The White House Correspondents' Dinner Versus My Son Going to Bed

I really, really do not get the White House Correspondents' Dinner. All day and night in Washington, DC politicians and reporters snipe at/congratulate/laugh with/laugh at each other. But apparently they also need one night out of the year to explicitly do all that or something. Anyway, I didn't watch it before, and I sure as hell won't watch it now that I have a toddler to coax to sleep. And that brings me to tonight's adventure.

So without further comment, I present to you my son going to bed:

Have Baby, Want Case File

If you research for a living you go into a lot of courthouses. Perhaps one of ten of these courthouses is a positive experience. You walk in and it's clean, well-lit, has computers purchased within the past five years and helpful staff.

The rest of the time it's a nightmare. It's hard to even get in to the courthouse, because the metal detector doesn't work. The computers are ancient abacuses with software that makes no sense. The staff...are there even staff? There are a lot of people just milling around behind the counter, but they're not there to, like, sort case files or get what you want. What should be a thirty minute trip turns into a two-hour trip and even then you probably don't get the material you want.

That is, unless you're a man with a baby.

Now let's get the standard disclaimer out of the way. Yes this is all very sexist and wrong. Moms with babies don't get the time of day from your median public servant/clerk/passerby. People see women with children and shrug, or even grumble about noisy kids. No big deal, joys of motherhood, societal role, etc. But a man with a baby, now that's impressive. I don't even have to do anything with the Nonvoter. Just standing there and not accidentally strangling him makes me a paragon of virtue. It's a terrible behavior pattern and it should change.

In the meantime, the Nonvoter is awesome to take to the courthouse. I zip right through, the Opinion Leader gets some time to herself, everyone wins!*

It's a breeze from start to finish. At the metal detector, people wave me through in line. Some of the lawyers even look vaguely guilty while doing it. That's right ambulance chaser, when was your last father-son work day, hmm?  People get out of the always-jammed elevators. They coo and compliment me on my awesome son and parenting while doing so! Yep, there he is, still not murdered, parent of the year right here.

And once I get to the office? The people there help me. They wave me over and look things up themselves. They double and triple check the files I want. They make faces and wave at the Nonvoter while I sort through the files. Hell, once they even offered to make copies for me!

It's like magic. These very same people go right back to staring dully at people behind me and mumbling that they can't read the file request/aren't supposed to give legal advice/are on break the moment I'm on my way.

And I feel slightly bad about it. There's a lot of people there who do need help, help of the getting screwed and needing legal redress variety. And of course, there are a lot of women with kids who don't get the same treatment, particularly in the domestic division- divorce, deadbeat dads, et cetera. It's unfair bordering on heartbreaking.

On the other hand, a three hour trip with the Nonvoter maybe making things difficult for the Opinion Leader has now turned into a one hour trip that the Nonvoter loves. I just have to keep him from chewing on the case files.

*Well except my targets. But they shouldn't have driven drunk/beaten their wives/not paid their taxes/gotten parking tickets and then run for public office to begin with.

Flashback: The First Few Months

No rest for the wicked. Or the parents.

Every so often another cable news anchor has a baby and throws a huge fit at the state of parental leave in the U.S. And then those of us who don't make enough money to keep half a dozen nannies on retainer point and laugh. A for effort, you have approximated human emotion!

The Nonvoter was born in April of 2012, and that meant no leave. You can't just take off of consulting in April of an on-year. That's game time. That's when everyone buys research. They've had their one decent quarter of fundraising and have a bit of money to spend and oh god the election is in six months we need research! If he had arrived in April of 2011 or 2013 I could have taken as much time as I wanted, because no one hires anyone in April of odd-years. Alas, working like crazy during the on-year is what pays the mortgage in the off-year. So work it was.

It didn't even stop while he was being born. There were calls, there were emails. The only reason I didn't get calls in the middle of making all the family and friends calls was that he was born fairly early in the morning. There was work to do, and I was the only one around to do it. After we visited the Nonvoter in the NICU* for the first time, my wife kissed him and whispered "Daddy has to go hurt bad people now."

It was theoretically going to be okay. We had planned for it. I had moved my schedule and production around, let the appropriate clients know. Because planning is totally a game-changer with babies.

Of course it all went to hell.

2012 was the worst year of my career. It was even worse then 2009, when no Democrat thought they had to spend money on research and no one had money to give them for research anyway. I blew leads. I blew sales. I blew deadlines. I blew one job because I wrote the whole proposal up, carefully proofread it, then forgot to click "send." I found the email three weeks later.

I don't even know how I managed what work I did do. The parent books might be crap but they get one thing right: the first few months sink into a blur pretty quickly. Sometimes I worked during naps. Sometimes it was after bedtime. Sometimes I crawled off to a coffee shop and felt like a total heel. A lot more times than I care to count I wound up throwing myself on the mercy of the client, especially if the client also had kids. I remember exactly one specific thing- the Nonvoter falling asleep in my arm while I read through county board minutes from I forget where with the other. I mostly remember it because I wanted to fall asleep too.

I have no lessons learned here. It sucked, I floundered around a lot and lost potential clients and money. It also worked out okay, which is not nothing. The Nonvoter eventually was okay for minutes and minutes and the Opinion Leader and I learned how set a sort of schedule and otherwise work around him. It wasn't great, but it could have been worse. In the end it was inertia that kept me moving at work. I had been around for two cycles and two cycles is half a career in politics. You can do the job in your sleep after that.

And that's a good thing, because I'm pretty sure that's how I did most of my 2012 work.

*Yeah, there was a trip to the NICU. Thank you American health care system. Seriously.

No You May Not Watch West Wing

Wah waaaaaah

All right let's get this out of the way. Someone asked so I'm just going to clear it up. To hell with the West Wing. I hate it. The West Wing poisoned an entire generation of mostly Democratic television watchers. Campaigns are the worse for that show. So the real answer to this stupid question is "Nonvoter why don't you watch something a little less inappropriate and vulgar, like hardcore pornography?"

But since it was asked, here are my thoughts on characters on the West Wing and the acceptability of the Nonvoter liking/emulating them:

UPDATE: All right folks, I got schooled on this and rightfully so. Almost all of the original characters I wrote up were white men. That's on me. I could put it on Sorkin's writing, but I won't. So I added a few more. However I am not writing about Charlie, because being the explicit token black hire as a personal valet is a depressing career choice.

Bruno: I have no idea what this ULTRA TEEVEE CONSULTANT did to earn his multimillion dollar contracts, so I'm going to just assume it was nothing, and that he got paid eight figures to do crossword puzzles at White House senior staff. Also, he switched parties as a retirement gesture. That's pretty boss if you can pull it off.   ASSESSMENT: Go forth and make me proud, son!

Joey: I would rather the Nonvoter give consulting and politics a pass entirely, but if he must follow in my footsteps, and he must do honest work for market-rate pay, I'd rather he take after Joey. She does a job, she does it well. She has corporate clients as well as political ones. She doesn't get into the ego soothing game. She just shows up and polls and that's that. Job well done. ASSESSMENT: Just so long as you don't do something stupid like vote.

Sam: We're getting into sketchy territory here. Sam was a regular offender in the soaring bullshit tearjerker speech that inexplicably makes things happen. Also, he went to run for Congress (blech) in Orange County (gag). But on the other hand Sam did make his fortune before he went to go play at politics, and he managed to step right back into making stupid obscene money working for deeply awful people. I can respect that. ASSESSMENT: If you must.

CJ: CJ is not that bad, grading on the terrible curve of show characters. She's good at her job, she has a conscience but isn't too loud about it, and anyone who has to deal with the press all day always has my heartfelt sympathies. On the other hand, she went about it all the wrong way, only making a little money before getting into politics and cashing in after rising to the top. That's respectable, but the safer bet is always money first, freakshow-as-government after. So if the Nonvoter really wants to do it the hard way, sure. ASSESSMENT: I guess it will build character.

Leo: In the same category as Sam, in that he made his money before getting into elections and all that nonsense. But he also had a pretty crummy personal life, got picked for vice president basically to just piss everyone else off, and died an early death from a bum ticker. ASSESSMENT: Quit while you're ahead. Also watch out for fried foods.

Ainsley: I mean...sure. Being the token hire from the other party is an entirely respectable career decision, and there's decent enough money in it. But if that's the way the Nonvoter wants to go, I'd recommend holding out for something higher and better than assistant associate counsel or whatever. After all, she gave up a pretty great gig as a cable news shouter for that. ASSESSMENT: Just stick with the cable news gig! There's no shame in it!

Louise: No! No no, NO! Snapping off internet burns is not good consulting! It isn't even consulting at all! We have Twitter for that! And that meeting where everyone was just blowing smoke up Josh's ass to get a piece of the media buy? WHY DIDN'T YOU WANT A PIECE OF THE MEDIA BUY? ASSESSMENT: Get a real job, son.

Josh: Um. How to say this. He opens by offering his ex-girlfriend a job just so he can boss her around (complete with taunting her about writing an organizational chart that just says he gets to boss her around), he gets another girlfriend fired for the high crime of doing her job and promoting women's health, and the top of his self-actualization pyramid is fucking his assistant. ASSESSMENT: Son we need to talk about women and relationships.

Toby: Everyone, EVERYONE hates Toby. Even people with the bad sense and taste to like the West Wing hate Toby. Because he's an asshole. Not even a funny one or a smart one. He's just mean. And he's not the "idealist." Good grief, the whole cast fits the "misunderstood idealist" billing. He's a self-pitying martyr. And he committed treason! Treason isn't okay! Even if budget cuts mean some astronauts are going to die! And setting all that aside...he's a real jerk to his father, who comes off as a decent sort even though his job was pretty lousy/evil/etc. :( :( :( ASSESSMENT: Don't be like Toby.

Bartlet: Having worked in professional politics for many years now I'm kind of horrified at the thought that a parent would want his child to grow up and be president. You want your offspring to spend at least four years begging rich people for money, promising favors he will never be able to deliver, getting screamed at by everyone from Twitter to [cable news station in opposition to your preference], marked for death by various lunatics and requiring round the clock protection? But even setting aside the, like, actual job...Bartlet? Really? Covering up a severe, erratic mental disability, killing heads of state during diplomatic excursions, chickening out from doing his damn job when his daughter is kidnapped, and responding to members of Congress and your own staff getting blown to bits with a peace summit? Forget bad president, that guy's a self-indulgent psychopath. Don't run for president, but if you do, aim higher than Sorkin Jesus. ASSESSMENT: YOU ARE NO LONGER MY SON!

The Manuals Are Useless

It's time to face facts: dad  books are awful.

I mean, every dad gets roped into reading What to Expect When You're Expecting, and every dad is going to have to weigh in on at least one bizarre scare scenario that book lays out. Then you go out and buy a bunch of dad books and it turns out most of them cram first year parenting in with pregnancy so you get two phases of mansplaining and crappy jokes in one book. You're probably going to buy a couple so feel free to check my math, reading the banal Everything Father-to-Be book or the vaguely amusing but equally unhelpful Pop Culture or the Guy's Guide to Surviving Toddlers, Tantrums and Separation Anxiety (Yours, Not Your Kid's!). I did not make the last title up. And if you think that's bad, check out a representative section:

So I volunteered to be the one to change what was not only my first diaper but also my son's very first poopy diaper. At the time, we had a few people in the room with us, and I asked them all to leave. You'll understand this when your time comes, believe me. I was nervous enough; I didn't need an audience at this very moment to intimidate me further.

Fucking seriously? You got performance anxiety over changing your first diaper? Jesus Christ. It's a diaper. Put it on backwards, put it on forwards. Put it on halfassed. You're going to be changing a million of them so you're going to get plenty of practice. And if you're afraid of looking like a stupid asshole in the course of being a parent I got some really bad news for you too. Go ahead and call the audience back in. They probably have good advice. Ignore or yell at them at your leisure, it's one of the perks of the job.

So you run up against two issues in these dad books. The first is that there's no real consensus on what dads are even supposed to be doing. There's just agreement that the job requires more than OUR dads (and thanks for that, our dads?). Most of them have this bizarre fifth wheel quality too, like you're never going to be as queen awesome as Mom because diapers are such a puzzle. Or something. But I can deal with the role fuzziness: no one has any idea what consultants are supposed to do either, least of all the actual consultants. We don't get licensed, and our only professional association is a self congratulation club that charges too much for conferences. If whatever you're doing is working then, well, it's working. If not you figure it out.

The other issue is that manuals are great for low variance situations. For example, when assembling furniture. Prong A, Slot B, Bolt C, apply screwdriver, admire work. There isn't any scenario where the leaning desk vomits right in your face or inexplicably won't eat despite being clearly hungry and furious about it. It's just a desk. Follow instructions and it will work. On the other hand, there's high-variance situations. Then you can learn as much as you want but it's not going to help that much. Take research consulting. There's a lot of stuff you do need to know, like which taxes are public record or what a lien is and when it is bad. Unfortunately consulting means applying this knowledge to campaigns, where the candidates are crazy and the managers are driven crazy. The manuals don't cover what to say when the candidate chickens out of using the three best attacks then yells at you because your last ditch attack is lame and thinly sourced. Or when the candidate "forgot" about a previous divorce.* Beyond staying calm and talking it out with the other grownup in the room, there's not a whole lot to say in advance.

So, uh. Stay calm and talk it out with the other grownup in the room. And stop buying the dad books, it will only encourage them to write more of them.

*The number of candidate v. baby/toddler comparisons is probably infinite.

Obama Staff and Parents With Easy Kids

So the Nonvoter just had his first birthday, and we survived his first birthday party. There was a lot of domestic panic that everyone would see the house as it normally is and then the little jerk cut off his nap prior to the event, turning into an overtired wreck. But we made it work, and I even got to talk to some parent friends while the Opinion Leader* took a turn dealing with our son. One of them had a baby who was, relatively speaking, angelic. Quiet, content to just check out the place and chew on her own fingers, put up with being held without any struggling/punching/choke holds at ALL. And the mom gave me a look that was oddly familiar. Sympathetic, mildly guilty, relieved.

"I can't even imagine what it's like," she said. "It's stressful enough when she fusses, which isn't often."

The funny thing is, I've seen that look and received that sympathy before. It's just come from Obama staff, specifically their 2008 variety.

We all saw/cursed/applauded Barack Obama's re-election in 2012, and we're all in basic agreement that he had a pretty hard time of it, what with the unemployment and the Tea Party and whatnot. But of course this was not always the case. There was also the Obama of 2008. He didn't just raise money, he DROWNED in it. He had so much cash he did gaudy, ridiculous things like buy an hour-long infomercial, ads in people's Xbox games, and even ads in his opponent's home state just to be an asshole. He won Indiana, for God's sake. For being the first black president he made it look pretty easy.

And of course since he raised infinity money, he hired a bunch of staff, kids and idealists who had no appreciable skills or reason to be on a serious, functional campaign. They hit the political job market in 2009 with their one shiny resume line and were very pleased with themselves. Meanwhile, the rest of us had been working on actual competitive campaigns. The kind where the candidate is kind of a shit and never raises enough money and a zillion dollars in third party** ads drops on your head and god am I even going to get paid? I'm not going to get paid am I. God damn it.

So in the same way my home life has parents of kids who don't attempt ritual murder-suicide at every nap time, my work life has those people who don't get that politics is, in the median, a discouraging, unpleasant occupation. We don't get the choice of working for the inspiring guy, just like we don't get the choice of putting the Nonvoter back to sleep for the third time that hour, at 3 am. It's nice when it's rewarding, but a lot of the time it's not.

Of course, there's no point begrudging people good luck. And the fact is it doesn't matter in the long term. The 2010 elections made all of us Democrats assholes anyway. And any given parent might have a sleep-through-the-night wonder baby today, but sooner or later he's going to have a nightmare toddler, or teenager, or whatever. We all got it coming; some of us just get it a lot earlier and harder.

*Ie, my wife

**527s, super pacs, you get the idea

Conference Calls

Tough crowd!

Everybody's a critic, et cetera, but this is a very good question! Much like conference calls in any other profession, campaign calls are 1) a show of commitment and 2) a colossal waste of time. They exist to force consultants to regularly confirm that we are still around and care very deeply about winning the election, even if we don't care that deeply at all or if our caring has dropped off a bit because our invoices haven't been paid. On the other hand, diapers. Or nap time, or snack time, or Nonvoter just plain bored time. So you have to employ a few tricks to change that diaper during the call.

First of all, the phone has voices and a glowing screen and its buttons go beep. That's baby crack. You're going to need at least an awesome a toy to distract the Nonvoter for the duration of the call. And holding it against your head is a bad idea: kisses and raspberries are a premium tool to keep the kid quiet and you don't want him to grab the phone while deploying them. Keep it in your back pocket, or some place similarly out of sight and reach.

The best way to do it is to get your part out of the way up front. If your turn to talk is later it could actually come up at any time because of other consultants flaking or going faster than you expect. And you don't want to race the clock or have to lurch for the mute button with your hands covered in shit. So ask if you can go first because something is pressing, you have to jump off later, whatever. This usually works because no one, NO ONE, wants to go first on the call. Then when you're done be sure to ask "any questions?" twice. You ask twice because no one is paying attention, but we all kind of tune into long pauses so everyone will hear you the second time (and also not pay attention). Will they have questions later? Sure, but fuck it, you already asked and you have pressing consultant shit to do. Like changing diapers.

If you missed that or someone else thought of that first there's still a backup plan. Most campaigns inevitably talk about fundraising on their calls, because the candidate isn't doing call time. So the manager will inevitably beg the consultants for advice on how to raise money. This is a a pointless waste of time so any questions thrown your way will be dumb and you can feel free to just ignore them. If you're lucky the candidate himself will be on and it will drag on even longer:

(Someone): So how's the money doing?

Candidate: I'm doing everything I can and I'm always on the phone, ALWAYS!

(Pause as everyone tastefully does not admit they do not believe this in the slightest)

(Someone): Well you could try calling...

Then hopefully everything wraps up with the team none the wiser that you've been focused more on applying coconut oil to your offsping's genitals than on the getting the endorsement of the committeeman of stumblebum nowhere, or whatever.

Diaper CHANGED, commitment to the cause AFFIRMED, value ADDED.

You're welcome.

Sleep Versus Call Time: A Comparison

It's been hours. You don't even know what time it is. Your eyes are stinging and your vision is blurred. Your partner is rocking to herself in the corner with an alarming, vacant expression. There's been a lot of crying, some of it from yourself. And all you can think of is why the little brat won't just DO IT already.

I am talking, of course, about getting candidates to do call time.

For the (mercifully) uninitiated, call time is the foundation of all political campaigns. For various reasons we require campaigns to be funded by charitable contributions, and the only reliable way to get enough of those is for the candidate to sit in a room and call a bunch of people until they send money. It's really simple and almost effortless. So of course candidates won't do it. Ever. Every manager has had to yell at her candidate to get back to fucking call time. Even Barack Obama's manger did it. I guarantee you.

So as you might imagine, this has a lot of parallels with that time-honored, torturous ritual of getting your infant to go to goddamned sleep. I'd say they're identical, except that it's actually easier to get a recalcitrant, angry, shrieking baby to sleep than it is to get your average candidate into call time. After all, the baby is EVENTUALLY going to pass out in total exhaustion. He may not do it right now. He may not do it before YOU pass out in total exhaustion. But it's going to happen. Not so much for call time, even though the candidates will absolutely, 100% lose, do not pass Go, do not start "grassroots campaign" lose, unless they pick up the stupid phone and make the stupid calls.

With that in mind here is a comparison of the many ways candidates avoid call time and young children avoid sleep. All of the tactics in either column have been reliably confirmed to me or experienced by myself:

Candidate Dodging Call Time	Baby Dodging Sleep
Scream like an angry baby	Scream like an angry candidate
Hide under the table	Hide under the table
Take interns out for coffee	Giggle and play quietly showing no outward signs of fatigue
Fake phone calls	Fake being asleep
Flee the country	Flee the room
Start fights	Punch parent in windpipe/claw at eyes
Stick hands in pants to avoid touching phone	Take giant shit
Demand to look at questionnaire drafts/ads/press release copy over and over	Demand same book be read over and over
Wear manager down into insane nervous wreck	Wear parent down into insane nervous wreck

Parenthood Is A Leading Cause of Hypocrisy

Today I finally knuckled down and got my business a PO Box. Part of the reason was practical: a really silly dollar amount of my clients' checks has been lost in the mail and removing one of the transfer points makes a lost check slightly less likely. But mostly it was because parenthood has turned me into a privacy hypocrite, right on cue. 

It's my business to learn the personal details of total strangers. Home addresses, dates of birth, property tax payments...this stuff is effortlessly easy for me to find. Force of practice. Social security numbers are a bit harder but public records aren't nearly as scrubbed as we like to imagine. I find this stuff, I use it for legal and (to me) legitimate purposes and I don't think twice about it.

That's my job. I like it just fine. And until recently I lived the part too. When I had an office that address was on all my promotional materials, but when I started working from home my home address went on the masthead too. Because why not? It's the work of a minute for me to find this out anyway so I assume that's the median ease of discovery. We live in an age of Google and Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and a good portion of everyone's life laid out for the mildly curious to discover. The possibility of some weirdo having the ability to find us and the disposable time and resources to bother us is just another part of the price tag for smartphones and the other modern marvels. Besides, I work for politicians, and despite what you might have heard from House of Cards or the next dramatization, politicians are mostly just dorks and lobbyists in training.

Or so I thought, till the arrival of the Nonvoter. Parenthood is a negotiation of worry, and none of us are immune to that. When I first went into business I was serenely confident that I could handle the worst personal annoyance the job presented. In the other hand, any parent claiming to be serenely confident of anything is crazy or lying. Or both.  So now I do think about those clients whose money I am happy to take but to whom I would never introduce my son for eighteen years or more. I think of the criminal records, the domestic disturbances, the obviously crazy candidates. I think about the campaign staff and "consultants" who think street money is a good idea and aren't too picky about who gets that money.  I work with all of these people, happily. I even drink with them. They are just people doing their thing, and I can handle whatever comes with the working with them.

But the Nonvoter can't. He can't even handle sleeping through the night or using a toilet.

So the PO Box it is. Is it hypocritical? Certainly. But parenting isn't about internal consistency. It's about diapers and doctor visits and do as I say, not as I've done. I won't even pretend to justify it by saying I'm not running for office so I don't deserve the same scrutiny. There's no moral charge to my job, and there's no value difference between writing a book on myself or some other random taxpayer for fun and writing a book on some random obnoxious Congressman for money.

It's just parenthood: enabling hypocrisy since the dawn of time.