The Ties That Bind - Chapter 1

TEASER: This is the beginning of a story idea which explores the relationship between politicians and reporters, and on a deeper level, explores the relationship between humans on opposing sides of political arguments in a time when both liberals and conservatives resort to spewing hatred, rather than making sincere efforts to understand each other's points of view.

For me, someone who works as a reporter in Washington, the story I am working on gives me a chance to develop relationship between people who can connect on a deeper human level, rather than simply hating each other because of political ideology. It's about the moments of life that bind us together when all else ceases to be important, and unexpected friendships.

Chapter 1.

The roars were coming from every direction.

She took a deep breath and opened the door, delivering a smile to the expectant faces below. A blood-thirsty pack of reporters swarmed around the door of her campaign bus – each one of them eager to gauge her reaction to being slammed and branded a “brain-dead bitch” by a national television personality less than twenty-four hours ago.

All days she had kept quiet on the incident, running from one campaign event to another, dodging questions and delaying the inevitable – but now that an apology had been issued by both the host and the network, reporters were sure she'd break her silence.

“I accept his apology,” she began. “But there’s no excuse for Mike Shannon or anyone else to resort to this sort of immature name-calling. It has no place in our public discourse.”

“Did Mike Shannon call you personally?”

“He did. He was very apologetic.”

“Do you think he’s sincere?”

“He’s sincerely sorry that he said what he said, but I’m assuming his opinion of me hasn’t changed since last night. Now, there’s your quote. Go file your stories and I’ll see you in Des Moines tonight.”

A couple of reporters laughed – awkwardly.

Mike Shannon’s opinion was not an oddity among the talking heads, reporters and pundits. It was the rule, not the exception: They thought she was an idiot.

“But were you hurt by the comments, Congresswoman?” shouted one enthusiastic young reporter from the back of the pack.

“It takes more than that to rattle me, folks. You should know that by now.”

Then, in typical fashion, the unimposing, tiny but tough, and uniquely attractive Republican Congresswoman Vanesa Barnes from the great northern and snowy state of Wisconsin gave the reporters a cheeky smile and shooed them off.

As the group broke up and dispersed themselves, one reporter held back, giving a wave in the Congresswoman’s direction.

Katie Clifford knew she'd see Barnes later during post-Caucus celebrations – or commiserations – one or the other.

She rarely enjoyed the company of a reporter, but the Congresswoman, much to her initial surprise, did like Katie – a reporter roughly thirty years her junior.

And the feeling was mutual.

In fact, so mutual was the feeling that Katie knew, right then and there that she was not the best person for this story.

But she had no intention of giving it up.

As a general rule, Katie enjoyed writing about the public figures she liked and admired – and yet they were always the trickiest stories, requiring constant editing and re-reading to identify and remove any bias that might creep in.

It was even more difficult, Katie thought, to write objectively about a person she liked, than a person she didn’t like. Writing about someone she couldn’t stand, she always found herself easily able to stick to the facts – but with someone who had endeared him or herself to her, the temptation to promote them through her work was always difficult to avoid.

On one occasion, for a short election night story two years ago when Barnes had won re-election by the skin of her teeth and Katie was but a mere intern at a national newspaper, her then editor had had to scold her for making the story sound too anti-Barnes, when in fact, it had only turned out that way because she had been so paranoid it would sound too pro-Barnes that she had over-compensated and hadn't balanced her quotes fairly.

By all accounts, Katie didn’t think she was a particularly good journalist.

But the perks of working on a political profile feature were the months of up close and personal access, and a head start and an inside track on any breaking news stories that might crop up within the campaign. Not to mention a flexible deadline. Surely she could pull this one off.

***

Representative Vanesa Barnes was conservative as they come. Her dark brown hair reached just a couple of inches below her shoulder. Her teeth were white and straight, displayed constantly in a pretty, dainty smile. Her eyes were bright, alert and a striking shade of blue. She was undeniably a very pretty woman, and no doubt it would help her with a certain cohort of voters.

Truly, she looked like a Stepford wife. She was the ideal, all-American, conservative Republican wife, mother and politician.

She had first been elected nearly six years ago, riding into Congress on a new wave of support for Republicans on the far right.

That's what happens when the country sends a “socialist” to the White House; the right wingers blow a gasket and all Hell breaks loose.

By now, most of those who rode into Congress sharing the same wave were long gone, having lost re-election two years later, but Barnes was proving herself as a national rising star.
She had that x-factor none of the others had.

Katie on the other hand, was not a conservative. She was as much a bleeding-heart liberal as they come. A New Yorker born and raised, she grew up believing Hillary and Bill Clinton were a personal gift to earth from God himself – or herself, because you never know, do you?

Katie too was a pretty woman, but not in the same way the Congresswoman was. Katie was classically pretty. She was the typical twenty-five year-old reporter, striving to stand out – a tiny fish in a huge pond. She was over-worked and underpaid, could barely afford her rent and had pizza boxes piling up in her kitchen sink. The only pairs of jeans she could afford were twenty-two dollars, and she frequently had to wear shoes well past their use-by date. Luckily for her, being twenty-five and attractive, she could pull that off.

But admittedly – and only to herself – part of her fascination with these political women was the yearning for an insight into how some women seem to do it all; the kids, the husband, the high-flying career, the ability to look so polished and pristine day in, day out.

Sure, it would help if you had your own personal staff to attend to your every whim, she thought, but these women seemed to live their entire lives like that, well before they ever had a staff to maintain them.

Politically, Katie was pro-choice to her very core. A belief in LGBT equality was as basic a belief for her as the right to food and shelter was.

And yet here she found herself so enamored by someone she herself would usually have branded a right-wing nut job, whose belief system and world view was so drastically altered from her own that it made utterly no sense to find this woman such an appealing subject - or to even like her at all.

Perhaps, she thought, it was because Barnes was hated, ridiculed and demonized on a national scale – not just a local one. Perhaps, she thought, it was because everything she knew this woman to be on a personal level was so at odds with her public characterization.

She was warm, friendly, charming. She had a way about her that invited you in, despite all of your instincts telling you to stay away.

And for someone who fought so vociferously against gay rights and abortion in her home state, she comes across as perfectly non-judgmental in conversation.

“I'm no one's judge,” she would often say to Katie, rushing through the halls of Congress. “Only God is our judge”.

And on occasion, she could cut you in two with an icy stare that told you all you needed to know. It was plainly obvious that her staff respected her, but no one wanted to be on the receiving end of that stare.

A former colleague of Katie's had once described Barnes as “enchantingly beautiful, but a total whackjob”. There was just something about the combination of characteristics, he had said, all seemingly at odds with one another, that made her a fascinating person to watch.

In fact, one of the reasons Katie had chosen the world of political journalism back in her college days, was a desire to understand people in power – particularly women; their motives, their driving forces, their decisions, their hypocrisies, their contradictions. Journalism to Katie, was less a way to share the news, and more an opportunity to examine the fascinating psychology of political power – and Barnes was as richly complex a woman as they come.

She was a lightning rod for every attack the liberals ever made – and despite some grossly unsavory remarks and blatant misogyny – not all of the attacks on her were unwarranted and she knew it. She depended upon it.

She was a pro at taking all of the negative energy thrown at her by the media and the left wing and spectacularly transforming it into raw political power and fundraising prowess. She could stand in front of a microphone, tell a bare-faced lie, wait for the liberal attack machine to swing into action and without missing a beat, she'd send a help-me-I'm-the-victim fundraising email out to her constituents, sit back, and watch the cash roll in.