All the Presidents' Pets Read Free Page A

convention. The kids’ll love it.”
    â€œThat doesn’t make any sense.”
    â€œThe line between what’s real and what’s not, we’re fucking with it. It’s satire.” Seamus was becoming less friendly, more agitated. “Bro, you’re overthinking it. Sometimes it’s just funny.”
    Secretary Baker not so graciously declined my invitation, as did most of Washington’s powerbrokers past and present. Even Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who had recently shown up on Jay Leno’s
Tonight Show
in full clown makeup (he was getting ready for a presidential run in 2008), turned us down.
    That’s when viewers started fleeing in droves, and the critics smelled blood. The
Washington Post
’s Tom Shales wrote that “Rocca is ten minutes past his fifteen minutes of fame” and that I “deserved to die.” The
New York Times
’s Frank Rich served me with the harshest indictment of all:
“Rocca Your World
made me cry more than the recent revival of
Gypsy,
and for all the wrong reasons.”
    By this time Seamus had become bored—he had already “embedded” every woman at the network—and announced that he was moving on to direct a production of
Macbeth
with meth-addicted McDonaldland characters on the Lower East Side.
    â€œWe’re not connecting here, Mochise. You guys are way too linear.”
    Rather than bring in someone to fix the show, the network started eating into my hour. First came extended weather breaks. Then they forced me to make room for “Imus moments,” during which the I-Man was usually blasting away at my show. (Imus was implacable. He returned every check I wrote to his charity ranch.)
    I was no safer in cyberspace. On AmIAnnoying.com, I discovered that according to voters I was more annoying than Pia Zadora and only slightly less annoying than Jeffrey Dahmer. My Yahoo! fan site had already shuttered, after the lone remaining member, Roccandroll43, wrote, “Mo is so pale, skinny, and uncomfortable with himself. It really grosses me out.”
    What hurt most of all, though, was the treatment I got from Washington’s normally good-natured political comedy song-and-dance troupe, the Capitol Steps. Their latest revue,
Please, No Mo Rocca
included the biting “You’re the Flop” (sung to the melody of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”), which soon became an even bigger hit than last season’s “Bomb Bomb Iraq” (sung to the melody of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”). The lyrics were scathing:

    You’re the Flop
    You’re as funny as Cheney
    You’re the Flop
    But not nearly as zany

    You’re worse than watching roll call on C-SPAN
    You’re a filibuster
    Without the luster
    You deserve the can!

    That’s when Eric pulled the plug on
Rocca Your World
and conceived my “Pressure” segment. “Look, Mo, we might have pushed you too far away from your roots. This will be a much better fit,” Eric said.
    â€œBut I came to cable to avoid things like wearing silly disguises.”
    â€œHey, there’s nothing silly about the proud men and women who work in America’s service industries,” he said a little self-righteously. “Besides, Jim likes you.”
    Hard Time with Jim Traficant,
featuring my “Pressure” segment, would premiere only days later. Traficant had been out of prison for two months when the network snatched him up. Besides my participation, he demanded that he be allowed to wear his orange prison jumpsuit on camera and that Gary Condit be the first guest. (Condit was the only member who voted against Jim’s expulsion from the House of Representatives.) The network had high hopes.
    I didn’t have much choice but to submit to Traficant, so I packed my bags and moved down to D.C., the town where I grew up and where the show was being taped.
    Back in the café car,