The Social Animal (45 page)

She had always seen herself as a hustling young Horatio Alger girl. But she’d been through a period in which she was consumed by her quest. She would now right herself and sail on to better shores.

The redemption narrative helped Erica organize her view of herself. It helped her build integrity—integrating inner ideals with automatic action. It helped her attain maturity. Maturity means understanding, as much as possible, the different characters and modules that are active inside your own head. The mature person is like a river guide who goes over rapids and says, “Yes, I have been over these spots before.”

In the following months, Erica rediscovered her love for Harold, and couldn’t imagine what she’d been thinking before. He would never be an earthshaking titan like Mr. Make-Believe. But he was humble and good and curious. And with his disparate curiosities and research frenzies, he was engaged in the most important search, the search to find meaning in life. People like that are worth staying close to. In any case, he was hers. Over the course of many years they had become intertwined, and their relationship might not be inspiring or exciting and dynamic all the time, but it was her life, and the answer to any malaise consisted in going deeper into it and not trying to escape into some mythical land of make-believe.

THE
LEADER

THEY
FIRST
MET
THE
MAN
WHO
WOULD
BE
PRESIDENT
BACKSTAGE
before a campaign rally. He was still campaigning for the party nomination at that point and had been calling Erica for weeks to “bring her on the team.” His staff had spent weeks looking for women, minorities, and people with business experience to bring into senior positions, and Erica was a trifecta. Grace called to talk for about forty-five seconds nearly every day—wooing, begging, laying it on thick with his instant intimacy and flattering persistence. “How’s it going, sister? Have you made a decision?” And so she found herself in a high-school classroom next to a packed gym, with Harold in tow. They were supposed to meet him now, watch a rally, and then talk in the van on the way to the next event.

About thirty people milled about timidly in the classroom, none touching the cookies or cans of Coke. Suddenly there was a rhythm of rushing steps, and in he burst, somehow bathed in his own illumination. Erica was so used to seeing him on television that now she had the disorienting sensation that she was watching him on some super
HDTV
, not actually seeing him in the flesh.

Richard Grace was the projection of a great national fantasy—tall, flat stomach, gleaming white shirt, perfectly creased slacks, historically important hair, Gregory Peck face. He was followed by his famously wild daughter—the promiscuous beauty whose behavior was the product of a childhood marked mostly by paternal neglect. Behind them, there was a bevy of ugly-duckling aides. The aides had the same interests as Grace, the same secret ambitions as he, but they had paunches, thinning hair, a slouch, so they were destined to play the role of whispering tacticians, while he was Political Adonis. Because of these minor genetic differences, they’d spent their lives as hall monitors and he’d spent his life getting away with things.

Grace swept the room with a glance and saw immediately it was used to teach health class, with anatomical posters of the male and female reproductive systems on one wall. There wasn’t even a conscious disturbance across his mind; just the vaguest ripple of knowledge that he couldn’t allow himself to get photographed with a uterus and a dick splayed out behind his shoulders. He slid to the other side of the room.

He hadn’t been alone in six months. He’d been the center of attention in every room he entered for the past six years. He had cast off from normal reality and lived now only off the fumes of the campaign, feeding off human contact the way other people survive on food and sleep.

He was all energy and adrenaline as he moved around the classroom. In rapid succession, he gave his Man-of-Destiny smile to a quartet of World War II vets, to two overawed honor students, six local donors, and a county commissioner. Like a running back, he knew how to keep his legs moving. Talk, laugh, hug, but never stop moving. A thousand intimate encounters a day.

People told him the most amazing things. “I love you.” ... ”I love you, too.” ... ”Hit him harder!” ... ”I’d trust you with my son’s life.” ... ”Can I have just five minutes?” ... ”Can I have a job?” They told him about the most awful health-care tragedies. They wanted to give him things—books, artwork, letters. Some just grabbed his arm and melted.

He surrendered himself to fifteen-second bursts of contact, detecting and reflecting, with that razor sense of his, the play of movement around each person’s lips and the expression in their eyes. Everyone got sympathy and everyone got a touch; he’d touch arms, shoulders, and hips. He’d send out these momentary pulsar beams of bonhomie or compassion, and he never showed impatience with the celebrity drill. A camera would appear. He’d drape his arm around each person as they posed with him. Over the years, he’d developed a mastery of every instant camera manufactured on earth, and if the photographer stumbled, he could throw out patient advice on which button to push and how long to hold it down, and he could do it like a ventriloquist without altering his smile. He could take attention and turn it into energy.

Finally, he came over to where Erica and Harold were standing. He gave her a hug, offered Harold the sly conspiratorial grin he reserved for trailing spouses, and then brought them into the envelope of his greatness. With the others in the room he’d been ebullient and loud. With them, he was insiderish, quiet, and confidential. “We’ll visit later,” he whispered in Erica’s ear. “I’m so glad you could come ... so glad.” He gave her a serious, knowing look, then clapped his hand behind Harold’s head while staring into his eyes as if they were partners in some conspiracy. Then he was gone.

They heard a rapturous roar from the gym and hustled over to watch the show. It was a thousand people smiling at their hero, waving at him, bouncing on their sneakers, screaming their heads off, and pointing their camera phones. He flung off his jacket and basked there in the rush of support.

The stump speech had a simple structure: twelve minutes of “you” and twelve minutes of “me.” For the first half, he talked about his audience’s common sense, about their fine values, about the wonderful way they had united to build this great cause. He wasn’t there to teach them anything, or argue for something. He was there to give voice to their feelings, to express back to them their hopes, fears, and desires, to show them that he was just like them, could possibly be a friend or a family member, even though he was so much prettier.

So for twelve minutes he told them about their lives. He’d said all this hundreds of times, but he still paused at crucial moments, as if a sentiment had just popped into mind. He gave them a chance to applaud their own ideas. “This movement is about you and what you are doing for this country.”

Grace, like most first-class minds in his business, tried to find a compromise between what his voters wanted to hear and what he felt they needed to hear. They were normal people who paid only sporadic attention to policy, and he tried to respect their views and passions. At the same time he thought of himself as a real policy wonk, who loved nothing more than to dive down into an issue with a crowd of experts. He tried to keep these two conversations within shouting distance of each other in his head. Occasionally he’d give himself permission to flat out pander, and say the crude half-truth that got the big applause. He was a mass-market brand, after all, and had to win the votes of millions. But he also tried to keep his own real views in his head, too, for the sake of his self-respect. Fed by adulation, the former was always threatening to smother the latter.

In the final half of the speech, Grace turned to the “Me” section. He tried to show his audience that he possessed the traits the country needed at that moment in history. He talked about his parents—he was the son of a truck driver and a librarian. He talked about his dad’s membership in the union. He made it clear, as all candidates must, that his character was formed before he ever thought about politics—in his case by his military service and the death of his sister. He told all the facts of his life, and they were all sort of true but he had repeated them so many times he’d lost contact with the actual reality of the events. His childhood and early manhood was just the script he had been campaigning on all his life.

Self-definition is the essence of every campaign, and Grace stuck to his narrative, which, as one consultant had put it, was “Tom Sawyer grows up.” He described his small-town Midwestern upbringing, his charming pranks, the lessons he learned about the wider world and the injustice contained in it. He showed his wholesome manners, which came from a simpler time, his innocent virtue and his common sense.

The final passage of the speech was “You and I Together.” He told an anecdote about a meeting with a wise old lady who told him stories that just happened to confirm every plank in his campaign platform. He told them about the acres of diamonds they would seize together, the garden of plenty they would find at the end of the road, the place where inner conflict would be replaced by peace and joy. Nobody in the audience really thought a political campaign could produce such utopia, but for the moment the vision of it swept them away and erased all tension from their lives. They loved Grace for giving them that. As he finished his speech, shouting over their cheers and applause, the gym went wild.

An aide appeared and swept Erica and Harold into the van—Erica in the middle row and Harold in the rear. Grace appeared cool and matter-of-fact, as if he had just come from a dull meeting on quarterly-earnings reports. He made a few scheduling consultations with an aide, did a three-minute cell-phone interview with a radio station, and then turned his laser beam on Erica, who was sitting next to him.

“First I want to make my offer,” he said. “I have political people and I have policy people, but I don’t have anybody first-rate who will make this organization run. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll do, be the chief operating officer of the campaign and then do the same thing in the White House after I win.”

Erica wouldn’t have been in the van unless she was prepared to say yes to his offer, which she did.

“That’s fantastic. Now that you’ve committed, I want to tell you both about the world you two are about to enter. I especially want to tell you, Harold, because I’ve read your work, and I think you’re going to find yourself in a strange new place.

“The first thing to say is that nobody who is in this business has any right to complain. We choose it and it has its pleasures and rewards. But between us, there is no arena in which the character challenges are so large. You don’t get to serve unless you win. To win you have to turn yourself into a product. You have to do things you never thought you would do. You have to put your sense of reserve on the back burner and beg for money and favors. You have to talk endlessly. Walk into a room and talk, walk into a rally and talk, meet with supporters and talk. I call it logorrhea dementia—talking so much you drive yourself insane.

“And what do you talk about? You have to talk endlessly about yourself. Every speech is about me. Every meeting I have is about me. Every article that’s shoved under my nose is about me. When they start writing about you, it’ll happen to you, too.

“At the same time, this is a team sport. You can’t do anything alone, which means you sometimes have to suppress your individual ideas and say and believe the things that are good for the party and the team. You have to be brothers in arms with people you probably wouldn’t like if you gave yourself a minute to think about it. You can’t get too far out in front of your party or the people you serve. You can’t be right too early or interesting too often. You have to support measures you really oppose and sometimes object to things you think are for the good. You have to pretend that when you’re elected you’ll be able to control everything and change everything. You have to pretend that the team myths are true. You have to pretend that the other team is uniquely evil, and would be the ruin of America. Saying otherwise is seen as a threat to party solidarity, and that’s just the way it is.

“You live in a cocoon. I once read a beautiful essay on the life of a tick. A tick can apparently respond to only three types of stimulus. It knows skin. It knows temperature. It knows hair. Those three things constitute the entire
umwelt
for a tick. ‘
Umwelt
‘ is a word for the relevant environment of any creature. When you’re in this business your umwelt will shrink and be crazy. You will be asked to pay furious attention to minute-by-minute breaking-news stories of no consequence, which you will completely forget by the next day. You will find yourself monitoring the blogs of the twenty-two-year-old kids with their webcams who have been sent out to cover this campaign—kids who have never seen an election before, who have no sense of history and the attention span of a ferret. Because of their presence you can never utter an unrehearsed thought. You can never try out a notion in public.

“All of these things threaten your ability to be honest with yourself, to see the world clearly, to have some basic integrity as a person. And yet we endure this theater of the absurd because there is no other life so filled with consequence. When you are in the White House with me, you will be busier than ever and every decision will be an important decision. Once we’re in the White House, we won’t have to pander to the nation so much. We’ll be able to lead and educate it. When we’re there, you will never want to take time off, and you won’t.

“Once we’re in the White House, we’re not going to swing for singles. We’re going to hit home runs. I refuse to be a timid president. I’m going to be a great president. I have the gifts. I know more about more policy areas than anybody else in this country. I have more political courage than anybody in politics. My attitude is going to be, ‘I’ve got game. Give me the ball.’ ”