What I Learned About Romance From The 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates

In which I took my desire to Win At Reporting a little too far.

(Above: the most romantic photo of all these damn books as I could muster. Are you in the mood yet? You’re welcome.)

Hello, my dear readers. 

It is almost the end of 2020. Since I last wrote, a few things have happened: I turned 38. I broke a toe — my second one of 2020. I moved this newsletter to Substack, so I could join all the cool kids. I moved my subscriber list over from TinyLetter as well (which is why some of you are now unsure why you’re getting this newsletter but simultaneously relieved to be receiving my glorious prose in your inboxes again).

I also have been attempting to write more Personal Stuff. Why? Well, why not? It’s a pandemic and I’m as identity-crisis-ridden and alone with my thoughts as any other (childless) quarantined person. So.

All of this is a wind-up to an essay I’ve been meaning to write/publish for a very long time. It’s now past the 2020 campaign, so maybe it’s loo late for it. But the idea behind it was a cockleburr that snagged itself on my brain and wouldn’t unhook itself throughout the campaign. I had to get it out. So. Here is a (kind of long but you’re here, which means you have some buy-in already) essay I wrote about politicians and how they talk about their romantic lives.

It is maybe too long. But whatever. The point of having a newsletter is trying your shit out on people who have opted in.

So. I hope you enjoy.

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It is July 2019. I am in my swimsuit, roasting in the glorious dry heat next to a hotel pool in Greece. I am slathered in SPF 50, drinking a glass of rose and reading a thick book. It is my first vacation with my boyfriend, Neil. It’s idyllic. It’s romantic.

“This is without a doubt the horniest political book I have ever read,” I say, slamming John Hickenlooper’s The Opposite of Woe onto the baking cement.

“You did this to yourself,” Neil mumbles from his sun-coma in the next deck chair.

Smart-ass.

This was a few weeks after I made one of my stupider decisions of the 2020 election cycle:  I attempted to read at least one book by each of the Democratic presidential candidates.

It was an on-its-face terrible idea, both because there were at one point roughly 75 Democratic presidential candidates, and because campaign books are deeply awful. Mainly, I decided this in a crisis of confidence: did I feel like I was doing this job well? No. Why? Impostor syndrome, is my best guess. And my way out of this particular flavor of freakout is usually to try to outwork everyone, often in over-the-top ways. And so…I decided to read All Of The Books.

Getting back to Hickenlooper, though. Campaign books are often dull. Campaign books are not often horny. 

And to be fair to the former Colorado governor and current senator-elect, I have since decided that “horny” isn’t nearly the right word; “thirsty” or “girl-crazy” work much better.

To back up, though: Hickenlooper’s book is folksy to a fault. It feels like it was written by your uncle who only knows how to interact with you via aggressive teasing and semi-funny jokes. (Related spoiler: The title “The Opposite of Woe” is in reference to a joke where a professor is asking students to name the opposites of various words. He asks for the opposite of woe. And a student answers: “giddyup.” As in, woe/whoa. Get it? Horses. You see. You get it. Anyway, “giddyup” becomes a running theme in the book, something he says when he feels enthusiastic.)

Hickenlooper’s book is also probably the most human of all the ones I read. 

Back to the thirsty/girl-crazy point: He writes a lot — a lot — about his romantic relationships: the various women he dated, fell in love with, and split with before meeting his first wife; their divorce; and then meeting and marrying his second wife.

He writes about crushes. He writes about being a gangly, forlorn adolescent who never dreamed a girl would be into him. He writes about being quickly and profoundly infatuated with women, and about having his heart broken over and over. Hickenlooper proposes to two other women before finally meeting and proposing to his first wife. One of them, a Swedish woman named Nalen, he meets at a geology conference, corresponds with for months, and then proposes to during a brief trip to visit her in Sweden.

(Only barely related to all of this -- but I had to include this detail somewhere -- he also writes about taking his mom to see Deep Throat in the movie theater. I swear I am not making this up.) 

With all of its mating and dating anecdotes, Hickenlooper’s book is suffused with the insecurity of suspecting you’re just somehow not enough for the opposite sex -- which is to say, it’s uncomfortable and honest. Effective at making you want to vote for him? Eh. I don’t know. But yes, it is uncomfortable and honest. Which puts it several notches ahead of most other politicians’ books.

I think reading Hickenlooper’s book as one of my first in this project opened my eyes to maybe the most revealing part of any campaign book: how they write about their love lives.

I didn’t fully appreciate this until I started reading Amy Klobuchar’s The Senator Next Door. Klobuchar is focused on her achievements here for the most part, which of course is the point of any politician’s book. But on the few occasions where she does dig into her love life…well, they’re exemplified by the scene where Klobuchar gets dumped just before a Halloween party:

“Just before a party, he told me he wanted to get married and that unfortunately he considered me -- with my alcoholic dad, my divorced parents, and my keen interest in politics -- a high risk for a future divorce. He delivered this news while I stood there in my Halloween costume. I’d just gotten ready, and I was dressed as a Christmas tree, decked out in a green turtleneck, green tights, brown shoes, and brown socks. I was covered in ornaments, and I had a star attached to a ruler on top of my head. I’d topped everything off with a blinking string of lights that I’d plugged into the wall with two extension cords for maximum mobility. But who remembers? Looking back, I do acknowledge that it may have been my outfit that actually scared him off.”

I have struggled to come up with a more artful way to put how I feel about this passage, but I have only landed on this:

I fucking love this anecdote.

The juxtaposition of such bleakness -- some guy dumping her, and blaming her family and her ambition for it -- with the description of the Halloween costume. The fact that an electrified, extension-corded, impossibly wholesome Christmas-tree costume is of course what a hard-driving, A-student, future-senator would wear. And then there’s the finishing thought -- the costume scared him off! -- when of course, he was making excuses, slamming her family, and, oh, I don’t know, being a just a tinge sexist.

I may never as a writer craft an image as sadly funny, as funnily sad, as a crestfallen Klobuchar, her body wound with blinking Christmas lights as her date walks out the door.

Then there’s Klobuchar’s story of her first date with her eventual husband:

“After [the movie], we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant, but halfway through, I decided that John wasn’t really interested in me. Thinking, ‘why bother?’ I went into the restroom, took out my contact lenses, and replaced them with my glasses.”

These anecdotes are entertaining and relatable, but also reassuring. It turns out that no one, not even our highest elected officials, with their unnatural confidence, goes through life unscathed by the indignities of dating. 

And yet, they illuminate a distinct gender divide between the books I read: The men err on the side of being too passionate. They chase women down, pursue hard, put together grand gestures. The women, meanwhile? They’re not romantic; quite the opposite. They’re pragmatic -- career women who, ha ha, have a few spills on the way to marriage. And when love doesn’t work out? Oh, they dust themselves off. No time for tears. And by God, they weren’t looking for marriage, at least not that hard. I mean, come on. 

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Disclaimer time: First off, I did not read every candidate’s book. This is not an exhaustive study, and at this point I don’t have time, much less the inclination, to read the rest (part of the reason I’m writing this here and not for a fancy website somewhere). This all is what I picked up from reading a good many of these books.

And second off, to be clear, not every candidate wrote about their spouse or partner or dating life at length, or even at all. Some books are less memoirs and more idea books, sort of manifesto-lites -- Marianne Williamson’s A Politics of Love, Andrew Yang’s The War on Normal People, and Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution fall into these categories.

But I did see this pattern play out in these other books, beyond Hickenlooper and Klobuchar. There’s Cory Booker, writing about how he met a woman at a black-tie dinner in the late 1990s and immediately became convinced “she was the one.” (Spoiler: The romance did not last.)

Joe Biden fits the pattern, too. As his book says, Jill rejected him the first time he asked, citing doubts about becoming a full-time mother, as well as being married to a politician. “Jill says I must have asked her to marry me five more times, and she kept saying she needed more time.”

She did eventually say yes, after Biden gave a smitten ultimatum: “I’ve waited long enough. I’m not going to wait any longer. Either you decide to marry me or that’s it. I’m out. I’m too much in love with you to just be friends.”

On the women’s side, meanwhile, there’s Kamala Harris. She writes about refusing to be in the dating game as a politician, knowing the scrutiny that will come with it. And then she writes about meeting her husband, Doug Emhoff, when her friend Chrisette set them up. It’s a rom-com-worthy, pushy-sidekick-friend set-up, too: Chrisette calls Kamala repeatedly one night, so much so that Kamala picks up, fearing it’s an emergency. But it’s not. Chrisette gives her an order: “You’re going on a date.” 

Courtship ensues. There are some amusing anecdotes about working around her busy schedule as a politician, and also his as a lawyer...but really, the rest is history: they fall in love, she meets his kids, it’s fated. Amen. (Or, as Hickenlooper would say, “Giddyup.”)

Elizabeth Warren is the one of these women with two marriage stories to tell, in A Fighting Chance. 

She writes about dropping out of school, having kids young, realizing that the combination of this man and her ambition were never going to make a lasting marriage. She sums it up with a heartbreaking realization: “I failed.”

But then, she meets Bruce Mann, and in talking about him, she breaks the pattern I’m writing about here. She talks about how he was, memorably, wearing shorts when she first met him, and she goes on to wax poetic about his legs. She asks him out -- bounds up to him like a golden retriever, as she puts it, and asks him for tennis lessons. And eventually, she proposes to him.

She is passionate. Hell, with all that leg talk, she is downright lustful.

And yet, when it came to her stump speech, Warren had a whole section where she focused on that first marriage. She was practical -- a woman who screwed up once and dusted herself off, then told it as a learning experience.

“I got to go to college! Yaaay!” she would say, getting the crowd to cheer with her.
“And then at 19, I fell in love! Yaaaay…” she would say with decidedly less enthusiasm, drawing laughs. The crowd could see where this was going.
“And then I got married.” More laughs. 
“And dropped out of school…” Here she would trail off in faux-weariness. The people laughed and clapped.

I must have seen her perform this speech dozens of times. And I personally always took this segment as a way to get her down to the crowd’s level. Here is the Harvard professor, the East-Coast senator, the woman who has shown off her bankruptcy law expertise everywhere from congressional hearing rooms to the Daily Show.

But this story about leaving college for a boy was relatable. Who, woman or man, hasn’t done something stupid for love, after all?

And it established her attitude toward these love stories: the sadder but wiser girl. She was 19 and silly once. And then, after that, she knew better.

It wasn’t just these candidates who fit this pattern, by the way; Bill and Hillary Clinton fit the bill, too. He retold their engagement story at the 2016 convention -- how he asked her to marry him three times, and Hillary, ever wise and pragmatic, held back and thought hard before she finally said yes.

The crowd laughed indulgently.

----

I can’t speak for other women who cover politics. But it’s hard to be a woman reporter and not feel some sort of kinship with the women who are up on stage or wading through the crowd, shaking hands, citing endless policy details, wearing themselves out.

And I know when I felt this kinship most intensely: when those women were insulted in childish ways. When Trump insulted Hillary Clinton's looks, I froze momentarily. I thought of every boy who called me fat on the playground, at a time when I was mostly minding my own business, trying to ace spelling tests and do my multiplication worksheets as quickly as possible. I thought of the boys on the high school cross country team who nicknamed me (with my very un-distance-runnerly body) "Gut." I thought of the boy I worked with at my first restaurant job, who informed me that he and another boy in the dishwashing room had conferred and agreed that I was kind of pretty, except for my face.

And before you hurl “YOU’RE NOT OBJECTIVE” at me…at the very least, I can say I’m a bipartisan, equal-opportunity gut-punch-feeler. Reading that Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries insulted Carly Fiorina’s looks ("Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!"), I felt my breath leave me. I physically crumpled in my chair just a little bit. 

Trump later backpedaled, saying he was talking about her “persona” and not her face. A debate moderator then asked Carly Fiorina whether she believed Trump, and she responded elegantly: "I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”

Now, reader: I am a professional. I do a damn good job of removing my feelings from elections in general. But did I uncrumple a little? Breathe a relieved, “good for you, lady” sigh for her? I did.

Speaking of women running for president, a fun fact about this year’s Democratic primary candidates: Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren had, between them, never lost a race before this year’s Democratic primary.

This was taken as another example of the Ginger Rogers, backwards-in-high-heels phenomenon -- the whole idea of women in powerful positions being so good at what they do that they do it not only with whatever gendered hurdles come their way, but often with better results than the men.

I don’t disagree with that take, but I personally more saw it as -- well, “relatable” wouldn’t be the right word,  as it would imply that I specifically think I’m also the type to go undefeated in a long political career (which, no, I would not be that person). 

Maybe it’s more that I did a nod of recognition when I read that fact. Takes a perfectionistic A-student to know one. 

The kind, perhaps, who sits down and decides to try to read through all the candidates’ books in a futile effort to break away from the political journalist pack. But I digress.

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There are a couple of potential takeaways from the romance-in-campaign-books gender divide I’ve delineated here. 

Maybe it means that the kind of women drawn into politics are simply practical and level-headed, while the men are passionate and impulsive. Or that the women rightly understand that the scrutiny will be a nightmare. As Harris says in her book, she knew “that single women in politics are viewed differently than single men.”

But then, we should also consider that in all these books, politicians are constantly making strategic choices. The point of a campaign book is not to tell the whole unretouched truth, and it’s certainly not to write a good book; it’s to make a 300-odd-page ad. It’s to create a persuasive narrative, not a good story.

So while I certainly wouldn’t say anyone is lying about their personal stories, they are editing. 

Maybe the women who have run for president thus far have just been really cool customers. Maybe Amy had a detached humor about the whole dating enterprise. Maybe Kamala really had convinced herself dating wasn’t that necessary or feasible. Maybe Liz steeled herself after divorce and said, “Welp. Learning experiences.” Maybe Hillary took a few rational steps back from that bearded hippie and said, “I need to think.” 

But now I wonder: did Kamala or Amy or Hillary or Liz ever over-aggressively pursue a guy and scare him off? Did Joe or John or Cory ever ghost any ladies? Brush them off? Tell a woman in a Christmas tree costume she was too ambitious?

To be clear, I’m not arguing that candidates should tell us every embarrassing or unflattering detail of their love lives. (Please God, no.) 

What I’m saying is that after the editing process, we just happen to be left with some pretty traditional tropes: The man with hearts in his eyes, chasing after the demure lady. The lady who either plays it cool or does a sort of slapstick fall into romance...or, maybe, is sadder-but-wiser when it fails once.

Fortunately, we are not all running for president. But we all do edit our own stories. I think about my dating life. I think about any time a coworker I like-but-am-not-that-close-with ever said to me, “How are things with so-and-so?” And I answered, “Oh, it didn’t work out.” 

And if they probed for details (which, rude), I’d have a ready answer that told the facts but not the real truth: “Oh, he wasn’t funny enough.” “Eh. Not my type.” Ha ha! Onward and upward!

And then I think about writing that sort of story down in a book that weary political reporters will read. And I feel the panic rising.

I was telling a friend about this essay, and she was matter-of-fact about her take: “A man pursuing a woman is tenacious; a woman pursuing a man is Fatal Attraction.”

Which pretty much nails it.

I find myself wondering about all the ways women politicians hem themselves in. The way they can’t get angry, can’t be perceived as too power-hungry...all of that is well-worn by now.

And maybe this, the way they talk about falling in love, is another way they do that — narrating a basic, intimate part of their lives to make it as palatable as possible.

And that’s the double-bind, isn’t it? After they’ve reined in their anger and assured us they’re not too ambitious and told us a tidy story of politely being pursued and cheerfully bouncing back from heartbreak, we still want women politicians to be authentic. 

That was one of the big problems with Hillary Clinton, right? I heard over and over from voters in 2016 that she wasn’t “authentic.” That she wasn’t trustworthy.

I try to imagine an alternate-reality Hillary Clinton -- one who proudly, jovially told the world in her convention speech that, ha ha, I proposed to Bill three times before he said yes. 

Can you imagine? 

Oh, that poor woman, her opponents -- and maybe even some of her supporters -- would say. She had to go chase him. What, was she stalking him? She always seemed kind of crazy.

No, seriously, what’s wrong with her?

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The 2020 candidate (at least, among those whose books I slogged through) who perhaps most noticeably falls outside of these tropes is Pete Buttigieg -- who, in Shortest Way Home and then on the campaign trail, was trying to introduce America to its first openly gay major-party presidential candidate.

Once again: it’s not a great book. It’s got the aw-shucks, I’m-just-a-small-town-kid thing that politicians always try to do and always overshoot by a country mile, often by using phrases like “country mile.” (And I just want to say, politicians: cities like South Bend with populations of 100,000 are not small towns. If your town is Midwestern and the tallest structure isn’t a grain elevator or a factory building or a church steeple … it ain’t a small town.)

But anyway. The romance: There is virtually nothing about his relationship with Chasten that is not idyllic. There is their meeting on a dating app, and then a first date of drinks, a ball game, and a moonlit kiss. There is a warm scene on Christmas at Chasten’s family’s house. There is anxiety over their families meeting each other. There is Mayor Pete proposing to a teary-eyed Chasten at an airport.

I confess that Mayor Pete’s story doesn’t fall neatly into the straight-women-versus-straight-men dichotomy I’ve created here. But there is something remarkable about it: the amount of time he spends in his book talking about his relationship -- telling, point by point (and yet, somehow without too much detail) how it happened, and then how he decided to talk about it to his constituents.

He spends full pages talking about the strategy of how he told the public that he was gay.

Which, after all those other campaign books, feels unusual, even jarring. Because, after all, to hear the book tell it, these guys’ love story is familiar. Conventional. Pretty much exactly like any straight couple’s.

Which, I imagine, is kind of the whole point.

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I know why I latched onto these stories, by the way. I spent my 20s and early 30s in full-on dating-as-a-second-job mode: ditching some men but chasing others, being infatuated, coming perilously close to more than one engagement (and after far too little time together, at that). And always with an increasingly intimate relationship with heartbreak.

I’m a Hickenlooper. Takes one to spot one, is what I’m saying. 

What I wouldn’t have given -- in wading through profiles, in developing borderline-arbitrary litmus tests (he likes swing dancing? Nope.), in weeding people out and, even worse, being the one weeded out, over and over -- what I wouldn’t have given to be a Kamala Harris. To spend years saying, “Eh, best not to play the game,” and then, miraculously, have a friend shove me not only into a good blind date but a lifelong partnership.

Can you imagine.

I write this essay now, somehow miraculously having come out of the other side of that. Even saying so makes me feel anxious -- like I’ll jinx my good luck somehow. 

That smartass from the deck chair and I have lived together more than a year now, and more than half of that has been spent in pandemic quarantine mode. We have our offices in separate rooms. We’re splitting bills. We’re dealing with each other’s moods and eating habits and mid-workday-noises-of-frustration (His: “I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING.” Mine: “[loud, frustrated grunt-screaming]”). We’re trying on the clumsy label of “partner” instead of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.”

I try to imagine how I’d write about how we got together if I had to write a palatable, political narrative of it. I of course already have the edited origin story I give at parties when people ask: “We met on a dating app! I introduced myself by making a juvenile penis joke I thought was funny! He rolled his eyes and asked me out for tacos! And it worked out!”

I suspect it would have to be toned down even more.

The truth of how relationships happen is more complicated, of course. I can’t speak for him, but on my end, there were sessions obsessing over his early texts with my girlfriends, wrestling with when to tell my parents and sisters about him, literal stomachaches about when to bring him to a work function. 

Then there has been the complicated business of growing together: learning each other’s bedtime routines, going to church, going to each others’ parties even when we haven’t wanted to, some couples therapy sessions, celebrating each others’ victories. During the pandemic, we have mourned the deaths of both of my grandmas. We have had fights that left me so angry my hands shook and went numb. And day by day, we have incrementally expanded the dictionary of inside jokes and song snippets and physical touches that make up our language -- the same sort of two-person language couples everywhere have.

Maybe I’ll propose to him one day. Maybe he’ll say yes. If he doesn’t, let’s be real: I’d probably be like Joe or Bill and just ask again later.

And fortunately, I will never run for office, so I will tell the tale to my niece and nephew or my kids or in my memoir, because why not? At the very least, it’ll be authentic.

Giddyup.