This will be my last RNC post.
Friday started out with the news that I might interview Henry Kissinger, a man whose deeds and intellect I’m mightily afraid of. I was given the task because I’m always the earliest low-level employee to show up. Kissinger is considered old stuff by the established journalists I was working with - none of them could spare a moment of covering McCain’s upcoming speech to talk to the aging icon.
So I got the assignment. I had about three hours to prepare for my interview, which was not enough. I was assigned to ask only questions on Palin’s foreign policy experience, to plump up another reporter’s long-ish story on it.
When I arrived outside the restaurant, only one other reporter was there - Chuck Plunkett from the Denver Post. He told me he was nervous. I concurred.
We were eventually led in. There was Kissinger, planted on a black leather couch at the farthest corner of the restaurant. I sat next to him, Chuck on my other side. You can read what happened.
It was not a great interview, certainly one of the worst I’ve done. But then, he’s my first major subject, and it didn’t go terribly. I am hoping to score some time with him while I’m in Delhi, and prepare a lot more beforehand.
Speaking to him was like communing with a large, glistening brain. His sharpness was palpable, his empathy, not so much. He smiled a couple of times and made jokes, but mainly he was all business. It struck me how uncomfortable he was speaking outside of his “field of competence,” as he put it, that of foreign policy. But as soon as I introduced it - in the form of the India America nuclear deal - he visibly perked up. His speech was actually clearer.
I had his resume fresh on my mind when I arrived, but all of the things he’d done sort of fled my brain as I sat next to him. It’s near impossible to have both experiences at once - a comprehensive understanding of a person’s life and a spontaneous discussion with said person.
It reminded me of something a Cuban expat told me during an interview. He had been forced to meet Fidel Castro in the 90s, when he went there as part of a medical team. Castro drove this man’s father out of the country and changed the course of his family’s history. But as he stood in front of Castro, now an old man, he felt nothing but pity.
I didn’t feel quite pity for Kissinger, nor awe. I felt like I was talking to any other stranger, this one old and German. There are moments in the interview where it’s clear I’ve forgotten who he is (I almost ask him if he’s ever been to India). I suppose I had to do that simply to calm my nerves. Someday, I hope, there will be enough depth to my own life and personality that I need not do that.
Immediately after Kissinger, I ran down to the floor to hold a spot for my photographer. The AP and Reuters photogs share the two center spots at all of these events - it seems it’s just a convention agreed upon by the other news groups - a little unfair, maybe, but nice for me, because I got to hover around the very front section with my guy every night.
I made sure the spot was secure, then headed to the California delegate section to meet Harmeet Dhillon, a delegate who is running for a position in the State Assembly of Dist. 13 in California (which includes the proudly liberal San Francisco).
I asked her what she thought of Palin, and she was resoundingly positive. When I brought up P’s beliefs in creationism, here’s what she said:
“As a Sikh, I believe in reincarnation. I don’t think people should not vote for me because of that. We have something called a constitution and first amendment rights. What she believes is not going to affect that.”
It had been brought up at the Indians for McCain dinner: religious values are a patently good quality in a person, even if they differ in particulars from one’s own. The significance of a religious politician isn’t about policy - which as Dhillon contends, religion can’t affect - but what it says about that person’s character. Palin, who has shown by example that she believes what she says she believes, is in Dhillon’s mind, a person of character.
I brought up the camp Dhillon’s family started, at which Amardeep Singh has taught, and she nodded a curt yes.
“Amardeep knows me.”
(I should point out: she was more intimidating in person than Kissinger.) She told me as a State Assembly member, she will take a vow never, under any circumstances, to raise taxes. And she will insist that California follow federal government standards.
Her explanation of why she holds an ACLU member card was uncannily like her defense of Palin’s ultra-Christian beliefs.
“I don’t agree with everything they believe in. But I think they are an important and necessary institution for protecting religious freedom.”
I like what that statement shows she has: the ability to hold two opposing views in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function, what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the test of a first rate intelligence.”
Dhillon and her fellow Indian-American Republicans are very clear: they know they are different from the average republican, and even from the politicians they support - perhaps fundamentally different. But they say those differences - religious, social, intellectual - will not come in the way of the shared goals these groups have. And in that way they reconcile opposing realities. Indian and Republican.
I worked until 2 in the morning and couldn’t sleep until 4, I was so keyed up. This past week has been exhilirating, troubling, incomparable. I would do it again tomorrow.
I flew home and was “selected” for special screening, as I have been each time I’ve traveled in the past three months. This time I asked the woman why they aren’t upfront with their policy, calling it screening for people who look Middle Eastern, rather than “randomized.” She said I’d have to talk to the airline.
Standing aside to be checked as hundreds of white people walked through, uninterrupted, I felt bad. Like I’m not a part of the country in the way they are. It brought me back to a moment on the floor when some Texan delegates laughed that the protestors clearly have nothing better to do because,
“They’re democrats! Democrats don’t have jobs.”
I turned to them.
“I’m a Democrat and I have a job,”
“Well you’re the exception, honey! If you’re a Democrat and you have a job, you’re clearly a Republican!”
I got angry. They reminded me so much of the obnoxious white Republicans I’d grown up with in Texas, simplistic in their thinking, clad in expensive clothes and alienating. I reacted. I shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have said anything to begin with.
“I guess if you’re rude, you’re clearly a Republican too.”
It was horrible. I had no journalistic integrity left. I had let my feelings escape into the reality around me, the reality I am meant only to record. So as I stood there in the airport security line, remembering that, I tried also to remember the words of Fitzgerald, to keep in mind that this is my country too, this country of Republicans and Democrats, white people and Indians and black people and Native Americans, like the Ojibwa man who would sit next to me in an hour on the plane and tell me how his tribe’s reservation land has been stolen over decades, but even so - there are fierce Republicans and Democrats and mainstream thinkers among them. That we can be different and fight and still somewhere share a purpose. I tried in my mind to hold these two opposing thoughts, and to still function.
