Christina Murphy

Columnist

Since the announcement of Hillary Clinton’s presidential run just a few weeks ago, it seems like this is the closest we’ve come to having the nation’s first female president. Last Sunday, HBO’s “Veep” gave us a glimpse of what being the first female President might be like. Turns out it’s filled with a lot of meetings, appointments, weird gifts from world leaders, phone calls, missing hikers and men. 

Season three ended with the unexpected resignation of the president and the former VP Selina Meyer moving on up to the West Wing. The episode begins with President Meyer attempting to deliver her first big speech in the office, but the teleprompter goes blank, leaving her speechless, so to speak. The episode then flashes back to the previous 24 hours, where we get a look inside the bungled speech preparation strategy adopted by her team of “flying monkeys” that she calls her presidential staff. 

As we learn from the opening credits, the past eight months of her presidency had not been going great – especially for her devoted and sometimes obsessive assistant, Gary, who has been shut out of meetings and kept from his main girl, Madame President. He now has to watch over her through an empty office window that has a view directly into the oval office. His love is so extraordinarily suffocating that he inadvertently blinds her while she is delivering her speech by taking her back-up reading glasses, because he thought having them in her pocket made it look like she had a penis. Although, he makes it very clear that she could “totally pull it off” if she kept them in her pocket. 

President Meyer is a woman and a fierce one at that, although most times it does feel like she achieves most of her success due to a series of random accidents. 

Politics are a boy’s game and President Meyer is breaking through barriers. In the world of “Veep,” and probably the real world, the White House is filled with a bunch of “lady racists” who use phallic language to assert their dominance around Washington D.C. through obscene gestures and things that border on sexual harassment. 

Meyer’s first goal as president is to reallocate funds for her Families First bill, which would work towards alleviating poverty, specifically for underprivileged children. Through use of a “cock-thumb” strategy, she finds $50 billion that could be cut from an obsolete submarine defense system in the military. Her plan is thwarted at the last second by a congressman who threatens her team with the backlash, which will result from the job loss caused by the cuts. In their last-minute attempt to make changes to her speech, they lose everything. During their struggle to resurrect the speech, they insert an older version, which includes a series of random notes and the former President’s $60 billion submarine-spending plan. President Meyer receives a standing ovation as she sees her Families First Bill dissolve in her own hands.

Little frustrations like this surround President Meyer throughout the entire episode. She has to balance being the most powerful woman in the United States, and arguably the entire world, with feeling so utterly powerless against her incompetent staff and overbearing political and gender restraints within the American political system.  “Veep” airs on HBO on Sundays at 10:00 p.m. and can be watched on HBO GO.