Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  In 1968, my Uncle Arthur had worked proudly for Bobby Kennedy and told us, teary-eyed, that during a meeting Kennedy had once doodled on his notepad lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V: We few. We happy few. We band of brothers. In the 1970s, my Great-aunt Molly had worked just as proudly for Bella Abzug. In the 1980s, my grandmother became so smitten with Jesse Jackson that she not only campaigned for him, but taped his picture next to Patrick Swayze’s in the “pantheon of hotties” she kept on her refrigerator.

  Yet as a Generation Xer, the first president on my radar screen had been bulldog-faced Nixon—who, in my mind, had been guilty of not merely lying to the American people, but of preempting my favorite television cartoon, Stop the Pigeon, with his tedious Watergate hearings. From there on, it seemed that politicians were harbingers of either stupidity or disappointment. President Ford with his Whip Inflation Now buttons. Jimmy Carter forging peace in the Middle East yet being called a wimp because—for some ridiculous reason—he refused to nuke Iran. Reagan parroting “There you go again” and everyone deciding this qualified him as a communications genius. Even Clinton. Although he ate pussy, played the saxophone, and jogged to McDonald’s—all excellent reasons to elect anyone president, in my opinion—his expediency was like a flashing red light at a railroad crossing: you simply had to know better.

  Listening to my relatives reminisce about the leaders they’d worked for, I couldn’t help but feel envious. They’d had passion, purpose, and hope, whereas my generation seemed to have missed out on everything from great psychedelics to canvassing for George McGovern.

  So when, purely by accident, I met a politician who inspired me, my sheer relief was enough to allay any cynicism.

  Congresswoman Minnie Glenn, as I’ll call her, had a whiplash intellect, a nearly photographic memory, and the ability to speak extemporaneously about landfills without catapulting her audience into a coma. Better yet, she’d never met a glazed donut she didn’t like or dirty joke she didn’t feel compelled to retell. Really, she was my kind of woman.

  As a writer, I was particularly compelled by Minnie’s life story, which read like a modern-day variant of Abraham Lincoln’s.

  Born in a small Midwestern town called something like Flyswatter or Hairspittle, Minnie got pregnant at age seventeen and married her high school sweetheart the day after graduation. While her husband, Frank, worked in a factory, Minnie sold Tupperware and served chili dogs at a local diner. Earning wages instead of salaries, they raised two babies and bought bread with pennies scavenged from their sofa cushions.

  But eventually, Minnie put herself through college, then law school, then ran for the statehouse. There, she made headlines by handing back a pay raise other lawmakers had secretly voted to give themselves because she felt it was “greedy and wrong.” In 1994, despite pooh-poohing from her own Democratic Party, she ran for Congress as an “ethical everywoman”—and won.

  She was thirty-eight years old.

  This was the same year Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” swept into Washington. Yet Minnie also arrived, a staunchly pro-choice, pro-union Democrat, wearing a green dress suit and high heels she’d purchased at Val-U-Village.

  “Of course I’m pro-union,” she joked to reporters. “My husband’s a factory worker. I get into bed with labor every night.”

  Having met Minnie during her congressional campaign, I was impressed. With her humor, honesty, and working-class gonads, she was the type of person I longed to be myself, let alone see elected to Congress. Working for her meant a once-in-a-lifetime chance to advocate for causes I genuinely believed in. Why, together, I imagined, we could raise the minimum wage! Revive the ERA! Transform the Pentagon into a giant baby-sitting service!

  One day I, too, could be like my Uncle Arthur or Aunt Molly, secure in the knowledge that at least once in my life, I’d done something of historical and political importance. “I was Minnie Glenn’s communications director before she became America’s first female president,” I might be able to tell my children, in one of my many interminable stories about Washington.

  I hadn’t even set foot on Capitol Hill, yet already I was delusional.

  It’s been said that Washington, D.C., is Hollywood for ugly people, and the first day I arrived on Capitol Hill, it did indeed look like a movie set. The lawn was strewn with cables, klieg lights, cameras. People dashed around murmuring into walkie-talkies, setting up benches and scaffolding, then dismantling them, while reporters and photographers moved around in packs. Anything that occurred there during the day could wind up on the evening news, and people were acutely conscious of this. There was a larger-than-life, stagy unreality to it all. No sooner did I step outside the cloakroom of the House chambers than I saw Newt Gingrich in the hallway wearing pancake makeup. It was like a drag show for bureaucrats.

  Standing outside the Capitol building itself, however, I experienced the same overawed thrill that most people have the first time they see the Statue of Liberty or the Grand Canyon: you can’t quite believe it actually exists in all its glory and not merely on some doctored-up postcard on your refrigerator.

  Hip, urbane, Manhattanite moi, I pointed and shrieked like a hillbilly, “Wow. This looks just like it does on the money!” and, “Hey, isn’t that Ted Kennedy?”

  A strange kind of fever takes over when you arrive on Capitol Hill. Although most Americans would be hard-pressed to identify the vice president in a police lineup, once you work for Congress, you suddenly take pride in being able to spot Senator Fritz Hollings and Representative Nancy Pelosi by the cafeteria salad bar. What’s more, you actually think this is exciting and of great interest to other people. “Hey, guess what?” you’ll announce to your colleagues on your way back from the bathroom. “I just peed next to the head of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Aid!”

  That first morning, oh, what a rush I got streaming up toward the Hill with legions of other staffers dressed in power suits and dresses with navy piping and pearls, everyone smelling of shampoo and ambition—carrying brand-new attachÉ cases and copies of Roll Call tucked under their arms—fierce with our own puffed-up sense of destiny and importance. After years of drinking jug wine with scruffy grad students in Birkenstocks, the high-gloss, super-enameled professionalism of Washington came as a relief to me. When I sashayed through the metal detectors of the Longworth House Office Building and the security guard said, “Good morning,” I took this to mean, “My, you’re impressive.”

  No sooner had I arrived than Minnie summoned me into her office. “Okay, we’ve got some serious business to discuss,” she said gravely, offering me a seat. “I need to know,” she said, sliding a box of Krispy Kreme donuts across the table. “Which do you think are better: jelly or glazed? Normally, I say the glazed, but now, I’m not so sure.”

  After we sampled one, then the other, and concluded that ultimately, more research would be required, we got down to work: we discussed her stance on the issues and the behavior of the new Republican majority in Congress (“They all vote in goose step,” Minnie observed dryly). She then outlined my responsibilities as communications director. It turned out that my title was misleading; I wouldn’t be directing anything.

  “You’re not to be my publicist or a spin doctor,” said Minnie firmly. “Just my writer. I’m not interested in self-promotion. Instead, I need to you to describe what’s going on in Congress using language that ordinary folks can understand.”

  One of the oldest jokes on Capitol Hill is that the most dangerous place to stand is between a member of Congress and a camera crew. Having been a reporter myself, I didn’t relish the job of twisting the truth around into self-serving pretzels, or of having to suck up to the media and sell Minnie to them every day like a box of laundry detergent. I was thrilled to be absolved of any duties that might fall under the category of “media whore.”

  Yet the idea of making Congress comprehensible to “ordinary folks” sent me into a panic. Because what the hell did I know about Congress? The total
sum of my knowledge consisted of the two-minute jingle “I’m Just a Bill” from Schoolhouse Rock. Why, I could barely distinguish between the House and the Senate, and I’d once—albeit drunkenly—confused a picture of the Capitol with that of the Vatican. From my grade school civics lessons, I hadn’t retained anything beyond the Pledge of Allegiance. And in preparing for my new job, I’d been way too focused on things like buying a cool “power skirt” at T.J. Maxx and bragging to my friends to bother to learn anything about my workplace.

  I was at least as much of a know-nothing as the rest of Minnie’s constituents, and I felt compelled to tell her as much.

  Minnie laughed. “My first day, I walked into what I thought was the bathroom and found myself in a supply closet,” she said. “We’re all learning the lay of the land. The fact that you’re not already mired in bureaucratese is a benefit. You’ll figure out Congress quickly enough.”

  By the end of our little meeting, I was fairly delirious. Why, everything was just beginning: my excellent Washington adventure … Minnie’s stellar political career … the fight to keep the world safe from fascists and weirdos. Finally, I was doing something significant with my life: peon, no more!

  Five minutes later, Vicki, Minnie’s chief of staff, called a meeting.

  “Tomorrow, you may have a job to come to, but you may not,” she announced. “Newt Gingrich is threatening to shut down the government again.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Minnie.

  “Nope. This time, though, it’s not just because of the budget,” Vicki said. “Apparently, he’s upset because he wasn’t allowed to ride near the cockpit on Air Force One.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Minnie, displaying the very language skills that had inspired me to work for her. She kicked off her shoes and flopped down on her couch. “This isn’t the United States Congress. This is the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Capulets and Montagues, the Bloods and the Crips—except with leather office chairs and more money.”

  While the prospect of the federal government shutting down was unnerving to me, it wasn’t nearly as unnerving, I discovered, as my new office mates.

  For her legislative assistants, Minnie had hired three political go-getters whose colorful characters could easily form the basis for a comic strip. Lee was a handsome, ambling lover-boy with the molasses-like demeanor of a true Southern Gentleman. When irate constituents telephoned the office, he suavely picked up the receiver and announced, “Now, watch this, y’all. I call it, ‘The Touch.‘”

  Then we’d listen to him coo, “Now, Mrs. Kublicki, you just calm down a minute there. That’s it. Take a deep breath. Now, tell me exactly why you’re upset about farm subsidies.”

  Kiran, who sat across from me, was an ambitious pre-law student whose big goal in life, he informed me, was to be able to zip around from the copy machine to the wastepaper basket then back to his desk without ever leaving his chair. “My other goal, of course, is to go to law school and become the first Indian-American Supreme Court justice,” he said. “But then I thought: why not aim lower?”

  Zachary was a hot-tempered workaholic who won me over instantly with his penchant for M&M’s and gratuitous profanity. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ramses, but I’m going to have to put you on hold for a moment,” he’d say in the middle of a phone call. Then he’d set down the receiver and yell over at Lee, “Hey, dumb-ass. You’re sitting on the fucking stapler.” Then he’d pick up the phone again. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ramses. Now, let me explain to you about Medicare co-pays.”

  Each one of these guys instantly impressed me with his ability to identify all 435 House members simply by hearing their voices over C-SPAN. Each one could master the nuances of a mind-numbing House resolution in less time than it took me to operate the copier. They could absorb and process volumes of bureaucratese faster than any computer. There was just one problem: they were, on average, twenty-three years old. When they weren’t going to legislative meetings or answering constituents’ detailed questions about discretionary funding, they liked to play a game in which they twisted each other’s fingers back to see who would squeal first from the pain while hollering, “Had enough yet, douchebag? Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?”

  Except for Vicki and Minnie’s deputy chief of staff, Edna, I was by far and away the oldest person in the office. After a lifetime of being called “kiddo” on the job, I found this profoundly disconcerting.

  Worse yet, as I surveyed the cafeteria, it seemed that nobody else in the entire Longworth House Office Building looked old enough to drink legally. While the top senior staff positions in the House tended to be held by lawyers and middle-aged politicos, most of Capitol Hill was staffed by people who’d graduated from college so recently they still referred to time in terms of “last semester” and “sophomore year.” Mainstays of their vocabulary were “awesome,” “dickhead,” “Beer Pong,” and “roommate.”

  I had just one friend on Capitol Hill, Bruce, a communications director who worked across the hall from me. At twenty-nine, Bruce was a former journalist reinventing his career and therefore just as much of a freak as I was.

  “Bruce,” I groaned. “Why do I feel like I just landed on the set of MTV’s Spring Break?”

  He laughed and clasped his hands together delightedly. “Surprise,” he said. “Welcome to Congress.”

  Unfortunately, when he explained it, it made sense: each day, members of Congress must ingest huge amounts of turgid information, craft or oppose legislation based on it, then share it in a compelling way with some 700,000 disgruntled constituents who’d sooner be out bowling. They must do this while shuttling back and forth to their district, fund-raising, attending six meetings at once, and appearing on interminable Sunday morning talk shows. Last time anyone checked, this was humanly impossible.

  And so, members of Congress must hire a staff to be their surrogate eyes, ears, mouths, and brains. These staffers must be able to work up enthusiasm for congressional hearings on things like the pasteurization of cottage cheese. They must be capable of staying awake while reading “The House Subcommittee Report on Managing Bio-hazardous Waste at the Sandusky Nuclear Plant.” They must be willing to work insane hours for salaries that often make baggage handling at Dulles Airport look attractive. And, since they have absolutely zero job security, they must believe it’s worth forfeiting their entire personal life and financial welfare for a cool-looking business card and a job recommendation printed on congressional letterhead.

  In other words, they must be twenty-two years old.

  “After all, who else is stupid and ambitious enough to want that?” said Bruce.

  Still, it was unsettling to realize that Congress was essentially being run by people whose parents—for the most part—were still paying their rent. And when it wasn’t being run by them, it was largely in the hands of the senior staff. More often than not, these were adrenaline junkies who’d spent their entire careers a) hopping from the twilight zone of one election campaign to another, or b) slavishly serving one elected official out of some sort of demented love.

  The two groups running the day-to-day operations on Capitol Hill were precisely those with the least in common with the rest of America.

  “Explains a lot, doesn’t it?” said Bruce.

  Indeed, I hadn’t been at my job a week when a legislative assistant for the House Appropriations Committee tried to slip a provision into the D.C. budget authorizing a dog run to be built next door to his apartment. Over lunch in the Longworth cafeteria, I listened to a twenty-one-year-old staffer argue: “If girls can’t talk to their parents about abortion, why not put them in foster homes with parents they can talk to?” Another staffer—this one on the Senate Banking Committee—suggested a federal law requiring all banks to have “greeters” in their lobbies who’d wave to the customers and hand out lollipops. “This way, Americans would trust big banks more,” she explained brightly.

  Later that week, Kiran himself proposed a bill that authorized euthana
sia for any Medicare patient over eighty. “I mean, like, why should my tax dollars go toward keeping Grandma alive when she’s going to croak anyway?” he shrugged.

  Given the environment we were working in, it took Zachary and me two full days to realize he was kidding.

  Yet, it was not just the staff who made the Hill feel like one enormous middle school. All day long when Congress was in session, bells went off to summon the members to the chambers. As soon as they sounded, representatives scurried through the hallways, clutching notebooks and sporting distinguishing little lapel pins like members of an honors society or a fraternity. The same catty cliquishness existed among them—the same sniping, gossiping, whispering—that you’d find in any seventh grade bathroom. Names were called, tantrums were thrown. People ganged up on each other out of pettiness or sheer malice. And throughout the proceedings on the House floor, members would summon the congressional pages—glorified gofers, really—and pass notes to them. Sometimes these notes were instructions for staffers, but other times they were candy orders. In the middle of a heated debate on foreign aid, you might see a congressman beckon to a page, then hand her a note and whisper in her ear urgently. A moment later, she’d return with a bag of malt balls. Rumor had it from the Senate side that Ted Kennedy was partial to Red Hots, which caused no degree of snickering. One time, Minnie herself was filmed eating M&M’s on C-SPAN.

  “So, how’s the new job?” my mother asked when she called. “Gosh, it must be so impressive, working with all those big shots.”

  Naively, I’d assumed that, being the arbiters of democracy, all members of Congress were equal. Yet it turned out that some were distinctly more equal than others. As a freshman in the minority party, Minnie was the lowest of the low in the pecking order. In the office lottery, she’d come in second-to-last out of all 435 representatives, so she’d had to settle for an office divided into two separate spaces. These spaces were conveniently located on two different floors in opposite corners of the building. This meant that anytime you needed, say, a briefing memo or a paper fastener, you had to climb a flight of stairs, then walk the equivalent of two city blocks. As a source of anaerobic exercise, it wasn’t half bad, but it pretty much undermined any attempt to “make government more efficient,” as Minnie had pledged to do during her campaign. Anytime she needed to talk to us, it took ten minutes to assemble for a five-minute meeting. It could’ve been funny, except that it got old almost immediately.