The New York Times dropped a story on Wednesday about former House member Mary Peltola, one of Democrats’ top recruits in a critical Senate race, about her behavior toward staff.
The people who work for congressional Democrats are, by definition, Democrats — they want Democrats to win elections, and they don’t like Republicans. So you’d expect them to have a reasonably high bar for participating in a hit piece against a Democratic Party politician in a tough race. You’re expecting to see revelations of financial scandals or physically endangering staffers or some other kind of misconduct that truly shocks the conscience.
What we get in this story instead is what I would characterize as ticky-tack bullshit.
The candidate got angry and yelled sometimes (so did Chuck Schumer when I was an intern in his office). That’s a good reason to, maybe, ultimately prefer to work for another member. They also tag her for having used the words “faggot” and “retard” in private. I grew up in Greenwich Village and was always very woke on the former term, but I’ll admit that the r-word was very much part of the vernacular in the 1980s and 1990s, even in a very left-wing place. I used to say it a lot. After receiving a good talking to from a friend circa 2008, I have made an effort to purge it from my vocabulary but have not fully succeeded.
Peltola is eight years older than I am and from Alaska. I don’t think she should talk like that. But I also think that if you don’t understand that linguistic norms shift over time and that older people are often a bit behind the curve of linguistic change, you really don’t understand politics.
The drive to structure politics around language policing rather than the substance of what people do has been a toxic force in progressive politics for years, and folks doing practical work in frontline seats and frontline races need to stay away from it. A Democratic Party whose staffers are such cocooned snowflakes that they can’t restrain themselves from leaking against their boss over salty language — rather than trying to have a calm, respectful internal conversation about it — isn’t going to make it.
But what really got me was this thing about a lizard:
For some on her staff, one task exemplified the disregard Ms. Peltola appeared to have for her employees: feeding her daughter’s pet chameleon, Meatball.
Meatball’s preferred diet consisted of live crickets, according to three staff members familiar with the demand, including two who fed the chameleon. Ms. Peltola instructed aides to purchase the insects at a pet store and then feed them to Meatball.
Aides initially went to Ms. Peltola’s apartment in Washington to feed Meatball, but the congresswoman later brought the reptile into her office on Capitol Hill. On at least one occasion, the crickets escaped in the office and had to be recaptured, according to two former aides who witnessed it as well as a photo viewed by the Times that showed aides in the office trying to trap the crickets using manila folders and small paper cups.
The problem here isn’t about politics at all; it’s about life and work and an attitude toward work that I’m afraid I’ve seen from a lot of younger people over the past 10 years. If your boss wants you to do something, just go do it! If you find the work unpleasant and don’t want to keep doing it for the long term, that’s fine. Nobody stays in a job forever, and it’s always reasonable to want a better one.
But you know what’s a good way to get a better job? Work really hard at the job you have and impress people. Feed the chameleon!
When you’re young and don’t have the experience or knowledge of your more senior colleagues but also don’t have competing family responsibilities, you should be the one who is willing and eager to take stuff on and become a valued member of the team.
Members of Congress have a hard job
Last week, I flew to Burlington on Monday to speak at Middlebury College that evening, then back to D.C. on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday I took a train up to New York City for a dinner about energy policy, then returned to D.C. on an early morning train so I could appear on a Thursday afternoon panel. It was a kind of exhausting week, but I also like my job and it’s nice to talk to college students and in the end it was all fine.
Being a member of Congress from Alaska pays a lot less well than writing the #14 U.S. Politics Substack and also involves constant travel back and forth to Alaska, which is a lot farther away than Vermont. Beyond that, you have to travel around Alaska during your visits home, which is a major logistical challenge. Juneau is 700 miles from Fairbanks, which is 350 miles from Anchorage. Large swaths of the state are much more remote than those three cities. People need to travel around Alaska by air on small planes (Peltola’s husband died in a plane crash in 2023).
When I was an intern at Rolling Stone, one of my job responsibilities was that every morning I was supposed to pick up a poppy seed muffin and a coffee for one of the editors.
He liked heavy cream in his coffee but was under doctor’s orders to reduce his fat intake, so rather than switch to skim milk, his solution was that I was supposed to use an eyedropper to dispense a very small and precise amount of cream into his coffee.
To this day, I do not understand why he didn’t pick up his own breakfast, why he didn’t act more normal about the dairy, or any of the many other aspects of this scenario. I did not enjoy this task — I am still complaining about it 26 years later! But I’m also not going to name the guy because even if I think the task was dumb, it’s not a scandal. He wasn’t falsifying stories or embezzling funds. And, actually, outside of this one specific unreasonable thing about the eyedropper of cream, he was pretty nice. Perhaps the time it would have taken him to put his own eyedroppers of cream in his coffee really was critically important to the future of journalism.
Regardless, Mary Peltola must be busy as hell!
Members of Congress, especially ones on the front lines and/or with logistically difficult commutes from D.C., have a really hard job. Basically the only mitigation available is that they have staff to help them. And even though being a congressional staffer doesn’t pay very well,1 it is a prestigious job that can position you well to move on to other things. Your job, as a staffer, is to help your boss do her job better. Your boss’s job is to represent her constituents, to contribute constructively to the legislative process, and to win elections.
What your boss needs help with on any given day is going to vary. Maybe she needs a briefing on some issue. Maybe she needs to arrange a trip to Nome. Maybe she needs somebody to feed her pet lizard because she was held late for votes and needed to reschedule a meeting with someone important. Feed the lizard!
This thing where the crickets got loose seems legitimately annoying, but that also sounds like the staffer who was supposed to be feeding crickets to the chameleon fucked up. It’s not like Peltola was letting crickets loose in the office as a prank.
Complain about real misconduct
While the poppy seed guy was pretty nice and helpful except for his breakfast routine, the big boss of the magazine, Jann Wenner, was a giant asshole.
He once screamed at me over the egregiously messy state of my desk in front of everyone. I will admit to being a messy person who has been known to let the state of his desk lapse pretty egregiously. But in this specific scenario, the messy desk he was mad about wasn’t even my desk!2 I was just standing near the desk. Somebody did step in to point out that it wasn’t my desk, but I got no apology.
Even so, it’s not a crime to be an asshole.
Years later, Ben Ryan accused Wenner of serious sexual harassment, which Wenner denied. But Ryan’s allegations seem well-corroborated by his contemporary diary and his then-boyfriend. Joe Hagan, separately, reports in his biography of Wenner that he “was known for his jovial sexual harassment.”
I’m glad that Ryan came forward, and I think it’s pretty twisted that a bunch of people in media made excuses for or protected Wenner despite what seems to have been a pattern of pretty widely understood harassment. If I’d seen him do something like that — as opposed to just seeing him be unreasonably unapologetic about a situation in which he was objectively in the wrong — I like to think I’d have blown the whistle to someone.
If your boss is sexually harassing people, or insider trading, or taking bribes, or stealing money, or any of the many other genuinely criminal things that sometimes happen in the workplace, then by all means, tell a journalist. But if you just don’t like something about the job, get another job.
It’s a good idea to work hard when you’re young
I do get that as a congressional staffer, you feel you should be doing elevated work related to legislation and constituent service, not operating as a part-time personal assistant.
But also, think about this: You could spend time summarizing a document for your boss that she doesn’t have time to read in full because she’s too busy going to the pet store to pick up crickets, or you could go buy the crickets because she’s too busy reading the long document. Either way, you’re being helpful, and that’s the job.
More broadly, I worry that because the left believes, as a public policy question, in labor rights and good working conditions, it also creates a memetic environment in which young people are not instructed in the value of working hard, especially when you’re young.
But something that’s hard about a junior role is that to advance in your career, you really need to accomplish two different things. One is that you need to master more advanced skills so that you’re capable of doing higher-level work. The other is that you need to impress more senior colleagues and be seen as a helpful and diligent person. There can be a conflict between these things because the stuff that it’s most helpful for you to do — feeding lizards and putting eyedrops of cream into the coffee — tends not to be the stuff that builds skills. But the edge most young people have is a lack of responsibilities and competing demands on their time. You’re not letting your spouse and kids down if you feed the lizard and write the policy memo. You just need to put in extra hours.
When I was in my first job, one of the things my boss wanted me to do was wake up every Sunday morning and watch the Sunday morning TV interview shows that the news networks all did and summarize them for our audience. This was a pretty annoying task, schedule-wise. And I suppose I would have been within my rights to ask for comp time during the week. But the other problem with the Sunday morning gig was that I didn’t think it was very interesting. It didn’t generate articles that I was proud of or that built my reputation or that would help me get my next job. But taking comp time would have meant doing less of the normal work for the magazine that actually helped me advance. So I didn’t want to do less normal work for the magazine — I wanted to be a helpful employee and I wanted to generate good articles, so I did both. And then I also wrote my personal blog.
And when I got my next job, it was really a blogging gig on the strength of the success of my personal blog. But I had also amassed some of the skills that come from working in a real newsroom and writing structured columns and also also had bosses who would testify that I was a helpful person who pitched in and did what was needed.
It kinda sucked to work that many hours, but I know people who were serving in Iraq or washing dishes in restaurants at the time, so in the grand scheme of things I don’t think spending 2003 to 2005 toiling in the content mines makes me the greatest martyr in the world.
If you want to have a chill life, that’s fine. But the person who becomes chief of staff is going to be someone who has really dedicated themselves to the vocation. You should be aware of that and not interpret every demanding boss as a scandal.
This is a problem, by the way. Both members and their staff should be paid more.
I believe it was Touré’s desk.
Chasing around crickets is a great story to tell at a bar, but it’s pathetic to complain to a reporter about it. Be like us when we were kids and fictionalize it into a story that can be played by Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep.
Look, this story is, as Matt says, "ticky tacky bullshit." The fact that it's getting more press than Susan Collin's bribery scandal and the Trump administration covering for her, is profound failing of the media. This column encourages prioritization of the issues. That said, of my boss had asked me to feed their pets, I would feel a bit weird about that. I don't know what Matt was doing for Schumer when he was younger, but work-life boundaries are important.
Congressional ethics rules are actually pretty strict about this. Staffers aren't there to do congresspeople's chores. Is it a big dea for me as a voter? Is Dan Sullivan guilty of the same thing? Eh. To me, it seems like downstream of the fact that Congress is way underpaid for the work they do, and that leads to a lot of corruption, from the petty, like what's described here, to the more serious, like what Collins is accused of. One form is way more serious than the other, but neither needs to be valorized.