Nassim Taleb says we like our heroes free and unencumbered. Now, I ain’t no hero, but that’s through no fault of my own. I arrived in D.C. as a single man after a couple of long-term relationships that didn’t work out. I knew going in how many people had been brought down by sexual missteps in this town, so I set some rules to help me err on the safe(r) side. In Washington, safe sex means in part: no dating lobbyists, no dating your staff members, and I should have added no dating reporters, but I didn’t at first. One former member, Blake Farenthold of Texas, amazingly violated the first two rules in one fell swoop by propositioning a staffer to have a threesome with him and a lobbyist, leading to his resignation in 2018.
I’m stunned by those who do things like pen love letters to staff, such as Rep. Pat Meehan, Republican of Pennsylvania, who was elected in 2010 and, like Farenthold, ended up resigning in 2018 after declaring a staff member his “soulmate.” The amazing part is that Meehan was on the Ethics Committee. On paper, he sounded like a well-behaved family man, so why not? Meanwhile, if you’re a single guy like me, some people in D.C. get suspicious immediately.
One young fellow member told me he’s dating his scheduler. They’re happy. Blissfully in love, he says. I told him, keep in mind she’s no longer working for you—you’re working for her, not the public you swore on oath to serve. She’ll be hailed as a hero the moment she decides to call it off and publicly complain about it. I’m not preaching, just advising. It’s risky to date in a town where there’s potentially a thin line between love and blackmail, or at least love and bad PR.
But we’ve got a president now who doesn’t care for puritanical grandstanding or moralistic preening. He is a lot more direct, even visceral, open, and realistic about his likes and dislikes, so overall, this is a good time to be a fun-loving politician instead of a stick-in-the-mud. I have an active social life, and it’s probably easier in the era of Trump. We’ve had “perfect family man” presidents before, after all, and many of those men sold out our country, even if their wives were happy the whole time.
If politicians’ family lives aren’t what really matter to the voters, maybe that’s a good thing. I’m a representative, not a monk. The days in which candidates presented themselves in the agora wearing spotless white robes are behind us. I represent the Florida Men—and Women—who elected me. I hope to represent them at their best, but I also represent them at their worst—and I beg their forgiveness when I am at mine.
Now to money.
Nobody is really from Washington, but everyone there quickly forgets where they came from. The question everyone asks aloud is, “Who do you work for?” The one they ask silently is, “And what can I get from you?” The answers are never: “The American people,” and “Not a damn thing.” The sociopaths who descend on Washington learn to substitute the will of the people (or political bosses) for their own, and they usually hope to make a buck in the process.
I arrived in D.C. with a duty to 700,000 constituents back in Florida. I seek to represent their interests, but the people who run D.C., the ones who stage-manage you around as soon you arrive, would prefer you forget your obligations at home and instead sit around, occasionally going to their cocktail parties and collecting PAC checks. The unstated assumption is that your votes will at least sometimes reflect their sources’ pet causes when you aren’t just rubber-stamping the party bosses’ wants.
It’s not as if legislators spend most of their time legislating, from what I can see anyway. They spend most of their time fundraising, getting buttered up by well-connected constituents or special interest groups, and looking for dirt they can weaponize against political opponents.
The party apparatus showed little interest in me before my primary, but when they decide you’re already a winner—and will be able to bring more money into the party in the future—then they perk up. Once you’re in the “in” crowd, Washington lets you know it. But it has a weird way of showing its enthusiasm.
As soon as I got to Washington, I was whisked to a restaurant with a fancy chandelier, where I found myself surrounded by congressional leaders, lobbyists, and newly elected legislators. Carafes of wine danced around the tables like ladies in beautiful red dresses, the steaks probably cost more than my kidneys would fetch on the black market, and there were all the artistic desserts you could desire—impressive to a North Floridian whose idea of “fancy dining” had long been fish that gets grilled but not put on a bun.
Addressing the crowd was then speaker Paul Ryan, since retired, a man who in the mid-2010s went suddenly from an admired symbol of the free market movement to the deeply unpopular symbol of the Washington establishment. But at this gathering in 2016, Ryan was still a kingmaker, if not a king, and the assembled lobbyists were his court.
It was the first time I had ever met him, and the first thing I saw him do on that occasion was to introduce an odd group of people he described as the individuals he considered really responsible for getting us newcomers elected: an array of lobbyists. Now, he never said we had to obey these lobbyists, nor was anything quite that crass implied. Rather, his behavior was a case of congressional leadership fulfilling its obligation to demonstrate
