Let’s recognize that bad things happen. They happen more than anybody would want. Teenagers have sex. Girls get pregnant. It’s not ideal, but it is inevitable. The important thing is to have in place the kind of infrastructure to deal with it. That’s a hell of a lot more useful than living in some fantasy world where sex doesn’t exist.
MARY
JAMES AND I SHARE AN APPRECIATION, indeed a delight, for young people who want to have a career in politics. Given the histrionic preponderance of reporting on cynicism and corruption in politics (not to mention the dearth of history teaching), it is a wonder anyone under the age of the Dwight Eisenhower era has any interest in, let alone respect for, the political process.
James and I are proud of our work in the political arena. And for us, politics is still an honorable, even noble, calling. James never fails to tell young people, “You can be a rainmaker or get rained on,” meaning basically: you don’t play, you will pay.
I tend to stress “With rights, come responsibilities.” We are all obliged to be stewards of our freedoms, guardians of our republic.
When the girls were little, I always took them to vote with me and never failed to get choked up as I cast my single vote. I wanted to impress on them the glory and necessity not just of voting, but of actively participating as a citizen.
There are many ways to participate in the political process, but for those young people who have been asking us for over twenty years now how to break into the political arena, here are some insights:
Don’t do it for money.
Don’t give in to the cynicism.
Don’t burn bridges.
Don’t backstab.
Don’t fear failure.
Don’t expect a return on every favor or good deed.
Don’t worry about your career, only the race you are on.
Never ever lie to colleagues or reporters.
Trust your gut.
Be loyal to a fault.
Play hurt.
Stay in it to win it.
Prepare for sleep deprivation.
Be equal parts grateful and humble for victories.
Be equal parts honest and earnest about learning from losses.
Seek mentors and protect/support them unconditionally.
Take care of the underlings and volunteers.
Revere your foxhole buddies.
Remember liars and promise breakers.
Learn every campaign skill set.
Go deep on at least one policy area you like.
Keep your ears open and your mouth shut before getting the lay of the land.
JAMES
THERE’S MORE TRUTH TO this than either side would care to admit: Republicans tend to love specific human beings, but they don’t care as much for humanity as a whole. Democrats often don’t have a particular affection for individual human beings, but they care deeply for humanity.
What do I mean by that? Take Mitt Romney, for example. During the 2012 campaign, there were all these stories about Romney’s kindness to specific folks, how he used his wealth to help people he knew were in need. I don’t doubt any of the stories. But the policies he proposed would have ravaged the middle class, discriminated against gay people and generally hurt the poor and elderly.
Now, a lot of Democrats I’ve encountered over the years can be a little prickly, person-to-person, too. Paul Wellstone, the late, very liberal senator from Minnesota, was not a backslapping kind of guy. But he had this enormous affection for humanity and the human condition.
I don’t think Franklin D. Roosevelt was particularly prone to go visit the dying or the old. But he cared deeply about the suffering of the most vulnerable in society. The New Deal happened because he cared about those at the bottom, not just those at the top.
Lyndon Johnson could be a real son of a bitch. He manipulated people and coerced people. But he did have a streak of courage and a conviction to help the poor and the oppressed. The Civil Rights Act. The War on Poverty. He wasn’t necessarily a likable guy, but he cared deeply about righting the ills of society.
MARY
NORMAL PEOPLE ARE OCCASIONALLY hesitant to ask James or me a personal question, such as “How can you two lunatics stand each other?” but everyone is inexplicably interested in the lives of people who work in politics. So instead they ask us about people we know or have worked for—political celebrities, which I guess is what the political arena has now become. They want to know what Bill Clinton is “really” like. They want to know about Bush 41’s health. They ask if Dick Cheney is really Darth Vader and Dr. Strangelove. They want to know all about Karl Rove or Maureen Dowd.
More generally, they’ll ask me: “Are there any liberals you love?” My answer to this question varies. Sometimes I’ll use it as an opportunity to make a larger philosophical point. I will say: “None.” I don’t love any modern liberals because they have totally bastardized classic liberalism, which was all about encouraging freedom and individualism, and building a society that tolerates a diversity of opinions. This goes all the way back to Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher who believed there were ultimate truths, although nobody has a personal claim on them. The only way to get to an objective truth is by observing, verifying, listening to and comparing verifiable facts. Unlike what passes for debate today—trashing your opponent and fictionalizing his argument—in ancient Greece those antics were reserved for the theater.
Many of the liberals I knew twenty years ago embraced this idea. They talked and listened. They were open-minded, liberal in the best sense. But today’s “progressive” liberals are different. They have no interest in debate. They’re closed to any ideas beyond the hard left–sanctioned ones, which they’ve turned into a purity litmus test. There is only one point of view—theirs—and they will lay waste to anyone who disagrees with them, who doesn’t frog-march in perfect unison to their principle-free and provably preposterous policies and programs. It’s their way or the highway. I guess to their credit, they are straightforward about their political strategy: utter, complete and unrecoverable destruction. Their go-to tactic is to brand everyone who opposes them as haters and bigots.
Obvious to anyone beyond third grade, liberals have finely honed the tactic of emotionally attacking messengers rather than logically debating messages because it’s easier to emote than explain. Of course, there is no explanation for pursuing and expanding policies and programs that have been exposed as demonstrable failures.
Failed outcomes are irrelevant to progressives; their template for success is good intent, their good intent. But what really cranks me up even more than the vile, stupid things progressives say and do is their habit of never subjecting themselves or their families to the destructive policies they foist on normal Americans. They wouldn’t think of having their kids ground up and ill taught in the pubic school system they wrecked; and you won’t see them wading through the incomprehensible Obamacare hustle they devised for their own health care.
I could go on, but you get the drift.
Sometimes I give a more personal answer to the question of whether there are liberals I love. I do love plenty of Democrats. (And not just one Chester James Carville.) Donna Brazile is one of my closest, dearest, soul-mate friends. When Donna and I talk politics—and, yes, we do—it’s never about ideological purity. It’s a real conversation, an open-ended back-and-forth. Neither of us claims to have all of the answers. And there are plenty of nonfamous liberals I love too, for similar reasons. If you could hear what these people say outside the hearing of the Liberal Mind Police, you’d like them too.
JAMES
IT MIGHT SURPRISE A LOT of people, but I’ve genuinely liked a lot of hard-core Republicans over the years, and not just my wife. I like Johnny Isakson, the senator from Georgia. Personally, I like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal just fine. I like Sean Hannity. He’s an affable guy. What you see is wh
at you get.
A lot of the big Republican fund-raisers down in Louisiana I really like. I consider them good friends of mine. Hell, I convinced some of them to give money to Barbara Boxer in California.
I like Scooter Libby. He’s a really personable guy. I think a lot of Ed Gillespie. He ran the Republican National Committee, worked in the Bush White House and advised Mitt Romney—that’s like a trifecta of everything I’m against. But I think he’s smart and motivated.
I actually don’t even loathe Karl Rove. I’ve done a bunch of events with him, and we used to go at each other really hard over everything. I mean really hard—verbal body slamming. But he’s also sort of grown on me over time.
I’ll never understand how modern conservatives have managed to be massively and totally wrong about nearly everything since the turn of the century. Weapons of mass destruction, financial deregulation, abstinence-based education, the idea that tax cuts raise revenue, the exportation of American-style democracy, Terri Schiavo, creationism, self-deportation, global cooling, the notion that running a deficit is going to wreck the country, the IRS “scandal,” Benghazi—they’ve just had a bad, bad century so far.
In the last century, they had their moments. Communism was evil, and they weren’t afraid to say so. As I said, they were tougher on crime than many Democrats. Still, what is it about a modern political movement that contains likeable, educated people, but nevertheless is a) repeatedly wrong and b) completely incapable of any type of self-analysis or second-guessing?
That said, I don’t think of Republicans as evil. The truth of the matter is, deep down inside—other than the ugly partisan experiences during the Clinton “scandals”—I’m really not too mad at anybody. It would be easier to list the people I don’t like than the people I do. Most of the time, my experience has been that most Republicans are just wrong, as opposed to nefarious or ill intentioned.
That doesn’t necessarily make it less of a problem, of course. We learned as a country during the Bush years that there’s a real price for being wrong. That’s why I keep fighting with them about all their boneheaded positions. But at the same time, it doesn’t make them bad or malicious people. A lot of them are perfectly kind, honest human beings.
Those realities can exist simultaneously. It’s an important truth to remember about politics, where it’s so easy to always think of the other guy as nothing more than the enemy.
MARY
MY REFRAIN—AND BELIEF—IS that things don’t change fundamentally. People are people. Human beings behave in the same ways—and have behaved in the same ways for centuries. But one change that happened in Washington while I was living there, at first gradually and then very rapidly, is that the sides were polarized not just on issues—but in personal ways too.
As the years in D.C. passed, James and I had fewer and fewer opportunities to socialize together. Our friends were bifurcated. The social events to which we were invited, or the parties we gave, were more divided, more partisan, and it was increasingly hard to find issues and causes that we could agree on—or even people we both liked. I’d throw a fund-raiser for a worthy conservative. James would have a fund-raiser for somebody he thought was a worthy liberal. And we didn’t go to each other’s parties.
10.
Name Dropping, D.C.-Style
MARY
I’VE ALWAYS LIKED MANLY men and strong women. Of course, it all goes back to your parents and what they were like. My mom and dad were both tough, straightforward and hardworking. And maybe that’s why I don’t like mealymouthed, wussy wimps. I like strong people who take risks and don’t wring their hands over it. I like decisive people who measure twice and cut once. When they make a decision, they’ve arrived at it through some logical, methodical process. And if there’s a risk component to it, they have the testicular fortitude (and I mean that in a gender-free way) to take it and run with it.
Dick Cheney is everything I admire in a man and a leader. He embodies all the qualities you hope everyone engaged in public service would embody. Well, don’t hold your breath. Because, while there are many unique and admirable people in politics and public service, only a handful are in Cheney’s league.
He’s steady, patient, prudent, consistently honest, good-humored and generous of spirit. He can work through an unanticipated, labyrinthine issue and all the related politics quicker than most people can figure out they have an issue.
And he’s funny. He has a dry, wry, witty Oscar Wilde kind of humor. He can laugh at himself, and the Dr. Strangelove jokes and the whole Darth Vader skit on Saturday Night Live. One of our favorite end-of-day, on-the-way-home-from-wherever, really fun Air Force Two things to do was to grab a glass of wine and pop in a videotape of the SNL skit, “Darth Cheney.” The skit with the coffeemaker in his chest always got a big belly laugh out of the viewers in the cabin. The VP and Lynne even dressed up their black and yellow Labs in Darth Vader costumes one Halloween.
I wouldn’t say that he enjoys—or doesn’t enjoy—his reputation with the media, but I can say he was never perturbed about it, not in the way his family and I were always made crazy by the political caricatures and parodies of the man we know and love. He always seemed more vexed with my concern about it than anything else, and he would always tell me to just chillax and stop worrying about him or his image.
One of my biggest regrets is that I listened to him about that. I could have spent all my time fighting the attacks against him. He didn’t deserve the trash talk, and he was 99.9 percent right in all things. But an 11 percent approval rating could be a bit of an impediment to getting things done because his detractors ceased debating and started demonizing anything Dick “Darth” proffered.
You probably have a read on Cheney one way or the other. And if you love him, you don’t know even half of what is so cool about him. And if you don’t adore him, I guess that’s your loss, because you ate up all the toxic garbage about him without bothering to think things through or think for yourself, and now that toxic stuff is still circulating in your system.
When it comes to Dick Cheney, “what you see is what you get.” He isn’t hiding or playing games. That’s my all-time favorite thing about him. And at work or play, office or home, he is always chill.
The most riled up that he’s ever gotten, as far as I know, happened one Thanksgiving. If you’ve read his or Lynne’s books, you know that he makes Thanksgiving dinner every year. One year, when he was cooking at his daughter Liz’s house, she and I were on the phone jabbering about kids or whatever. Midsentence, she asked me to hang on, because she had to go see why her dad was making so much noise in the kitchen.
He wasn’t happy, it turned out, because someone had fed his beloved Labrador retrievers bananas against his strictest orders—and the dogs were upchucking them while he was trying to get the turkey in or out of the oven. Wow, he was really unhappy about that. I wasn’t even there and felt the need to apologize.
JAMES
PEOPLE THINK DICK CHENEY is such a mystery. I don’t think there’s much mystery at all. I don’t agree with his politics. I despised the Iraq War. I thought the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were bullshit.
But Mary adores him. He’s not a big backslapper or anything like that, but he’s nice enough. He certainly doesn’t pretend to be somebody he’s not, so give him credit for that.
There was this Showtime documentary that came out in 2013, The World According to Dick Cheney by the filmmaker R. J. Cutler, whom I’d known since he did The War Room about Clinton’s campaign back in 1992.
It goes through the terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and waterboarding and the really controversial national-security policies he helped put in place. And Cheney says right off the bat, “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults.” As in, I did what I thought was right and didn’t worry about what was popular.
I sat there thinking, That’s it in
a nutshell. And I told Mary this after the movie came out. I said, “If somebody is a Dick Cheney fan, he’s going to like this movie. If somebody already dislikes him, there’s nothing in there to change that either.”
The bottom line is, whether it’s in a documentary or in real life, Dick Cheney gives you the distinct impression—which I suspect is accurate—that he doesn’t really give a shit what you think. If you share the worldview that he’s a guy who knew best what had to be done to protect the country and went about it come hell or high water, then the movie sort of reinforces that narrative. If you think that he was a guy who used 9/11 as an opportunity to do a bunch of crazy shit that wasn’t well thought-out and harmed America’s reputation, as well as undermined the Constitution, then you can find that in the story too. Both sides can take away what they want from it.
But whichever side you’re on, the truth is he’s not very upset about whatever you think. He’s not losing any sleep over it. I’ve met the guy plenty of times. I’ve flown out to Wyoming with him on Air Force Two and spent time with his family. And I can promise you, that’s exactly the way it is. If you were hoping that maybe he had started reconsidering what he’d done as he grew older, or questioned any of the decisions he’d made in office, you’d be disappointed.
This is not a man sitting on the rocking chair on his front porch, second-guessing himself and weeping over the mistakes of the past.
MARY
I’VE BEEN CALLING George H. W. Bush Poppy for years. I don’t know when or why I started. But I certainly called him Mr. President when I worked for him and wouldn’t think of calling him anything else when I see him in any formal setting. On this, James and I have bipartisan agreement; we respect politicians, or at least people who get in the arena.
Love & War Page 24
