In February 2024, according to a former staff member who told the story to The New York Times, Representative Mary Peltola, an Alaska Democrat running for the Senate, pushed an aide. As the Times put it in a report published yesterday, Peltola “shoved a male employee in the chest with one hand, causing him to stumble backward.”
You might wonder why the paper of record is reporting this detail. Did the employee then tumble off a cliff and die? The Times does not mention any bodily harm, beyond the backward stumble. The encounter is instead offered as evidence of what the Times calls “a campaign and congressional office marked by chaos.” Chaos.
The attempted exposé of Peltola is the latest installment in a familiar genre. Democratic staffers (they are almost always Democrats) complain off the record about the private behavior of their boss, who is almost always female, toward them. The behavior in question ranges from inappropriate to, more often, somewhat inappropriate to completely appropriate.
One notorious example concerns former Representative Katie Porter of California, who shouted, as she was being filmed, “Get out of my fucking shot” at a staffer. Although nobody enjoys being shouted at, there is a certain urgency about getting the staff out of a camera shot that is supposed to focus exclusively on the principal.
[Marc Novicoff: Democrats’ great Alaskan hope]
The classic of the genre involves Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was deemed abusive by staffers in 2019, as she was mounting a presidential campaign, for episodes such as berating them for bringing her a salad on a plane without including a fork. Klobuchar was reduced to eating her salad with a comb. The story was supposed to make Klobuchar look unreasonable, if not crazy. To my mind, it reflected poorly on the staffer who did not think to procure the fork.
The Times’ Peltola exposé labels the shove as “one of the more notable incidents described by former aides.” This raises the intriguing question of what the less notable incidents entail. The story details several.
In one episode recounted by the Times, Peltola grew frustrated with a prep session for interactions with the news media. The story gravely notes that Peltola “picked up a water bottle and pretended it was a microphone, shoving it toward a staff member as she berated her.” The bottle did not strike the target, but it reportedly came within an inch of doing so, according to “text messages sent at the time.” One can only imagine the carnage Peltola narrowly averted. (Two other people present at the time described the exchange as “lighthearted.”)
Peltola’s reign of terror includes text messages requesting more campaign signs. In pursuit of this goal, which seems quite reasonable, she reportedly texted, “BIG SIGNS NEED TO BE SENT TO SOUTHEAST” and “OUR SIGN GAME IS FUCKED.”
Peltola also wrote disparagingly about a progressive organization. “I hope Planned Parenthood knows that if we don’t win it’s more their loss than ours. FUCK THOSE BITCHES,” she texted her staff in January 2024, according to the Times, which published an image of the text. And, apparently referring specifically to one Planned Parenthood board member, Peltola later wrote, “I hope she dies of a botched abortion.” This was an obvious, if hostile, joke. The anecdote suggests that the staffers are aggrieved by Peltola’s political leanings as well as her managerial failings.
The centerpiece of the story revolves around the care and feeding of Meatball, the office lizard. The Times presents this piece of the puzzle in the tone of Watergate-style disclosures, complete with details about sourcing: “Meatball’s preferred diet consisted of live crickets, according to three staff members familiar with the demand, including two who fed the chameleon.” You can almost imagine Ben Bradlee inspecting the copy and asking skeptically why the third source was not directly involved in the cricket-feeding. (I don’t know the answer. I was not in the parking garage where this anecdote was presumably shared.)
The Times elaborates upon the indignities this task entails: “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.”
A naive reader might conclude that this episode is harmless farce, or perhaps reflects haplessness on the part of the staff. Did the crickets get loose through some elaborate Escape From Alcatraz plot, or did the staffers simply fumble the job? (One suspects the latter).
The Times explains that, to her staffers, this task “exemplified the disregard Ms. Peltola appeared to have for her employees.” Was Peltola supposed to feed Meatball herself? This expectation would seem to make poor use of her comparative skill advantage, not to mention burden her with a frequently impossible task, given her need to travel between Washington, D.C., and Alaska.
The story does contain one bona fide example of improper behavior—an allegation that she sometimes used the slur faggot. Four former staff members report directly hearing her use the word. If true, it certainly reflects poorly on her. The Peltola campaign denied that she’d used the slur.
[Mark Leibovich: The Democrats aren’t built for this]
Yet the overall impression the story conveys is not an office beset by chaos, but one rife with staffers burdened with unrealistic expectations of workplace norms. Berating subordinates is a poor management practice. But it does not constitute chaos or the level of abuse that would justify a national news story. The fact that staffers for Peltola as well as for other Democratic politicians apparently categorize being scolded by their boss as a level of scandal requiring them to alert the media reflects a solipsistic tendency.
Staffers working for Democrats—but not for Republicans—now commonly use the national media as their human-resources department. They also use the media to publicly denounce their boss over matters of policy. Democratic staffers have sent letters demanding action on impeachment, climate change, and, on multiple occasions, the Middle East, among other issues.
Democratic staffers like these seem to believe that their role is to serve as a kind of moral check on their boss, to issue public dissents when a politician fails to uphold their preferred stances. If that is the position they imagine for themselves, then they probably take umbrage at being asked to feed her lizard. Nobody wants to be shoved by their boss. The question is whether that kind of behavior is worth going—anonymously—to The New York Times. More important, these Democrats should come to terms with the reality that sometimes, when you work for a busy, prominent person in a high-stress environment, your job really is to feed the lizard.