Meghan McCain - Dirty Sexy Politics

While we were eating, we turned on the TV—an addiction at this point. For the last four months it was always on, in every room, wherever we were. We expected to see Obama on the screen. But Sarah Palin was giving interviews in the lobby of the Biltmore. What? Why the hell was she giving interviews? Was the failed vice presidential running mate supposed to do that? My dad certainly wasn’t giving interviews.

We were shouting at the screen. I think somebody threw a pillow. Sarah was trying to continue her political career, or save it, we figured, and separate herself from my dad and his loss. She was trying to be her own person now, free from us, free of the campaign and my dad. I don’t know if that’s what she was doing, or thinking, but we decided it was.

Our defeat was just hours old, and still too painful, to us anyway— wasn’t she even heartbroken? But it was the very beginning of what would be months of postmortem, the beginning of Sarah and many individuals in the campaign not letting things die or the wounds heal. The fallout from the campaign went on and on and everybody except my dad would want to have their say. Including me.

Election night was like a fire, and when the ashes were left, there would be things that would rise out of them. Nothing is ever really over, it just evolves into something else.

I was supposed to drive up to meet my parents at the cabin in Sedona later that day. But I stalled—hating to say good-bye to my friends, hating to separate after all our months together. I couldn’t stand to think about it. But they had their own lives and careers to get back to. I knew that. But I asked anyway. Would they stay a little longer, get me through the next few days? They weren’t my employees anymore—staffers who were helping me with the blog or my hair. I was closer to them than I’d been to anybody.

They didn’t just say yes. They said they wanted to stay with me and weren’t ready to leave yet. I’m not sure they were telling the truth. But the gesture itself says everything. Shannon, Heather, and Josh stayed around to bring me back to life.

MY PARENTS HAVE A CABIN BETWEEN SEDONA AND COTTONWOOD, about a two-hour drive from Phoenix. While I drove, Shannon, Heather, and Josh rehashed election night, everything I had missed.

The Biltmore ballroom had been a big wake and split up into many smaller wakes, which went on all night. The Originals, people who had spent two years of their lives completely devoted to the campaign, found each other like magnets and didn’t let go. There was drinking and everything else, almost everything, including skinny-dipping in the Biltmore pool. I was hanging on every word my friends were saying, delighting in the gloriously bad behavior, until I saw blue and red lights swirling and flashing in the rearview mirror.

I was being pulled over.

The officer said I was going eighty-five mph. He asked why I was speeding.

“I’m sorry, Officer,” I said, handing over my driver’s license. “My dad just lost the election to Barack Obama.”

This is possibly the best excuse I’ve ever had for speeding. He gave me a warning.

Pulling back onto the highway, our conversation started up again, including a long analysis of crazy-sex—and what it is about. I remembered meeting a guy once who had done a “semester at sea” in college, traveling around the world on a cruise ship and taking courses. He told me a story about how the ship had encountered a terrible storm, so bad that they all thought they were going to drown. People were praying and freaking out, and scrambling for life jackets. He said the only thing that he could think about was having sex one more time before he died. He went around to random girls and asked if they were interested. He didn’t want to die doing anything else.

Election nights are kind of like that. The emotions are so strong and searing—the exhilaration or disappointment is overwhelming—and, no matter what, a part of your life is ending. Crazy-sex was a way to get through it, work it out, even honor and celebrate it. As much as my mom will be horrified to hear this, I understood what crazy-sex was about.

I wish that something so dramatic had happened to me, that my campaign celibacy vow had ended that very night—like the minute the campaign was over, I got drunk and tore off my clothes, skinny-dipped in the Biltmore pool, and then drifted off with a campaign staffer whom I had crazy chemistry with, and been attracted to the whole time, and then, we wound up together for the night. That would be the movie version. But there’d been no campaign staffer for me, not even one I’d had my eyes on. In reality, I went back home to the guest apartment and passed out in my gold dress.

The vow could end now, in any case. I was free to have sex again. When my sanity returned, life normalized, and I found somebody worth the trouble and risks, would it come back to me, after all these months?

Was it like riding a bike?

It was pitch dark when we arrived in Sedona. Our cabin is in the middle of the mountains, deep in a canyon, essentially in the wilderness. We crawled out of the car like bugs that have been hiding under a rock. We were like boat people—scruffy, tired, needing showers and sleep. The main cabin was empty, as far as we could tell, or my parents were asleep. But I needed to find them so they could tell us where to stay.

Looking for them, I wandered into one cabin and pushed open a bedroom door and saw Charlie and Judy Black under the covers, curled up in bed.

“Oops! Sorry!’

I love Charlie and Judy, and there was something so funny, and so classic, about standing in a bedroom in my ragtag state and coming upon those two in their pajamas.

I laughed and couldn’t stop. It meant so much to me.

My first post-election laugh.

THE NEXT MORNING MY DAD WAS SITTING BY THE POND, alone, making phone calls. The trees behind him were so beautiful, golden and red, autumn colors. The air was dry, chilly but sunny. He had a sheet of paper in front of him, a long list of names and phone numbers on it.

Just seeing him, like that, made me cry. There was something about how all alone he was too. The night before, he had been surrounded by what felt like millions of people and now he was all alone sitting by our pond with his sunglasses and dorky Dad sweatshirt on making phone calls and being stoic.

The aftermath. This was going to be the worst part, wasn’t it?

I walked over to him slowly, told him I loved him, and gave him a hug.

Then I found my mom, and asked her what my father was doing, and she said that he was calling supporters and big donors to thank them. She looked really tired but hanging in there for all of us. She was wearing jeans and a sweater and I remember thinking it had been a long time since I’d seen her in cabin clothes, casual stuff, the kind of thing she liked to wear at home.

“Where is everybody?” I asked. Charlie and Judy, Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, and everybody else had gone back to their families that morning. Only Brooke Buchanan, my dad’s tireless press secretary, was left, along with my parents, my sister, Bridget, and my friends. My brother Jack had gone back to the Naval Academy that morning. My brother Jimmy was heading back to Camp Pendleton, where he was stationed.

That afternoon, my dad started grilling. It was his therapy. He grills steak, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers, and basically any other kind of meat, poultry, and fish imaginable. He is a grill master, and loves feeding people. He loves it when we really load up our plates and keep coming back for more.

Suddenly food became the focus of our existence. We feasted as though we hadn’t eaten in two years. Meat, big meals, everything he could grill, several times a day, and even though I started to feel really full, I kept eating. We only stopped to sleep.