Dirty Sexy Politics (11 page)

Chapter 14
The Diva Who Fell to Earth

I
t was beginning to dawn on me that I wasn’t quite as valued on the campaign as I had previously thought. Looking back, I realized that it had been going on for a while, and showed itself in the way people treated me, how they danced around certain subjects, and tiptoed, timidly. Nobody was being real or direct with me. Instead, they were vague and spoke in super-calm voices, like Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

They didn’t feel lucky to have me. No. In the eyes of the campaign, I was like a curse, a brat, a diva, a monstrous daughter-of. Or maybe I’m giving myself too much credit again. I was a small and pretty unimportant detail, in the vast scheme of things. All I needed to do was keep my mouth shut.

In the beginning, when I first joined, there were only a small number of us—we called ourselves “the Originals”—and it felt like a family. In places like New Hampshire, I felt safe and wasn’t particularly careful about everything I said. The rule that I live by—
there are no secrets
—worked for me in that environment. But not anymore.

Now I annoyed people. I know that. Just being young, and acting young, can be super-irritating to older people. I was the daughter of the candidate, too, and this added to the sense of entitlement that people seemed to suspect I was carrying around. But this is
not
how I have ever thought of myself. My brothers and sister and I were all raised to be real, and pull our own freight, and not walk around expecting the world to wait on us. My two brothers are both in the military. I don’t think it gets more un-entitled than that.

The last thing I wanted to do was call my parents and whine. They had enough on their plate as it was. What was I going to say,
Hey, I know you are running for president, but so-and-so forgot to invite me to that reception . . .

Forgot to put me on the list . . .

Forgot to tell me where to go . . .

I felt lost in the shuffle. But, like I said, in the scheme of things, my complaints were small potatoes and so was I. What bothered me most was that, underneath all the drama, I felt a separation building between me and the rest of the campaign, which had been my home since graduating from college. And worse, I felt a separation growing between me and my parents. With each passing day, it was becoming a bigger hassle to get past security just to see them.

NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, OR WHERE YOU COME FROM
, you had to think that Sarah Palin’s lipstick on a pit bull speech was incredible. There was so much tension building beforehand—everybody wondering whether she would choke, how she would look, whether she could pull it off. I don’t think anybody on the campaign was relaxed about it. And it seemed to make matters more stressful that very few people had met her, or even seen her. Almost as soon as she was announced, she had gone underground to prepare her remarks.

And when she delivered her speech with such confidence, so naturally, as if she had given millions of convention speeches already, even ad-libbing some jokes, the sense of excitement in the hall was palpable.

In the family box in front of the TV cameras, the Palins were assembled, looking inhumanly gorgeous and well groomed. The media frenzy around them was astonishing—they were rock stars, from Bristol and Levi down to little Trig.

I wish I could have been a better sport about the fact that Sarah and her family now seemed to dominate the entire convention. Everyone was so excited by the Palins’ newness and real-life dramas, their exotic Alaskan lifestyle and their cohesiveness. The campaign’s focus, as well as the world’s, was suddenly completely on them. But it was starting to seem like reality TV to me. I kept wondering,
why are these people taking over our lives?

Later that night, I happened to be sitting in the hotel lobby bar with Shannon and Heather when Sarah walked by—and the campaign staff and journalists in the room exploded in spontaneous applause, and then charged at her. A rope line formed, almost magically, as people began waiting their turn to talk to her, ask for an autograph, or to have their picture taken with her. I mean, even journalists were waiting to be photographed with her.

Sarah was basking in a kind of golden haze of glory—and who could blame her? She was not just an overnight success or even a political Cinderella story. She was a sudden, freakishly huge, full-fledged phenomenon. It seemed too much. And it seemed too easy. From my chair across the way, I watched with incredulity. I had never seen anything like it, ever, even in all my travels with Dad.

Maybe there was a chip on my shoulder or maybe I was jealous. It was hard to collect all the complicated feelings I had. But earlier that day, it had been made painfully clear to me how low I’d sunk, in terms of status on the campaign.

I had wandered down the hallway outside my room at the convention hotel, where I was staying on the same floor as my parents, my brothers and sister, as well as senior staff. My hair was wet and my face was bare. I was heading to the “makeup room” in the middle of our floor, where two hairdressers and two makeup artists had been installed to glam up everybody. And I mean
everybody.
There was nothing more important, suddenly, than how we looked.

The scheduling of these miraculous makeovers was really crazy, and stressful. We all needed to look perfect and camera-ready when we needed to be, but quite often there weren’t enough stylists to accommodate all of us—my parents, both Sarah and Todd Palin, and our families.

I was running late that morning, and hoping to get some help with my hair for a photo shoot. I entered the makeup room and looked around. But all the chairs were taken. The stylists were busy with the Palin kids, as well as Levi.

“Can you make time for me?” I asked.

“You’ll have to wait,” the makeup artist replied. Levi, Bristol, Willow, and Piper, who was seven, needed to be styled first.

The makeup artist shook her head slowly, always the sign of a power trip going on. “They’ll be getting more airtime.”

Silence fell over the room. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the reality check going on inside my head. I tried really hard to call upon Meggie Mac, my alter ego, the perfect, polite, and smiling daughter-of. But she failed to appear.

There was only one thing left to do: Go back to my room and do my hair and makeup myself.

The Palins had taken the lead now. The makeup artist was right. I should have thanked her for making me take that big red pill. All my delusions of having an impact, or the importance of my fan base and the unique hits on my blog, vanished like the steam rising from my hair dryer.

I was irrelevant. And in fact, I might have never been relevant to begin with—even way back in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, when we only had one damn bus.

I felt a joke in the air, but it was on me.

MY DAD WAS THE LAST TO SPEAK. IT IS A BEAUTIFUL
tradition of a political convention, when the nominee finally appears in front of the jubilant hall and accepts the nomination. Seeing Dad come onstage and make his acceptance speech was one of the top five best moments of my life. I was entranced by him, and uplifted. His voice and strength grounded me, as they always do. Then I started to cry.

I was in the family box—that place where you aren’t supposed to show anything except a kind of mesmerized stare—and tried to fight it, and fight it. But my mind began to play back moments from the past year, our days in Iowa and New Hampshire, and all that the campaign had been through, the road trips and dustups, the intrigues and hilarity. I thought about my dad and all that he’d been through—as a boy, as a soldier, a senator, a dad, a candidate running for president. He’d tried so hard, and given so much. And here he was, accepting the burden and honor and great responsibility of representing the Republican Party in the coming election.

I looked around the great hall. It seemed like the biggest room I’d ever sat in. It was humbling, and real. All these people had gathered, all this hope and energy, because of what my father had done and who he is. And what he represents. My dad was what I believed in. He was what I had signed on for. His commitment to change, and to making the country a better place, was daunting and inspiring and made me feel so good. I cried harder and tried to muffle the crying sounds coming out of my mouth. Little mouse squeaks came out instead.

It was true, I saw that now.
I was lucky to be there at all.

Chapter 15
A Bus of My Own

W
ith the convention over I expected things to die down—and get more relaxed. I kept waiting to feel better, and more grounded. It never happened.

The campaign shifted gears all right. Everything sped up and became more intense. Maybe the transition from the primary season, to loopy convention chaos, to general election mode seemed gradual to some people. But for me, our entire world had ramped up and hyped up, almost overnight.

New Hampshire was a faraway dream, a beautiful memory that was fading in the nonstop noise of now.

But there was no going back. Only forward. But forward was a place of insomnia and anxiety. The tension at headquarters was in evidence everywhere—in the voices of staffers, in the tone of e-mails and orders, in the way decisions got made. Nothing was ever calm or quiet.

Unless you had been acclimating yourself to this kind of environment over the preceding months, I’m sure it would have seemed impossible to survive it at all—like being thrown in a room where, instead of music blaring, it was the sound of an extended scream.

I spent a couple weeks in New York and Los Angeles, doing a few campaign events with my parents and going on TV to talk about a children’s book that I had written,
My Dad, John McCain
. I was so nervous beforehand, I couldn’t sleep or eat. It was such a big deal to me. I went overboard and wore the most conservative suits too. The journalists were all pretty sweet, and treated me with kid gloves. In the end, the campaign was surprised I survived it. I made some mistakes on TV—bumbled a few lines—but nothing as dramatic as the mistakes the campaign thought I’d make. The campaign’s biggest fear, I later learned, was that I’d say the F-word on morning TV.

Looking back now, I can see that after the convention I was worn down and running on fumes. I’m sure you know how it is—I can’t be the only person who gets cranky and negative when she’s tired and stressed out. Wherever I looked, I saw problems and irritations and people I didn’t like. The campaign became the focus of my animosity.

Sometimes I believed that Steve Schmidt was making me nuts. Then I would think about the Bus Nazi and Blond Amazon, and so many other campaign staffers who drove me nuts, and I had to admit that the entire campaign was getting to me. The problem was, I had seen too much, and I knew too much. After fourteen months on the road, familiarity had truly bred contempt. At one low point, I remember wishing that, once the election was over, I would never see any of these people again.

Luckily, I never stay in a bad mood for long. Sometimes all I have to do is remember to be grateful for being alive and healthy, and for all the opportunities I’ve been given. I remember the people I love and the causes that I care about. There was so much more in life to be thankful for than to complain about. But after the convention, when I tried my tricks for adjusting my attitude, I found it wasn’t so easy.

You know the expression “Now is the winter of our discontent” from Shakespeare’s
Richard III
? Well, my winter came a few months early, like the middle of September. I just couldn’t shake it.

It’s not like I had an enemies list or anything. It wasn’t individuals so much as
types
that bugged me. And while I hate being put in a box myself, or categorized as a
type,
I have to recognize how difficult it is to not do it to others.

Political fleas were one type that bugged me. These were staffers who had jumped off the dead dogs like Giuliani and Romney and hopped on my dad at the last minute. Maybe fleas is too negative—it sounds like they were feeding off my dad and sucking his blood. The relationship is obviously more symbiotic. Amoebas might be better. It was like a bunch of foreign amoebas from different campaigns joined ours and suddenly we were a much bigger amoeba ourselves.

A lot of the new amoebas were former Bush White House people, too. This troubled me a lot more than it seemed to trouble anybody else. Let’s face it. That administration didn’t have its act together.

Most of all, the résumé-polishing flea/amoebas bugged me. They showed up to add a line to their résumés and didn’t really care about my dad. Loyalty was foreign to them, because everything was just about their own career enhancement. One guy on our campaign, who bragged endlessly about his MIT degree, told me two days before the election that my dad had a 30 percent chance of winning. I wanted to deck him. It turned out Mr. MIT had been sending his résumé around for a month already, looking for a job. His lack of integrity was really stunning and I wish he could be driven from politics. But there’s no chance of that. All of this will be forgotten in 2012, when he joins up to work for the next Republican nominee. And trust me, he’ll wait until the last minute to jump on board. He doesn’t want too many losers to foul his résumé.

As far as the media was concerned, even at this point, my father was looking like the man
not
to watch. Maybe from a campaign’s perspective, there is no such thing as balanced, satisfying coverage. But you didn’t have to read too closely between the lines to assume that the entire country was in an Obama-loving craze, even when the polls showed that the race was close.

I was done with the media, in any case, and just as sick of the political beat reporters as I was of our campaign staff. The behavior of many campaign staffers and advisers and reporters during the final months of the campaign appalled me.
These people were grown-ups?
And this is what a presidential campaign looks like?

AS IT TURNS OUT, EVERYBODY WAS SICK OF ME, TOO. IF
you thought my basic popularity levels couldn’t sink any lower than during the convention, guess again. Almost as soon as the general election process ramped up, I couldn’t do anything right.

Everywhere I turned, and for everything I did, I was either ignored or berated for bad behavior. At the back of the Third Bus, where Mr. Burns the Bus Nazi always put me by now, if Shannon and Heather and I danced to music or got slaphappy and laughed too much, people were appalled.

Suddenly it was a huge crime if I gave random people—volunteers and fans we’d meet on the road—tours of the Straight Talk Express. I loved showing people what the buses looked like inside, giving them a peek at history, and watching them light up in huge smiles. But I was told, point blank, to stop.

My swearing was the final straw. I tried to stop—I really did—but in high stress situations, the F-bombs would just launch out of me like hiccups. When word got back to my parents about it, they were embarrassed and called to talk to me about it. I felt so bad, and problematic.

Word went out that we weren’t supposed to swear in front of the Palins, or at least, all the little Palins. But I never did, anyway. But at the same time, I had to wonder why there was a seven-year-old girl riding on a campaign bus, whether staff were swearing around her or not. Piper is an adorable daughter-of, as well as being a sweet girl, but I didn’t get how traveling on a campaign bus in pivotal moments of a national election was good for her or good for the campaign.

I was raised very differently. My mom and dad have strong feelings about not exposing their kids to the nitty-gritty world of campaigning—or even politics. Bridget was seventeen and my parents were both pretty protective of her. When asked why he kept his family out of the limelight, Dad always said that he wanted us to be independent and have our own lives. He never wanted to look like he was using us to warm hearts or gain some kind of emotional advantage.

We were never urged to join Dad on the campaign trail. He seemed content that his oldest three kids, my half brothers and half sister from his first marriage, lived full lives of their own and had no interest in whistle-stops and waving on stage. When I made it known that I wanted to join the campaign as a twenty-two-year-old college graduate, I had to convince my dad’s advisers, not just my parents, that I was planning to contribute, be responsible for myself, and not get in the way. If I didn’t toe the line and cooperate, my dad had no plans to bail me out.

Clearly, the Palins didn’t see things the same way. Maybe I’m not being sympathetic enough to working moms, or to little Piper, who seemed to enjoy wandering to the back of the bus or plane to butter up the media. Sarah Palin was the campaign’s secret weapon—on the surface, anyway. Supporters were going nuts for her, and Middle America, and far Right donors, too. Women appeared to be almost obsessed with her—thousands of them, cheering and even crying at her events. Record-breaking crowds turned out for her events; it was amazing and beautiful. We finally had Obama-sized appeal.

Dad was thrilled with her—and appreciated what she could do, and all the attention and energy that she brought to the campaign. He told his advisers that he loved doing events with her—“We’re so much better together than we are apart!”—but the Groomsmen convinced him that it made more sense to split them up. That way, they could cover twice as much ground, and do twice as many events, in a day.

The media was falling for her too. Sarah was a beauty, seemed kind of groovy, and had sex appeal, too. Ratings went up when she came onscreen. But my father’s advisers, as happy as they were by the excitement over their VP pick, were a little spooked by the fascination and popularity that Sarah drew to her. The big gamble they’d made by choosing her was causing a whole lot of stress. I called her “the Time Bomb.” I was waiting for her to explode. There was a fine line between genius and insanity, they say, and choosing her as the running mate was starting to seem like the definition of that line.

The brighter the spotlight, the more difficult a mistake would be to handle. Dad’s advisers wanted Sarah to look prepared and worldly—and from what I could tell, there was a massive effort to outfit and educate her. I sympathized with how difficult she must have found this Pygmalion process, and dealing with Steve Schmidt—ugh—couldn’t have been fun. He didn’t seem to have a gentle side or a soft touch.

I had never felt comfortable complaining about Steve to my parents. I’m sure Sarah didn’t either.

I’D BEEN IN CALIFORNIA FOR A WEEK WITH MY BLOG
staff when the campaign finally made its mind up about me: Don’t come back. I was a distraction, too controversial, and not playing well with others. The blog could go away too, for all they cared. It just caused complaints. My personal stock had sunk so low, staffers didn’t want their pictures on it anymore.

I was given a choice. It wasn’t a nice one, either.

I could quit and go home or else I would be effectively banished to the heartland on an extended tour of regional McCain campaign headquarters for five weeks. It didn’t take a genius to do the simple arithmetic: They wanted me out of their hair until a few days before the election, when they would trot me out again, like a circus animal in a suit. Stand. Wave. Smile.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I’d been ruminating about how the Palins weren’t “ready for prime time” when, in fact, it was me all along. I was such a prodigal daughter-of that nobody wanted me around.

Home.

It was starting to sound pretty nice.

Home.

I could barely imagine it.

No more tyranny from the Groomsmen. No more seating assignments from the Bus Nazi. No more having to watch the antics of the media circus and its gaga behavior over the Obamas and strange lust for the Palins.

I could live in my jammies and UGG boots, watch TV and YouTube videos all day, and eat healthy food. I could go for days without worrying about my hair, or even washing it. What if I stopped brushing it altogether?

I would be free to be me, say whatever, and drop F-bombs all over the house. I could swim in the pool, pork out on Mexican food, and hang with my Scottsdale girlfriends who didn’t care about politics.

Or, I could have my own bus.

Are you serious?

My own bus for six weeks?
And it was going to be one of the nice buses with comfy seats and clean upholstery, a new bathroom where there weren’t cigarette burns on the toilet seat, and AC that didn’t blow out pure mold.

I could fill the mini-fridge with Diet Pepsi and Starbucks frappuccinos. I could fill the drawers and cabinets with M&M’s and Luna Bars, Swedish fish and Doritos.

I could lead as many tours of the bus as I wanted, play any music I liked, sing as loudly as possible, and express myself as colorfully as I could—even if every other word would have been inappropriate for Piper.

The road was calling.

And I answered.