Dirty Sexy Politics (16 page)

My best songs reminded me of the campaign, Garbage’s “I’m Only Happy When It Rains” and Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” I pretended I was Shirley Manson. I am really not a singer, at all, but when you don’t care and just sing your heart out, it has a way of feeling like something real and compelling and transformative is happening in the room.

We took short breaks sometimes—just sat in the sun on the deck. Sometimes, if my dad wasn’t on the deck, we’d talk about the election. When he was around, we didn’t. Nobody did. You couldn’t raise the subject. It was too painful.

Eventually we became so into Rock Band, it was the only thing we were able to think about. We lived to play. Our conversations started being only about Rock Band. We bickered over the singing and who wasn’t hitting the notes. Sometimes my mom or dad would come into the living room and want to talk, and interrupt, but we just continued to play. We were Rock Band obsessives. One time, our neighbors in Sedona, the Harpers, came over and watched a bit, and made a few jokes with my parents about how into the game we were. But we were really serious about Rock Band by then, and didn’t laugh along. To us, it wasn’t a joke.

That was it. That’s how we passed the time, in the dry air and sunshine of Sedona, in the shadow of the red cliffs. Instead of appointing a transition team and cabinet secretaries and inaugural chairperson, and giving thousands of volunteers and Republican staffers jobs in a new administration, and taking over the reins of power from George Bush, my dad grilled me onions and made his dry ribs. My mom laughed at the thought of being on
Dancing with the Stars.
I sang my heart out and played Rock Band with the best friends I ever had.

MOMENTS OF REALITY SEEPED INTO THE BUBBLE OF MY
little world, though. Once, we went into town so Josh could cash his campaign check before going back to LA, and when the bank teller saw the check, issued by the McCain Campaign, she said we’d all done a brave job and she had voted for Dad, and Josh got emotional.

Another time, we went into town to get our nails done. The nail salon was really dinky, so we took turns, went in shifts, because there were too many of us to get done at once. Bridget was finished, and about to leave, when a woman in the salon asked her if she was “John McCain’s adopted daughter.”

Now, if you have ever met Bridget, who is sweet and incredibly modest, you would know instantly that she isn’t into having a famous father.

“Yes, I am,” Bridget said.

“He lost the election because of Sarah Palin,” the woman snapped.

Bridget came to find me outside, where we were drinking our coffee, and she told me the story. Seeing Bridget was upset, Heather, who never loses her cool, became enraged. We call Heather “Little Buddha” and things like that, because she is a laid-back Californian and Zen personified. But she went striding into the nail salon and found the woman and asked, in a loud voice, if she was the one who’d just been talking to Bridget.

“Who are you?” the woman asked defensively.

“I’m Heather.”

I’m Heather.
As if that made a difference to anybody. And then Heather started yelling. “This family is going through a really hard time—can’t you imagine that? And this is the first time they are venturing out into the world and you start laying into a seventeen-year-old girl about why her dad lost the election? That is so uncool, so insensitive.
What’s wrong with you?”

Bridget and I were hugging each other in the car. After a few minutes we started to drive away and Shannon and Heather rolled down the windows and turned up the radio. I don’t remember what the song was exactly, something cheesy like Britney Spears’s “Toxic.”

The car picked up speed and the dry high desert air rushed in and blew on our faces. We were singing at the tops of our lungs. Singing at the blue sky. Singing at the mountain and the lush canyon.

Arizona is my home. I was back home again. The campaign could crush me and take over my life or I could find a way to be better for it. I inhaled the fresh dry high desert air. My wounds were open, and still sore, and I was feeling alive again.

Chapter 23
Now What?

I
t was the most historic election in recent memory, with more people turning out to vote than ever before. The young voted—with excitement, enthusiasm, and incredible passion. They organized. They contributed. And they proved that they care about their future, about politics, about this beautiful country and its place in the world. They care about ideas and understand they are worth fighting for.

The problem was that the young—or two-thirds of them—voted for the other guy and not my dad.

My dad got forty-eight million votes. That’s not an embarrassment, but it wasn’t enough to win. Did he lose because of Sarah Palin? Did Obama win because of Joe Biden? No.

Obama was unbeatable, in my opinion. I believe that my father’s running mate—while she changed so many things about the race—had no bearing on the outcome of the election. Obama was just too appealing, a new messiah—a young, smart, good-looking politician who represented everything that George W. Bush didn’t.

THE ELECTION LEFT ME SHATTERED FOR A WHILE
. I spent two months in my pajamas, pretty much, at home in Phoenix, a luxury that wasn’t afforded my dad, who was back in his office in Washington almost immediately, catching up on his Senate obligations.

When I wasn’t fogged out and numb, I wallowed in waves of dread and panic, and an unattractive fury, like something terribly unfair had happened in the world. It wouldn’t have been a good thing to mention president-elect Barack Obama to me during that time.

I didn’t know how my dad went on, plowing ahead without complaint. That’s how he is. His interest in rehashing was zero. The rest of my family was moving on too, or trying. My mom plunged into charity work. My sister, Bridget, had school to focus on, as did my brother Jack, who was in his last year at the Naval Academy. Jimmy had been deployed, and was overseas on a ship. I was jealous of their commitment to things, and that they had duties and plans.

Not me. The only duty I had was the blog. But I was avoiding that. I kept telling myself that I would do a final post about election night, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I couldn’t put those sad pictures on the Internet, or even write about it. My feelings were still too raw and my heart just wasn’t in it. As much as I wanted to pull the plug on McCainBlogette, I couldn’t come up with a good game plan about how to do it. So instead, I just let it die off, a slow death.

Graduating from college leaves a lot of people at a crossroads. I had heard stories about friends who fell apart, felt lost or full of dread during their first year out. There was a hole—and too many choices—after years of working hard in a formal setting of a classroom, with the predictable schedule of lectures, tests, finals, the next semester always coming up.

Now the question facing me was the very thing that I had escaped by joining the campaign. What was I going to do with my life? What did I want? I never put it into words like that. It was mostly a feeling of emptiness. The hurricane was over, I had survived, and now what was I supposed to do?

A bunch of nothing is what I did. I slept in. I watched a ton of TV. I went out with friends and drank red wine. I walked our dogs. I rediscovered yoga and dating and getting to wear consistently clean clothes. Looking back, I’m sure I was depressed and exhausted, and my body was trying to readjust to normal life. Except, nothing seemed too normal anymore.

AT CHRISTMAS, I WENT ON VACATION WITH MY FAMILY
. It was the first time we were all together since election night. Only a few months before, it had been hard to be physically near my dad, or be alone with him, because of the pressure of the campaign, his grueling schedule, and the omnipresent Secret Service agents. But suddenly it was like old times, just the six of us traveling in a pack again.

It is weird to go on a trip with my father. People don’t know how to treat an ex-presidential candidate. There is an awkward reaction to seeing him in person, and not surrounded by a bunch of handlers or Secret Service agents. The fact that he is surrounded only by my mom and me, my brothers and sister, is jarring for people. Maybe they are so used to seeing him on TV that they think he must go on vacation with the hosts of
Meet the Press
and
This Week
.

People always say they voted for my dad too. Wherever we go, no matter what, they’ll say that. He’s a famous politician, so they want to get up close and talk to him, but once they do, they can’t think of anything else to say except that they voted for him, even if they didn’t.

At Christmas, at LAX, where we were waiting for a flight, there was more commotion around him than usual. The election had only been seven weeks before and was still fresh in people’s minds. Crowds formed around him, and people expressed emotion, and sometimes it felt very raw.

Even now, when people come up to me and say that they wish my father were president because “everything would be so different,” it is hard to know what to say. They like to tell me why he lost—all of their theories—and blame it on Sarah Palin or George Bush. Meeting me, I guess, brings up strong feelings about politics and the campaign, about my dad, about Obama and his administration. They project their emotions and feelings on me, and I understand that. But it is difficult for me, too, and was especially so after the election.

All I wanted to do was forget about it. Like my dad always does, I wanted to do my best to move on.

But to what?

SINCE THE ELECTION, I HAVE FOUND MYSELF RELATING
to my dad in so many new ways—and admiring what he has brought to politics and the party over the years. He has made a career of thinking for himself, and not accepting the status quo or groupthink. That’s what got him the reputation for being a maverick.

But when I thought back on the campaign, and my own behavior, I cringed. There were things that I wished I’d done differently, and lots of things I wished I had never said. I’m not sure I handled the pressure and intense emotion as well as I could have. If only I had been more grown-up, or even just five years older.

Looking back, I believe a lot of my frustration was due to the constrained bubble world of a national campaign. I had been raised to speak my mind freely and be independent. If there was one thing that my dad wanted for me—and all his kids—it was to be strong, think for ourselves, and support ourselves. We were never supposed to rely on government or family money or a trust fund to take care of us. We were supposed to work, make a life for ourselves, and find a way to make things better around us.

But a national presidential campaign has to put forward one candidate—one agenda, one message, one set of views. The family of the candidate isn’t supposed to disagree or offer alternatives. The spouses of the candidates have to remain pretty silent—and just go along with the script. My mom is miraculously good at this. But even an old hand at politics, like former president Bill Clinton when campaigning for his wife in 2008, gets in trouble if he says too much.

I understood the reasoning. In the white noise rising from the campaign and all the candidates participating, it is important to hear each candidate loudly and clearly. My father was running for president, not me or my mom. And it was important for voters to really know him, and his views. If there was a chorus of dissenting opinions or different voices emerging from the campaign, his voice would get drowned out.

And then there was the Republican Party to consider. It was one thing to toe the line for my dad, who loved and appreciated and respected me—in spite of our differences. I could do that. But it was another to toe the line for a party that I felt increasingly alienated from.

More than anything, the campaign experience had opened my eyes to the inner workings and culture of the Republican Party. It had its own platform and agenda and base. And increasingly, this base was becoming narrower and narrower. It was no longer the party of the individual.

It was no longer the party of fiscal conservatives. George Bush had grown the federal budget in an unprecedented way. Under his leadership, it had moved farther and farther Right too, and was now a huddling mass of groupthinkers. The base, although critical of Bush, was spending all its time in a corner—a Far Right corner—and as far as I could tell, if it wanted to keep losing elections, it should stay there. It was becoming unappealing to moderates and people of my generation, who were now passionately politicized and voting in record numbers. And it was completely unappealing to the cross-over electorate who had voted for Ronald Reagan in 1981.

What had happened to the party of
You Live Your Life and I’ll Live Mine
? What happened to the party that loved the notion of self-reliance and, my personal favorite, individualism? I couldn’t help but yearn for the conservative philosophies of those two great men Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who believed it was our differences and varying viewpoints that made this country so truly great. What would they say about the party now?

With the rise of hate radio, media bullies, and Far Right groups, the environment has become constrained and narrow. These people are holding the party hostage, and always evoking the name Ronald Reagan, and claiming some kind of affiliation with his politics—and his ability to win elections. But Reagan did not win in 1981 because of the religious Right. He won with Democrats. He won with moderates. He won because his ideas were new and exciting—and appealed to a broad spectrum.

The bedrock of the Republican Party is freedom of the individual. Not groupthink. Not hatred. Not moral codes that we are supposed to live up to.

Goldwater and Reagan believed in freedom, true freedom, for all Americans to live out their lives in the way they choose. The way each American chooses, not their party, not their government, not a religious movement or an angry radio host.

You know, it’s simple and powerful and beautiful.
You live your life and I’ll live mine.
And I know in my heart that other members of my generation—a wonderful generation of enlightened souls—would feel energized and excited by these ideas if they were communicated properly, without dirty mudslinging and vicious venom, without unnecessary name-calling. Infused by new blood and new ideas, and new energy—optimism, not hate and negativity—the party could rise to prominence again. It would grow, expand, and become vital again.

I am not saying that we should abandon the core ideals that the Republican Party was built on. I am saying it is time to
remember them
.

It is time to return to honoring the individual. We need to make room for all Republicans. Today! Not tomorrow, but right now.

We shouldn’t have to look a certain way, or live a certain way. That means that my gay friends, like Josh, shouldn’t have to pretend they aren’t gay—or have an unequal, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell kind of lifestyle if they want to find a place in the Republican Party.

That means that my moderate friends shouldn’t feel like outsiders. And my friends with tattoos and nose rings or women, like me, who like to wear leggings and not pantsuits—they shouldn’t have to think twice about whether their bodies or clothing matched their political philosophy.

Being a Republican is not a lifestyle choice. And it doesn’t mean you can’t be young, or gay, or black, or anything else. It doesn’t mean you listen to a certain kind of music or live in a certain kind of house.

And it shouldn’t be controversial to be like me—a straight, pro-life Christian who is utterly determined to pass gay marriage in this country, who believes in a strong national defense, is worried about climate change, continues to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who thinks government is best when it is efficient and accountable and stays out of people’s lives and business.

There. I said it.

Those are my beliefs.

Do you think I should become a Democrat?

Of course not. In the last year, as a result of the campaign and what I learned, this is where my passion lies—and sense of purpose. I want to see if I can get the Republican Party to wake up.

Wake up!

Think for a moment about the negative voices that you hear on the radio and TV—on the Right and the Left. These people are selling hate and fear—and getting rich from it. These radio and TV stars care more about getting rich than they care about the future of this country, or the health of either political party. They make money by polarizing and spreading fear.

Think for a moment about the intolerant Far Right and its agenda. I am a passionate Christian, but I would never force my religious views on other individuals or want to see the agenda of the Republican Party narrowed to accommodate only one moral code. If the party continues to care only about these members, it will become smaller and smaller—and less relevant.

It is bad enough to find yourself put in a box by your opposition. But when a political party starts putting itself in a box, it is not a box. It is a coffin.

A new generation of Americans will be growing up and reaching political maturity in the next twenty years. And believe me, this amazing generation of passionate people—who were taught to volunteer, express their views, and pitch in—has more complicated views about church than it does about gays or premarital sex. This is why the party needs to wake up to gay marriage being a civil rights issue.

Wake up!

Wake up to new technology—the vast social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter that have opened up a new world to those who weren’t previously interested in politics. With the simple push of a button you can create a whole new movement with a whole new audience.

Wake up to the wonderful melting pot of America, where people of all colors and backgrounds and lifestyles are eager to connect with a political system that wants them, and speaks to them!

Wake up to the core ideal of the Republican Party—the freedom of the individual, the party of Abraham Lincoln—which brings us together more than it pulls us apart. We can disagree on all kinds of things, but we must stand together for equality, for freedom, for the ideals that make this country unique and great—and why so many people around the world dream of getting a chance to live here.