading trashy black novels? She'd do better to rob this place, I'd think. Then she'd get some attention.

I used to look at her and think: Come away with me.

But where?

Watching the mid-level DNC operatives around me, I realized that I was out of my league and gratefully so. Most had senators, their Choate roommate's CEO dad, or their trophy wife's aristocratic sorority sisters pulling strings for them. As we got closer to the convention and looming victory, the jockeying for postvictory positions was nauseating. Mark traveled constantly and took few of the hundreds of calls that came for him when in. He returned virtually none. People gave up and had no choice but to give me the message to pass on. I took many a long-winded, whiny, or nakedly bloodthirsty call, some from people soon to be occupying slots in the Clinton White House. I hope to never again witness people behaving so badly. People called who'd gone to third grade or Boy Scouts with Mark and who now wanted a job in politics. Mostly, though, it was party insiders wanting me to pass messages to Mark about “something very, very bad you should know” about a competitor. They'd bray that so-and-so muckety-muck had promised some perch to them and they damn well better get it. Muckety-mucks called to have me tell Mark that so-and-so is his son's best friend and, well . . . you know. Many kissed up to me shamelessly, trying to buy my help with fake camaraderie or promises of their future patronage. O beautiful for spacious skies.

As summer and the Democratic National Convention in New York neared, Mark was promoted to being Al Gore's campaign manager and the air around him thickened with excitement—the press of bootlickers was unbearable and his phone rang nonstop. One young woman joined the queue of Mark's never-returned calls. Soon, she was calling twenty times a day and desperate enough to try to enlist my aid, something about a job that her mother, the best friend of a DNC pooh-bah, had arranged. Mark never told me anything so I couldn't help her. Eventually she started showing up. I gradually came to understand that she was assisting Mark too. Except she, who was neither yet twenty-one nor a college graduate, wasn't answering phones. She was doing research, going to meetings with Mark. Once we got to the convention, which I expected to be my payoff for having been a faithful lackey, this young woman was accompanying Mark to high-level strategy meetings, riding in motorcades with him, showing up in the background on the evening news. I, on the other hand, got to sit doing nothing in the staff room while everyone kept asking me who that was that had my job.

I was completely demoralized. Pure and simple—my feelings were hurt. What hurt most was knowing that Mark wasn't a bastard. It never registered with him that his giving a bigwig's daughter a cool job that (let's face it) any bright person could do meant more than that now said bigwig owed him a favor. I didn't even exist on his list of people or things to consider.

I was through the looking glass in a world where basic civil behavior and decent manners had no meaning whatsoever. And why was that? Because I lacked importance. I had no protectors, no name. I was nobody. But this wasn't personal. It wasn't about hurting me. It barely concerned me. I was an ant. No one sets out to step on ants. That just naturally happens when they roam among giants.

I had to face the fact that I lacked the stomach for politics.

The man who'd parceled out jobs like mine at the DNC had taken a liking to me and listened helplessly while I cried on his shoulder about having been so unceremoniously, so publicly dissed.

“Debra, this is how this world works,” he said. “Mark likes you. He told me so. Imagine what might happen if someone was actually gunning for you. Get out now because this is nothing to the things I've seen. Go on to law school and don't look back.”

Mark never called for me, so I stopped even going to the staff office. I went shopping. I saw Broadway shows. I watched the convention on TV. My only joy was terrifying my replacement whenever she happened to cross my path. All I had to do was give her the look of death and she ran. Too bad mom couldn't steal someone else's backbone for her.

Outside Madison Square Garden one day, I struck up a conversation with a black female attorney on Hazel Dukes's staff. Dukes, since disgraced, was a NAACP grande dame and a well-known New York State politician of long standing.

She asked me about the paucity of blacks in leadership positions at the DNC, Ron Brown and Alexis Herman notwithstanding, and on Clinton's senior election staff in general. I had to admit that there weren't many. I was elaborating that the
real
problem was less the lack of blacks per se than the lack of committed activists who thought beyond their own thirst for power and proximity to the powerful. As it happened, Dukes walked by and proved the point for me.

The woman called her over and asked me to tell her what I'd just told her. Just a few sentences in, Dukes interrupted.

“You're wrong,” she scolded. “I'm
very
close to Mr. Clinton. Just yesterday, I was on the private plane. I talk to him all the time, he considers me a confidante. I've been to the governor's mansion.”

I, I, I, me, me, me.

There was a self-satisfied simper on her face. She preened and looked around as she spoke to see who was looking at her, clearly hoping to be recognized, preferably by a news camera crew.

“Ms. Dukes,” I said, “don't you think you might be being bought off with a few perks? So you rode on the private plane, how does that fix inner-city schools? What did you all talk about, real issues or how good the meal was? I know who's in those strategy meetings with Clinton and it aint you, it's hardly any of us.”

She sighed dramatically, then rolled off a list of the usual-suspect black politicians who'd been with her on the candidate's private plane, how Clinton called to wish her a happy birthday, etc. She never offered an analysis of the role of blacks in national Democratic politics that wasn't about her own individual importance or one of her equally hooked-up professionally Negro politician friends. We both thought the other a complete fool and parted with mutual disdain. With leaders who can be bought off with a plane ride, no wonder the Dems take the black vote completely for granted.

The night of Jesse Jackson's speech to the convention, I was the only black in the DGA's jam-packed skybox at Madison Square Garden. There were three Hispanics, all uniformed waiters. The air was giddy with incipient victory; everyone knew we were going to beat the Republicans. I was among the few listening to Jackson orate about the poor and the downtrodden; most were partying way up in the air, above it all. A young woman who was shepherding one of the elderly party grandes dames (a famous old-guard politician's sister) tapped me on the shoulder.