I was always interested in everyone's reaction to Ellie in the episode where she tells Danny her father won't fire the Surgeon General. All we really know about her is that she's not the favorite, and she wasn't around much during the campaign, etc. This is my version of her history, set around the beginning of the campaign. Involves a lot of Sam. :)
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In the beginning, I loved my father being in politics.
I loved the men, in their power ties, perfectly gelled hair, and the expensive Italian leather that made up everything from their briefcases to their Gucci loafers.
These were smart men, powerful men. You could feel their power from a mile away, potent enough to raise the hair on your arms.
At first, I loved it because politics meant sitting at the foot of Daddy's arm chair while he ranted aloud, drinking up his enthusiasm for it.
It meant dressing up in his bathrobe and sitting at the opposite end of the kitchen table, banging a wooden spoon and pretending to be the judge or the prosecution or he was appealing to.
It meant the soothing image of sneaking downstairs after bedtime and watching him read some thick volume in front of the wood stove, pretending not to see me until I had finally inched close enough to be grabbed onto his lap, where he would produce a piece of butterscotch candy out of his pocket and swear me to secrecy.
Growing up in a farmhouse in New Hampshire, I had no idea what it was really about. I was thirteen before I laid eyes on the cold, corrupt world of Washington, D.C., and the whole concept was different there. It was a concrete jungle; I saw the men in suits who used to visit my father in Maryland suddenly in their natural habitat, prowling for the weak and fighting for rank, and I didn't like it.
Even Leo McGarry, my Uncle Leo, upheld a stony, calculating expression that I didn't recognize as he stood on the steps of Capitol Hill.
I withdrew from it instantly, but it sparked something in my father. This was his world, and subsequently, ours, and a few years after he won the race for Governor, he had a nomination for the Presidency.
By that time, a lot had changed. My father rarely got in early enough to see me off to bed at night, much less spend time humoring me as I played in his bathrobe, or finding strategic places to hide butterscotch candy.
Plus, I had grown up. I was seventeen and loved men in politics for completely different reasons.
The concept of government still fascinated me. Old rules and new rules, three hundred years ago right up to yesterday. This whole intricate system of rules.
Didn? anyone realize how easy they were to break?
It was amazing how these men, with their clenched fists and iron morals, these graduates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton, these movers and shakers of America.....could be rendered utterly useless by one quick flip of a short skirt.
I was far braver than Liz or Zoey. We all powered through school, upheld the Bartlet legacy of scholastic excellence, and maintained a decent public face. I was the only one sneaking out at night, slipping into the shiny Mercedes and BMWs of the handsome interns who worked for my father by day, getting wasted at their upper crust fraternity parties and having to be carried back to my bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning.
Decent by day, naughty by night.
My senior year of high school, I went to work corrupting Chad Bailey, a gorgeous, twenty-six year old grad student who was interning while writing his Economics thesis. Chad was quiet, modest, and introverted, absolutely the opposite of every guy I'd dated in the last three years. He was a change and a challenge, right when I needed them. It took me the better part of six months to get him to lay a hand on me, and I didn't have five minutes to enjoy my victory before Mrs. Landingham walked in on us in the emergency stairwell, flushed and in a minor state of undress. My father predictably raged at me about the age difference, the public appearance, the immorality...all the things I could've cared less about. Even under the misconception that it was my first offense in such a department, I was sentenced to the summer in office, working for the campaign.
It felt like a death sentence. It felt like a waste of my last summer before college.
I thought the boredom would drive me out of my mind.
I was wrong.
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