Nikki Haley Has a Path to the White House

And Mike Pence is on a Walk of Shame

This piece appeared in TIME this morning. You can read it here. 

I went to Nikki Haley’s “Women for Nikki” campaign event in Des Moines last week, pitched it to my editor at TIME, and wrote it over the weekend. It percolated at TIME for a day or two, and the first edits came Wednesday. When it goes through a first edit, it almost always means that it is accepted. But you never know. Once, a piece at the New York Times went through two edits and then was rejected. Ugh. But that’s how it works. Part of the game. I’m just happy to get anything in these publications.

Given this situation, I almost always just go along with the editor’s cuts. I don’t ever want to be a bother.

Here is part of what was cut that you might like:

I watched Pence speak to a room of about 60 a few weeks ago. If the event hadn’t been hosted by Senator Joni Ernst, I doubt he could have fielded a baseball team with the crowd that would have come.

Let’s be honest about this. Pence isn’t traveling to gauge support for a presidential run. He’s on a walk of shame. He was booed last week at the NRA convention in his own state. If he does run for president, it’s only because he is a true masochist, and hopefully, his family will do an intervention. He’ll be better off retiring to Arizona and sitting sipping iced tea and reading his Bible in an air-conditioned country club with former Indianan and fellow loser former Vice President Dan Quayle. If Quayle will have him.

I understand this cut. But don’t be surprised if I use it in the future!

Only once have I ever disagreed with my wonderful editor at the New York Times. I wrote something like, “Rural Republicans in Iowa would still vote for Trump if he slapped the piss out of the preacher at the church potluck.”

I think it was one of the best lines I’ve ever written! Love the alliteration. I think they changed “piss” to stuffing.

Not the same.

So, whenever I’m being edited, you couldn’t pull me away from emails on my phone with a crowbar.

Yesterday, I left Indianola at about 1:30 p.m. to drive to Iowa City to pick up our daughter Johanna who is studying at the University of Iowa. At a stoplight in Oskaloosa, I noticed that I had an email from my editor with edits. I pulled off the road, pulled up the Google doc, and responded. Four more times, I did the same. He was rushing to get it finished, and I didn’t want to slow him down.

One time when I was stopped, I took the photo above to show him one of the places where I was editing.

He replied, “You live a cliche.”

Lots to unpack there since TIME is based in New York City, but I’ll pass. If my editor at TIME sees me as living a cliche, that’s fine with me. It’s probably why they publish me and other Iowa writers; we live where they don’t and have lives very different from theirs.

And if he saw my suspenders, he would know he was right…

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