I was on a mission—a deep-dive journey into understanding policy—and I felt a fervent obligation to convey it in an understandable, accessible way to our audience. But I am pretty sure it would have been a yawner if not for Jane’s professional and skeptical but bemused probing. While we talked, the cameras seemed to disappear, as though the cameramen were truly enchanted.
In the campaign world in those days, politics and policy were kept separate, parallel universes with very little interaction. I had always been an operations person and, by tradition and necessity, had zero time or desire to delve into policy much. But preparing for Equal Time, I did hours and hours of research, called up friends and various “smart” people, and asked them to come on the show and ’splain things for us Lucy types. Soon enough I was sucked into a centrifugal force of policy. I fell fast for it, and fell hard. I started loving policy like I’d never loved anything before.
It wasn’t long before our fans began sending us stuff, which was how we discovered we had fans at all. They sent us furniture. They sent us tchotchkes. They sent us artwork. They sent us two life-size papier-mâché models of Jane and me, a coffee table in the shape of a reclining nude holding a timepiece. (Get it, equal time?) Those nutty Loopsters were over-the-top decorators, which is also how we figured out that we had a massive gay male following.
I did not—and do not—like to insult the glory of individuals by lumping them together and assigning them a group identity, but by my empirical reckoning, gay men, by and large, do seem to possess superior taste and are, more often than not, the ultimate arbiters of fine taste, fabulous fabrics and smart decor. And terrific gardeners too. When they turned out in droves for Equal Time, I discovered true loves, soul mates and fantastic creative mentors.
Who doesn’t want to be loved by men who otherwise have no use for you? It’s a purer love, because it’s not filtered through the endless guy-mind loop, “I wonder what she’s like in bed.”
And when we complained that CNBC wouldn’t cover the costs of subscribing to The Hotline, the Washington political bible at the time, decades before Politico, I asked the Loopsters to send in a penny each so we could buy a year’s subscription. We got hundreds of thousands of pennies! We loaded up a wheelbarrow with them, on camera, and pushed it down to Hotline to buy a year’s subscription. I know this is vaguely Norma Desmond–esque, but thank you, beloved Loopsters, for all eternity. You made me so happy.
We bonded, the Loopsters and I, and it felt like we were on a journey together, much of which turned out to be my real life. I got married on the show. I got pregnant on the show. I lactated on the show. (I asked the producer once, “Why are you only doing a head shot?” Her response was to cast her eyes downward. When I followed her gaze, there were two giant round wet spots displayed on my made-for-TV jacket. The sound of hearing Matty offstage had produced an involuntary on-air mammary response.) There was also a deep and super-loyal following of “women of a certain-age” who came along for the ride. We exchanged letters, recipes, and photos of our kids, grandkids, and tales of odd husband behaviors.
The show was less a planned television production than a carpe diem thing along the lines of Dead Poets Society. Then suddenly—very strangely and unexpectedly (and nobody was more aghast than Jane and I)—we had a cable hit.
JAMES
WHEN MARY STARTED ON the CNBC show with Jane Wallace—which was a really good show, by the way—it became the first all-chick cable talk show. It had a cult following, and it really paved the way for a lot of shows that came after it.
While she was off spending her days in front of a television camera, I was spending more and more of my time 30,000 feet in the air. I was still an unpaid adviser to President Clinton and one of his fiercest defenders. But the paying jobs I had—writing books, giving speeches and advising foreign political campaigns—increasingly kept me away from Washington.
That last gig was undoubtedly the most interesting and exciting. Before 1993, I’d never thought much about doing foreign campaigns or aspired to work for politicians overseas. My specialty was domestic politics. That’s the world I knew. That’s the world I liked.
But after Clinton won in 1992, it started to look like an attractive and appealing opportunity. As bizarre, unfamiliar, annoying and enjoyable as my newfound fame was, it didn’t take me long to realize that I had a real problem on my hands: if I kept working on domestic campaigns the way I’d always done, I would become part of the story. I’d draw attention just by joining a campaign. That’s never what you want as a political consultant. The candidate should be the focus; the candidate should get the spotlight. I felt if I kept running campaigns in America, I risked becoming a distraction.
That said, I didn’t want to give up campaigns altogether. I love working on campaigns. It’s what drew me to politics. It’s what had defined my career. Besides, I’ve never been one to sell a product—a poll or direct-mail advertising or a television spot or some sort of software to target the right voters. That is the difference between me and a lot of other consultants in the political world. I’m not selling anything but my own bullshit. There’s nothing tangible that comes with it. No staff, no infrastructure, nothing. Just a guy with a mouth and, I hope, some smart ideas and sound counsel.
I decided to take that same approach to working overseas. I’d been asked about working on foreign campaigns a few times before. It seemed like a way to see cool places and an interesting challenge to try to figure out new, unfamiliar political systems. Early on, because I was so closely associated with the Clinton White House, I exercised a lot of caution. I didn’t want my foreign work to cause any trouble back home. Most of the people I worked for were pretty moderate candidates. Some were more liberal, some more conservative. You have to understand that a conservative somewhere else in the world might be more liberal than a Democrat in the United States, so our descriptions don’t always translate elsewhere.
I certainly wasn’t about to work for someone who was on the fringes or somehow anti-American. But in those pre-Internet days, you didn’t always know a lot about the people seeking out your counsel. You had to be careful. Shady people sometimes wanted to hire you because they believed your presence would confer legitimacy on them. I remember being approached about consulting for General Sani Abacha in Nigeria not long after Clinton got into office. They were offering me a ton of money. It didn’t take a lot of digging to figure out that this guy was an authoritarian dictator suspected of all sorts of corruption and human rights abuses. Thanks but no thanks.
When you work in different countries, you come to realize fairly quickly that established democracy is the exception, not the norm. And even where you have a democracy, that’s a relatively new development in many places. Take Indonesia, where I’ve worked in the past. They never had a political convention before. They had to start from scratch. You ask people, “Well, how are you going to choose delegates? How are you going to select a nominee?” The basic answer is “We don’t know.” It’s a totally new experiment for them.
Wherever you are, you can count on the fact that a lot of voting behavior is tribal. In the United States, for example, a general rule of thumb is that 45 percent of the people are going to vote Democratic and 45 percent are going to vote Republican no matter what. You’re always trying to win as much of a sliver of the remaining 10 percent as possible. These days, people are so polarized that the sliver is more like 5 percent, but the same principle applies. However, in a different country there might be eight viable parties, with the vote divided between them in any number of ways. That presents all sorts of complications. You have to figure out who’s likely to vote for which parties, how you can build coalitions and get enough support to win a majority. It’s a totally different equation than in the United States.
Another lesson you learn is that you can give great advice, but if it can’t be executed, it’s no good. You have to work within reality. Campaigns in other countries, for example,
often don’t have advance teams like we do here to help get people out to events and to measure how many people and what type of people show up. So if you have a strategy to barnstorm the countryside to get your message out but nobody’s showing up at any given stop, then that’s a stupid strategy.
On the other hand, some countries naturally draw large crowds at political rallies. When I was working for the New Democracy Party in Greece in 1993, somebody from the campaign called into headquarters and said, “We had 300,000 people turn out for the event in Salonika yesterday.” And I said, “Holy shit! That’s unbelievable, man. We got some momentum!” And the guy said, “No, no, New Democracy always gets 300,000 in Salonika. It doesn’t mean anything.” If you’re in the United States and you have 300,000 people show up at an event, you’re shitting yourself because you’re so happy. In Greece, people just go to political rallies. It’s like a social gathering. It doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for you.
Cultural differences like that take time and patience to understand. You learn to look at countries you thought you knew in entirely new ways, and you begin to understand more about the ones you never knew. The Greeks, they like to meet all day and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes forever. Israel is a much cooler, thriving, modern place than people imagine, especially Tel Aviv. In Afghanistan, you feel the absence of order. There’s no real emergency phone line, like 911, to call, no stoplights, no normal cops. When I was there, you had to have a tail car when you were driving because if you broke down or got in a wreck, you were entirely on your own.
Starting out, I knew there would be wins and losses, just like back home. The worst loss I ever had was down in Mexico in 2000. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had won every presidential election for the past seventy years. They hired me to work on Francisco Labastida’s campaign, and he promptly lost to Vicente Fox, who was a compelling guy in his own right. There were a lot of factors at play, but a loss is a loss, and that one stung.
Being a foreign campaign consultant also exposes you to some disturbing realities about how the world works. I did some work for James Michel, the president of the Republic of Seychelles, which is basically this string of little islands way out in the Indian Ocean east of mainland Africa. They’re actually not that far from the coast of Somalia, so they’ve had problems with pirates at certain times of the year.
In any case, I’m there on a visit helping him prepare for their version of the State of the Union Address, and I ask some of his people, “Would you give me a ride around? I just want to see what the parliament looks like.” So I hop in a car with this guy, and suddenly we’re rolling down this grand boulevard, and I see this brand-new ornate building up ahead. And I’m thinking, What in the world is this?
It was the parliament building. And I said something to him like “Man, are you guys crazy?” The International Monetary Fund was there helping out, and the government was raising taxes and cutting social welfare to get its fiscal situation in order, and they went and built this Taj Mahal of a parliament? I couldn’t believe it.
“It didn’t cost us anything,” he said. “The Chinese paid for it. They do that everywhere.”
It was my first real encounter with the fact that the Chinese actually go all over the world paying for stuff left and right to get in the good graces of political leaders. You need a new building for your government? You need a luxurious place for your politicians to park themselves? Boom. In many places, the Chinese will write that check.
It wasn’t the only time I’ve seen that phenomenon up close. In Afghanistan, where so many of our young people are getting banged up fighting the Taliban, and where we’re spending all this money on training police and building infrastructure, the Chinese have put their energy and money into building a railroad into eastern Afghanistan, where there’s like a trillion dollars’ worth of minerals just waiting to be taken out of the country. They are spending money hand over fist around the world to further their interests. I saw it in Seychelles; I saw it in Afghanistan.
At the end of the day, I learned pretty quickly that being successful at foreign campaign consulting boils down to sound judgment. You pick the candidates you believe in. You pick the candidates you think you can help. You steer clear of the ones who make you a little uneasy. You go in knowing that you’re going to win some and lose some. Ultimately, it’s not so different from working on domestic campaigns.
Have I made the right choice in every instance? No, but I didn’t make any horrifically bad choices, either, and that’s every bit as important. You can make some bad freaking choices, representing dictators or authoritarian regimes or bumbling idiots who generally just shouldn’t be in power. I’ve avoided all that.
I would say that along with good judgment, I’ve had good luck. You need both to be successful, whether in work or in marriage.
MARY
IT TURNS OUT, when your ratings are lousy and nobody’s watching, you are left alone to die a quiet TV death. It’s when you have a hit that the problems start. Once we were “discovered” by the TV critics, the CNBC suits appeared like Death Eaters and tried to suck the blood and soul from Equal Time, hoping to renovate us into a bad version of Crossfire. What they wanted was everything that doesn’t work on TV. And it was the antithesis of what we had been doing.
We did get a better set. And it was decided that we needed to be given a wardrobe budget, which led to free designer clothes—okay, that rocked—until it became obvious that the guys in charge didn’t want my own personal taste displayed. They wanted me to be “dressed,” kinda clone gal, TV monochromatic. I was supposed to look the same every night, same hair, same lipstick—bleh, bleh, you know the rest. I get it. This is how on-air people are successfully “branded” on TV. But in the end, free cool duds or not, I couldn’t do the whole processed cheese thing.
For one thing, it was suddenly not okay for me to be constantly changing my hairstyle. What? I’m the daughter of a beauty salon owner, I grew up in a beauty school and am a trained cosmetologist who’s been doing my own as well as all my friends’ hair for twenty years. Out of boredom and curiosity, I consider my own hair as ever evolving. And it became a recurring joke on the show. Hillary of the 1990s had nothing on me. My nonstop hair transitions were the star of many a spoof. The suits at CNBC were horrified.
The last straw was O. J. I didn’t want to do shows about that moronic murder trial, let alone night after night after night. The rest of television was doing the O. J. trial nonstop. What intelligent or edifying thing could I possibly add to that? What intelligent or edifying thing could anyone say about that? The O. J. trial clearly marked the early stages of cable crapdom: the dumber the story, the greater the coverage.
So I announced to Loopsterville: “If you’re tuning in to talk about that moronic event, change the channel or turn off the TV, because this is an O. J.–free talk-show zone.”
That really enraged the cable gods. They felt we were tampering with the vital life source of their cable kingdom: ratings. I held my ground. “I’m not going to do this night after night. Actually, I am not going to do this one single frickin’ night. Period.” Their response was to tell our producer, Ann Klenk, that her job was on the line if we didn’t get with the O. J. program.
I was like: “Hell, well, that’s fine! Let ’em fire you.” The problem was they did. So that wasn’t good. I mean, Ann was like a sister to me by that point. She had looked after me through a marriage and a zillion meltdowns. After my first miscarriage, she really took care of me, sent me home, found substitute hosts for me. We were very, very close. And she was the sole breadwinner at home, the single mother of a sweet baby girl.
So when the suits fired her and not me because I refused to verbally mud wrestle in the O. J. pit, it was a soul-sucking gut punch. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get Ann rehired. It was such a blatant injustice, so wrong, that I never had the same energy or commitment to the show again.
Is there anything worse than when somebody else gets punished for your misdeed? Answer: big fat no. It’s beyond horrible. And it wasn’t even a misdeed. By then, you could get your O. J. fix all day, all night, and this was before blanket cable.
By then I also had a three-hour radio show during the day, a far more gratifying way to spend my time. Five nights a week I was dragging Matty and the dogs to the TV set, and then we were eating dinner at the Palm with James when the show was over at nine-thirty. By the time we got home, and I’d watched the rebroadcast of Equal Time at eleven, it was well past midnight. It wasn’t a normal babyhood. I wasn’t a normal baby mama either. I was an exhausted forty-four-year-old postpartum and perimenopausal sixteen-car-pileup of a wreck. And guess what? Baby number two was on her way. When it was time to renew my contract, I didn’t.
Not long afterward, Jennifer Block called from Crossfire. She asked if I’d like to do the show as a regular.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to do TV. I hate TV.”
But, of course, I did it. At CNN, I had tons of support, great money, great research and a decent schedule that worked with my kids and their lives. And I stayed there until 2000 when I got another kind of call.
JAMES
WHATEVER YOU THOUGHT OF Crossfire—plenty of people loved it and plenty of people hated it—I never did agree with the assessment that it was some sort of evil show.
I would concede that it probably wasn’t a very good television show in its last year. CNN pulled back on the resources, and it showed. We probably got a hundred little things wrong. But in the end, we got one really huge thing right: the Iraq War. I’ll always be proud of that. I would argue that Crossfire was probably the most consistently anti–Iraq War talk show on cable TV. Paul Begala and I, obviously, were never for the Iraq War, and neither was Robert Novak. Tucker Carlson was for it for maybe a couple of months at most, until he realized the Republican hawks who were trying to convince him it was a good idea were just dead wrong.
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