Meghan McCain - Dirty Sexy Politics

Eating and sleeping.

Sleeping and eating.

We returned to the essentials. We let our bodies be exhausted. If you are doing nothing all day, you make more time for food.

Getting dressed seemed like a big effort, so we stayed in our pajamas all morning, and our sleepwear evolved to a form of in-between wear, comfort clothes like sweats and T-shirts, my ubiquitous UGG boots. We all looked raggedy and who-cares. After Brooke left for Colorado—to see her parents, her dog, Maddie, and go skiing—it was down to me and Bridget and my friends with Mom and Dad.

Sitting around the lunch table, we came up with a game called “What Cindy Did Next” where we dreamed up things for Mom to do now that the election was over. We decided that she should try out for Dancing with the Stars, and she smiled, her first smile since the election. We kept the idea alive for days until we’d almost convinced her.

After lunch, we slept.

We woke up, and ate again.

Dad’s dry ribs. This would be my last meal if I had to pick a last meal. And I ate his dry ribs like it was. He grills them with lemon, garlic, and other “secret ingredients.” It takes hours and hours and always reminds me of my childhood. Dad grilled an onion for me too, he always does, because I love, love, love onions so much. This is his special thing, just for me: an onion wrapped in tin foil with a lemon on it.

And then, we discovered Rock Band.

WE WERE AVOIDING THE TV NEWS FOR THE OBVIOUS reasons. And after so many months of being obsessed with the news cycle, we wanted to see if we could live in a world without one. It was really strange at first. Somebody voted that we watch movies, but I nixed that idea, fearing they might be too emotional.

The big TV screen in the living room was looming over us, so we decided to try playing Rock Band. All the equipment was just sitting there, left by Bridget or my brothers. I had never played it, or anything like it, my entire life.

For those of you who don’t know, Rock Band is a video game where the players use drums, a guitar, and a microphone to play along, or sing along, to rock music. It’s a competition, and a tiny bit like karaoke, except you are judged by how well you can hit the notes on time, and sing the words. Actual talent is beside the point.

Once we got into it, there was no stopping us. Hour after hour, day after day, we played Rock Band in the living room—from the moment we woke up, after going into town for Starbucks coffee. My dad would be grilling outside on the deck, and inside, in our pajamas, we played Rock Band.

We took turns trying all the instruments—the guitar, and singing parts, and the drums. Then a pattern developed, where Heather played the drums because she was a drumming savant—the minute she first tried them. Shannon always got to sing the Courtney Love songs, and Josh played so much guitar that his fingers bled one day. He taped them up in Band-Aids and played on.

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.

It 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.