In Which I Encounter Andy Card

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by hilzoy

Billmon has an interesting post about his encounters with Andy Card, President Bush’s unlikely chief of staff, over the years. It’s the sort of thing I have always wished journalists wrote in the course of doing their jobs: what, exactly, did they think of the various people they dealt with, as persons? Billmon was underwhelmed by Card:

“When I interviewed him, I could tell fairly quickly that a.) he definitely wasn’t the sharpest chisel in the White House toolbox (and this wasn’t exactly the Leonardo da Vinci administration) and b.) he had only the vaguest understanding of what Rollins and company had been up to. Card, in other words, was the patsy in the deal — something he complained about quite openly when we spoke.(…) He struck me as a sad sack, a minor league patronage player who had already reached the level of his own incompetence. A future FEMA administrator, in other words.”

I’m writing this post, despite the fact that it will be almost as content-free as my last one, for two reasons. First, to recommend Billmon’s post to anyone who wants to know who is likely to be Bush’s right-hand man if Rove and Cheney go down. Second, because having read Billmon for quite a while, I am certain that this is the only time when I will be able to say, about anything he writes: well, I can top that.

Specifically: Billmon writes: “I first encountered Card when he was a special assistant in the Reagan White House — having arrived there as a Bush loyalist in 1983.” Well, I first encountered Card when he was a Massachusetts State Representative in 1976. (Not that I made nearly as much of my encounters as Billmon did.)

Back in 1976, I was 16, and I had decided to go into politics. This might not be such a ludicrous idea now — I would never run for any significant office, for reasons I detailed earlier, but if I didn’t already have the best job in the world, I might consider running for, say, city council. But then it was flatly absurd, since I was probably the single individual on the planet least suited to surviving in the peculiar world of politics.

To illustrate, here’s why I wanted to go into politics. All the adults I knew wrote books, and it therefore seemed to me that I would have to write books as well, somehow. Moreover, I was supposedly “smart”, though I really had no idea what that meant, other than that it was somehow connected to the facts (1) that I did math fast, and (2) that everyone said I was weird. For this reason, I thought that everyone would expect me to write really good books. But I had thought about this, and as best I could tell I had nothing whatsoever to say, or at least nothing of any interest to anyone other than myself. Certainly nothing that would merit the sacrifice of perfectly nice trees.

Politics was the only thing I could think of that allowed people both to do genuinely good things and not to be expected to write books. When politicians did write books, no one expected them to be any good. No one I knew, for instance, thought that Profiles in Courage was any good at all, and no one particularly cared. At the time, this was exactly what I wanted.

(Funny story to illustrate the utter and complete mismatch between me then and politics: shortly after I started work as an intern, the State Rep I was working for asked me: So, what do you think about in your spare time? — Now: I had, at this point, no social skills at all, in a pretty literal sense. I wasn’t a jerk; it just never occurred to me that people didn’t mean exactly what they said, and so I found myself perpetually baffled by most of humanity. And, taking him to have asked an honest question, I gave the honest answer, which was: God. I can still see the look on his face as he tried to figure out how to respond to that. At the time, I knew I had said something wrong, but I had no idea what. My career in politics in a nutshell.)

Anyways: Andy Card was a State Rep at the same time that I was a lowly and clueless intern. He struck me as ambitious, and a little sharper than the average State Rep. But that wasn’t saying a lot: in my office, most of the Reps would spend the day playing poker and passing out exploding cigars to unsuspecting victims. He was not one of the people who struck me as really smart or really interesting, or for that matter really much of anything, other than earnest and ambitious.

Admittedly, being a Republican State Rep in Massachusetts at that point was not what you’d call an ideal showcase for talent. But it seemed clear to me that there were a lot of people who were a lot sharper than he was. And for that reason I was just amazed when he turned up in national politics.

28 thoughts on “In Which I Encounter Andy Card”

  1. I met Bruce McCulloch from Kids in the Hall at a Flaco Jimenez show at South by Southwest music festival in Austin in 1997. He struck me as really, really short and uncooperative, as he would not say the line “if my head were made out of meat… which it is not… how much would it cost” in his Gavin-voice.

  2. I am starting to find a number of people I knew years ago entering politics. Not quite at this level, but it always seems spooky.
    One law school classmate is now Pennsylvania’s Chairman of the Liquor Control Board (i.e., in charge of the state monopoly on wine and liquor sales), having previously run for Congress in my district, coming in 4th in a 4 way Republican primary and setting a new state record for dollars spent per vote (something around $12). Before that, he put on his entry in our 10th year reunion book that he was practicing equine law (which was the first thing I thought of when I heard about Michael Brown’s past career).
    Another, who was a neighbor growing up, is now running a massively underfunded and generally seen as hopeless candidacy for Philly’s District Attorney. His dad was referred to in our family as “the neighborhood shyster”, and we employed him for minor services, such as fixing traffic tickets. The son, who was utterly unimpressive in school, appears to have followed in his dad’s footsteps.
    I can’t wait to hear of a former classmate being considered for the Supreme Court — I know several who I suspect are working their way up the ladder to do so now.

  3. Then there was that year I worked for Fritz Mondale and he was running for President. I remember that Joan made killer stuffed mushroom caps and that it was the first presidential campaign where a full CNN crew was allowed to travel with the candidates as the 4th network. Whooo Whoo! Good times.

  6. I have met many more California assemblymen and state senators recently than i ever thought i would.
    lord, do we ever need a better class of people running for office. they are really just the people who ran for student govt (ie, the gossips and rumorhounds), but this time they have real power.

  7. Your “God” answer reminds me of a time I was talking with a close friend and another acquaintance (we’ll call him Rick). At some point we talked about the issue came up about whether there was a God, what He might or might not be like, why there is evil in the world–typical late-night college crap. Rick, who was 30 at the time, told us that he had never really thought about God one way or another at all. It was odd, because I can imagine someone deciding they don’t believe in God, or deciding that they are skeptical of God, or deciding that they don’t like God, or that they weren’t totally sure about any of the above. But to say that they had never thought about the topic at all seemed very weird. Since then I have found that I’m the weird one, but that is a different topic.

  8. By various diverse and probably uninteresting routes, I am one handshake from C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Tony Blair, and Saddam Hussein. I am, however, two handshakes from George W. Bush.

  10. I’ve sung at the ass of Charlotte Church.
    …okay, it was actually to Prince Charles but I was behind her and, even though she was 12 at the time, it was… prominent. In a delightful, if statutory, way.
    I’ll stop now.

  12. It is my sincere wish to live in a world where fewer people have social skills. And, yes, Profiles in Courage is pretty much unreadable. Also, the cover is awful.

  15. In a single summer in college, I got picked up hitchhiking in Pittsburgh by (Mr.) Fred Rogers, who was precisely in life as he was in his neighborhood, and by Chubby Checker, who was driving a panel truck full of gig equipment on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Philly. He had some wicked hash.
    I once saw Charlton Heston in a restaurant in Manila. And I shook the Marcos’ hands at the Palace in Manila. Nice shoes, the two of them. Met Jimmy Carter at the American Embassy in New Delhi. Francis Ford Coppola once yelled at me through a bullhorn when I worked as an extra on “Apocalyse Now”. I think I ran in front of Robert Duvall in a battle scene, but this big cache of dynamite had gone off near my left ear and I got scared.
    I never met Julie Christie, despite the fact that she has been stalking me all these years.

  17. If we’re talking brushes with fame, I was once patted on the head by Johnny Mathis on my way through Los Angeles International Airport. I’ve interviewed Sarah McLachlan, years ago, for college radio. And through my prior work in radio, I’ve met countless current and former pro athletes (baseball and football). Also interviewed George Voinovich when he was still Governor of Ohio and I was a stringer for a public radio station.

  21. George Takei. Not at the SF convention, but in the hotel before it started. I did a double-take, and he was pleased to be recognized, tho we each retained our dignity by simply doing the guy nod and passing by.
    That’s embarrassing, huh.

  22. I also shook James Whitmore’s hand when he was doing the Will Rogers tour. That was kind of cool; he did a wonderful job. Or at least I think he did, never having met Will Rogers.
    Oh, and I spoke to Robert Plant and got his autograph; he was just sitting at the bar at the Ritz Rock and Roll in Dallas in August 1983. He looked like hell.
    I shook Jimmy Carter’s hand on an airplane coming from Denver a couple of years ago. Nice old fart; he told me I have beautiful daughters. He looked not much older than Robert Plant did.
    And while we’re name-dropping, the most talented person I know is this guy. Maybe knew is more accurate; I hung out with him once a couple of years ago. Mostly I know him because we went to the same middle and high schools.

  23. OK, I not only stared at Ms. Churchill’s rear (along with Anarch), but I serenaded Mother Theresa (“Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”) in an impromptu duet with a colleague (from the Hong Kong Welsh Male Voice Choir) in the baggage claim area in Hanoi airport.
    And I was a Munchkin in “The Wizard Of Oz” at the White House in 1968, at Lady Bird Johnson’s Christmas Party for underprivileged kids, who were — since it was a *rotten* production — even more underprivileged after having seen us than before.
    (FWIW, Prince Charles is shorter than you might think [maybe 5’8″?], Rowan Atkinson much taller [at least 6′], and Stephen Fry appropriately gigantic [6’6″?], as well as preternaturally polite. And Joan Collins cannot resist a line of male choristers, as if you hadn’t guessed already.]

  26. We were oversized Munchkins (I’m about 6’1″) and wore (among other things) old white tennis shoes, dyed blue, with spangles. I got to be one of the Lollipop Guild …
    Enough detail for you yet? Or do you crave more?

  27. I interviewed Henry Rollins for a punk fanzine in high school (actually, I skipped graduation parties to go to the show). And I once did shots with Weird Al Yankovich in an LA bar. He was the coolest, funniest, nicest guy you could ever meet. He bought the shots.

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