Dirty Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain

many years go by or whatever your political views—if you want to gab, share stories, bond, and have lunch, please give me a call. I promise to answer your questions, share my waving technique and other tricks I have picked up, give you a decent meal, and maybe gossip a little. Like Alice Roosevelt Longworth used to say: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

Chapter 10
Gentle Folk of the Media
    A GQ piece about me landed on the newsstands ten days after the White House visit. News of it swept through the campaign staff like wildfire and my phone never stopped ringing. Everybody wanted to tell me—in case I didn’t already know—what I’d done wrong. Emotions weren’t just running high. They were bouncing and pinging, ricocheting like atoms splitting inside a nuclear reactor.
    If you track down the piece on the Internet now, it won’t seem shocking or make me appear to be as maniacally stupid as it did at the time. That alone is a lesson in context. The backdrop of a presidential campaign has a way of magnifying and distorting all flaws, all bumps, anything out of the ordinary.
    But I didn’t feel out of the ordinary. I felt like an ass.
    Normally, I am not big on the concept of regret. Or I should say that I don’t believe in sitting around wallowing and wishing things were different. It’s a cliché, but true, that we learn some of the most important things in life by our failures and mistakes. If we never had things that we were sorry we’d done, or sorry we’d said, we would never be forced to take a hard look at ourselves—and make changes for the better.
    Even so, I regret just about everything that I was quoted as saying to the GQ reporter, regret spending hours alone with him, regret going bowling with him, regret hugging him good-bye ( WHAT WAS I THINKING??? ), and, most of all, regret allowing the magazine to photograph me working on my laptop while sitting on top of a bed with an open bottle of Bud Light in my hand.
    Mistakes were made, is what I want to say. And I learned from every single one.
    THE BLOG WAS GATHERING STEAM—AND REACHING A mini boiling point that spring. A number of newspapers had written about it, and political sites had started linking to it regularly. Our regular audience was growing. Obviously, the fact that my dad was winning put me and the blog in the spotlight. After the New Hampshire primary, we had a great stretch of victories. Suddenly the media world was noticing everything we did and said.
    Steve Schmidt acted surprised each time we won—which irritated me, I have to admit. He was so hard-bitten and lacking in joy. But I suppose his pessimism was a leveler, and kept people focused. For my family and me, the win in South Carolina was particularly sweet. The voters were gracious and warm and softened the bitter memories of what had happened eight years before. I was able to see that it wasn’t the state or the people of South Carolina that had caused so much pain and disappointment for my dad and all of us. In a way, the smear of 2000 had tarnished the South Carolinians even more than it had my dad—and made them look like mudslinging racists, ignorant and pliable, when the spirit of the state is infectiously warm and generous and kind.
    The night of our victory in South Carolina, I jumped around so much during the mass celebrating that the heel of my boot came off. An incredible party ensued at the hotel where the campaign was staying—the most fun primary party of all. Nobody wanted to break it up and head to dinner, so Piper placed a four-hundred-dollar pizza order to be delivered to the lobby of our hotel.
    After Super Tuesday in March, when my father won in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont and gathered enough electoral votes and delegates to be the Republican nominee, the campaign regrouped—shifting its focus from worrying about Romney and Huckabee to worrying about the Democrats, and trying to calculate who