Two years after Hillary Clinton made her historical run for president and won the popular vote, an unprecedented number of women are running for office in the midterm elections — and winning their primaries. And yet America is still learning how to talk about women with political ambition. For starters, our pop culture depictions of women in politics have for some time leaned on models based on Clinton herself, including that of the brilliant woman who backburners her own potential for years to support her husband’s (think: Claire Underwood, Mellie Grant). Women who put themselves unapologetically first, who don't hide how badly they want the top jobs, like the delightfully brash and self-centered Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer on HBO’s vicious West Wing satire “Veep,” are still outliers.
It’s not just TV. Women who aren't biding their time and waiting their turns continue to run up against systems that aren't designed for them. When Tammy Duckworth became the first sitting senator to give birth this year, she and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had to engineer what The New York Times described as “several months of behind-the-scenes negotiation in the hidebound Senate” to change the rules about children in the chamber so Duckworth could bring her nursing infant daughter with her when she returned for a confirmation vote, 10 days after Maile was born. A “compromise” reportedly floated before the rule change suggested, quite ridiculously, that Duckworth could vote from the cloakroom, a sort of workplace version of a school banishing a pregnant teen from her own graduation. The implication behind the need for such painstaking negotiations is that a woman trying to do her job while parenting an infant is, even in 2018, a woman out of place on the Senate floor.
While writers and publishing houses have rushed to issue book-length postmortems of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid — including Clinton herself, with “What Happened” — we’re smack in the middle of a historic number of women pursuing high offices, many no doubt motivated by the rage shared by so many women since November 9, 2016. It’s this moment that Jo Piazza has opted to explore in her lively, timely and painfully insightful new campaign trail novel “Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win,” in which a Silicon Valley executive with a reputation for being "The Fixer" moves her husband and kids back to her small Pennsylvania hometown to challenge a longtime incumbent — an older white Republican described in the novel by one journalist as an "enemy of vaginas the world over" — and become the first woman in the state elected to the Senate. (That part’s real. Pennsylvania has never had a female governor or Senator.)
With the wave of women running this year, there’s no shortage of compelling, real candidates to profile, but fiction can both capitalize on this watershed moment and weave together more discrete cultural tropes and media critiques — not to mention the sexist reactions to ambitious women in politics — into one coherent narrative, without the distraction of real personalities and resumes getting in the way of the story. In other words, no actual women candidates have to be harmed in the making of, or discussion of, this book.
Charlotte isn’t exactly a breakout progressive superstar like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, though she does hail from humble roots and is taking on a veteran male incumbent; she’s not quite an Amy McGrath (a Marine fighter pilot who returned to Kentucky’s Sixth district to challenge Rep. Andy Barr for his seat) nor a Liz Watson (a Washington lawyer and EMILY's List pick who went back to Indiana to win the Ninth District Democratic primary), but she has moved home after having left to pursue a high-powered career, to run for Congress in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory.
Why her and why now? her hotshot campaign manager Josh — nicknamed “Boy Wonder” by her increasingly resentful husband — wants to know. Charlotte runs through all of the socially acceptable answers a woman candidate is expected to give but then speaks honestly about her pure, unadulterated ambition: “I like to win.”
What Charlotte has to do to win will, like many a candidate before her, challenge her conceptions about her own moral compass. As a journalist, Piazza — also author of the novels "The Knock Off" and "Fitness Junkie" with Lucy Sykes, and the nonfiction book "How to Be Married" — reported on the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections, and her novel draws on that expertise to show how campaigns work on the inside and how they're perceived by the press and public. In this way, Piazza’s novel shares some DNA with Joe Klein’s anonymously-penned “Primary Colors,” the salacious roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign as told through the eyes of an idealistic young staffer. But on the Walsh campaign, sexism fuels the harmful rumors floating around her marriage and family, and Charlotte alone knows the secret that could undo all of their work. The burden of that knowledge shades her every triumph and makes every defeat feel even more ominous. Piazza wisely takes her time divulging the details, instead teasing the big secret through most of the book, and the resulting tension propels the story forward more than any vote tallies could.
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And because this is decidedly Charlotte’s story, and a painfully realistic one at that, the jokes often elicit more rueful laughs. In a scene where Josh shows Charlotte her latest polling numbers, he points out to her that "White men are still a problem." Leila, her young assistant and confidante, fires back, "That should be on a T-shirt or, better yet, a hat." It's funny because it's true. The preternaturally twee Instagram stylist hired to shape Charlotte’s visual social media image is also a reflection of how important superficial appearance details — Charlotte wears flats to an event and inadvertently launches #HeelGate, complete with days of reactions from the insatiable take-osphere — are for women on the campaign trail. Piazza nails the different tones and voices of the different publications, from Politico ("Senate Candidate Sparks Pregnancy Rumors After Collapsing on Trail") to the fictional feminist outlet Pussypower.com ("Do Men Want Ambitious Women?"), in stories about Charlotte's campaign that pepper the narrative.
“Smile until you feel like your lips will fall off,” the Boy Wonder warns her. “A woman who doesn’t smile is an angry woman. You cannot be an angry woman, even for a second.”
Just reading those words makes me, an angry woman, want to flip tables. It's infuriating because it's true. The exhausting contradictions of 2018, however, demand that women also express their anger immediately or forever hold their peace, lest they risk a round of "why did she wait so long to speak up?" When Charlotte extricates herself from a grotesque and all-too-familiar #MeToo encounter, she's then criticized by Leila, one of the only people in her life Charlotte trusts, for not making a bigger scene. Charlotte's damned if she does, damned if she doesn't — every woman knows that catch-22.
As Charlotte moves from underdog to real contender, she has to also contend with how much of her reality the public and the media — to say nothing of her family, as the secret she's harboring affects them the most — are willing to accept. That's a kind of mental calculus that every woman contemplating a run for office has to complete, even as the standards for men's behavior have fallen so far that the efforts in "Primary Colors" to clean up after their candidate seem positively quaint now. As the general elections heat up this fall, we'll see if the changes of the last two years will alter how Americans think and talk about women candidates in reality, too.
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