August 26, 2019 Issue
Playing For Keeps
Lauren Parker-Seaborn has won over most of America, but is still fighting her toughest battle
By Sondra Torres
Lauren Parker-Seaborn smiles broadly as she watches her nieces and nephew splash in the Pacific Ocean on the secluded California beach. Except for the pair of plain-clothes Secret Service agents nearby (and the several that are less than a mile away, guarding all approaches to and from the beach), she looks just like what she is—an aunt babysitting her brother's children.
Her dog, Marty, is at the center of the three Parker children's romping. The Jack Russell terrier dashes around them, and tears through the beach after the sticks that her nephew Brandon throws for him to retrieve. Returning them also turns into an adventure for the "First Dog", as he sometimes nearly gets toppled by an errant wave, but he always returns the stick, ready for another toss.
Pointing to the dog, the First Lady jokes that he's the one the president really misses back in Washington. "I haven't seen Marty antagonize a member of Congress yet." She says, as if that alone is an explanation.
It's this off-hand comment that signals how different of a First Lady Lauren Parker-Seaborn is. Constantly compared to Jackie Kennedy for her youth and good looks, Parker-Seaborn is way more of a political animal than Kennedy could ever be, given the gender and social dynamics of the early 1960s. It's not an accident that her chief of staff, Dion Copley, was previously her husband's Senate chief of staff, and someone who has practical experience crafting legislation and dealing with other senators. And experience working with a driven, idealistic boss.
The role of First Lady, traditionally, was simply being the head of Washington D.C. polite society, and chief hostess for foreign dignitaries. Prior to the New Deal era, there was little political involvement on the part of the president's spouse, with a few notable exceptions such as Lucy Hayes forbidding alcohol to be served at the White House during her husband Rutherford's presidency, and Edith Wilson acting as the gatekeeper for information to her husband Woodrow, in the last two years of his presidency after he was laid low by a stroke (Wilson's disability and the First Lady's "stewardship" over him afterwards was not revealed to the public until Wilson was out of office).
As the country began its slow progress towards modern political and social equality for women, the role gradually expanded outwards: First Ladies, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt, became more vocal on certain political issues near and dear to them; Lady Bird Johnson with highway beautification and Nancy Reagan with the "War on Drugs" were the most notable examples. Betty Ford's candidness was perhaps the first crack in the traditional model of "First Ladyhood", and it was ironically Libby Lassiter, with her outspoken ultraconservative politics, who paved the way for the "modern" First Ladies that have succeeded her. Abigail Bartlet was an unapologetic career-oriented woman who made it a point (before the Bartlet multiple sclerosis scandal when she voluntarily suspended her medical license) to be referred to as "Dr. Bartlet" instead of "Mrs. Barlet"; Helen Santos went, by her own admission, from supportive political wife to an active politician who won the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat in Texas last year. While Mary Walken was a "traditional" First Lady, had Republican voters had their way, the current First Lady would have be Laura Shallick, the senior senator from Missouri, who made it a point to say that if her husband Henry became president, she would not resign her Senate seat to take up the mostly-ceremonial duties of the First Lady.
Bartlet, whose failed nomination for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) earlier this year led to her spending time with Parker-Seaborn and mentoring the younger woman in the ways the First Lady is scrutinized by the press, took heart that the modern First Lady was not to be relegated to a social hostess unless "it's by her choice." "Part of the wonderful thing with the younger generation of women and girls is that the voice in their head doesn't say 'it's not my place to speak out on issues I care about', it says 'why shouldn't I be allowed to speak out on issues that I care about?'' Bartlet said. "That's something that I believe that is good for our society, and good for women across the world to see."
Parker-Seaborn juggles so many roles that it's almost dizzying: First Lady, wife, ex-wife (from her brief first marriage), dog owner, aunt, sister, lawyer, socialite, businesswoman, philanthropist, retired child actor, and now, expectant mother. But its one role that she has that drives most of her political involvement during her husband's presidency: victim of gun violence. More specifically, the child of someone murdered with a gun.
"My father was a busy man," she recalls. "But when he did make time for us [her and her younger brother], he was so wonderful. He always had a way to make us laugh, even if we had just been fighting with each other, or with our mother."
Her father was Salvatore Parker, a Los Angeles lawyer and staunch Republican who was appointed Lieutenant Governor of California in 1986, when Parker-Seaborn was only 7, under new Governor Teddy Bridges. Parker's appointment resulted in his daughter's acting career ending and the family's move to Sacramento, a fact that she laughingly recalls she disliked mostly because she no longer got to dress up for various acting roles.
Bridges and Parker won terms of their own later that year, and developed a strong personal relationship, somewhat unusual when both men were elected separately to their respective positions. The pair planned to run an essentially joint campaign in 1990, according to recollections from both Bridges and Parker's staff.
But on August 26, 1989, as Parker jogged down a Sacramento alley, he was accosted. What occurred next hasn't been definitively proven without a suspect, but detectives studying the incident believe it was a mugging that went horribly wrong. "The lieutenant governor's wallet being in his hand with no money missing and the position of his arm near where he was known to keep his wallet, indicates that he was probably held up at gunpoint and went to remove his wallet," retired detective John Bartone, who was one of the first homicide detectives on the scene, said in a 2018 interview. "It's likely that the perpetrator was startled in some way and shot [Parker] twice in the chest, then fled in a panic."
It was only three days after Parker-Seaborn's eleventh birthday and marked an irrevocable end to her childhood. The Bridges took the Parkers in, and Parker-Seaborn's mother Helen was sent into a deep depression that lasted for months. "If it hadn't been for the Bridges, I don't want to think what would have happened to us," Parker-Seaborn said. "There was no way my mother could take care of herself, much less two children, in that condition." Both Governor Bridges and his wife, Grace, remain close family friends of Parker-Seaborn and her brother Salvatore Jr. (or "S.J."); Bridges walked Parker-Seaborn down the aisle during both of her weddings.
Coming to terms with her father's death, Parker-Seaborn joined Bridges in defying the Republican Party and proposing a strict handgun ban in California. She made a few public appearances alongside Bridges, and stoically stood, at age 17, with Bridges when he signed the Parker Handgun Ban into law in 1996. The ban was overturned by the Supreme Court two years later, and Parker-Seaborn, by then a prominent member of the College Republicans at Stanford, broke with Bridges, her family, and the rest of the party and spoke out for its re-institution. The hostile reaction she received afterwards led her to resign from the College Republicans and leave the party less than a year after effectively leading Lewis Eisenhower's campaign on the Stanford campus.
After that, she exited the political arena to focus on her professional career and personal life: graduating from Stanford with a bachelor's degree in pre-law in 2000, she went straight to the university's law school and became a member of the California bar in 2003. During her time at law school, her mother passed away from uterine cancer, and Parker-Seaborn tasked herself with establishing a foundation in her mother's honor. To that end, while still a law student, she started her own clothing line to supplement the trust fund she would inherit upon her 25th birthday, which eventually became the Smithee-Parker Foundation upon incorporation in 2004.
After graduation, she gained a position in her father's old Los Angeles firm of Summers, Calloway, and Hamilton in 2004 just as her first marriage ended. She met Sam Seaborn, another member of the firm, and became engaged to him in October 2005. When incoming White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman asked her fiancé to join him in running the Santos White House, Parker-Seaborn agreed to follow her husband to the nation's capital. The marriage date was continually postponed, as the tension in the relationship led to a "half-dozen" breakups and reconciliations before Seaborn left in June 2009 to begin sounding out a run for the Senate.
The couple would finally marry in June 2010, even after being injured in a car accident alongside a campaign staffer and driver. While appearing as a dutiful political spouse and making the necessary public appearances with her husband, Parker-Seaborn largely spent her energies towards her legal, business and philanthropic efforts. Before the 2018 campaign, she was "removed" in her own words, from most of the political aspects of being married to a United States senator.
That changed when, after long and frank discussions with her and close friends, Seaborn announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to replace Glen Allen Walken as president. Now, Lauren Parker-Seaborn took a leave of absence from her firm and handed off day-to-day control over her business and foundation and joined her husband on the campaign trail. She sat in on strategy meetings, argued with consultants and advisers, and pushed her husband on issues like LGBT rights and, perhaps most contentiously of all, guns.
It has been political folk wisdom in Washington that federal gun control legislation is doomed to fail. The deep coffers of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and their willingness to drown gun control proponents in negative advertising and throw funds to any opponents that stand for a looser interpretation of the Second Amendment's "well-regulated militia" clause, in this telling, mean that any serious attempt at significant gun control is foolhardy at best, political suicide at worst. The "lonely landslide" that was Josiah Bartlet's re-election victory, in this school of thought, was due in part to the president's efforts to extend the federal assault weapons ban that was due to expire in 2003.
Throw in the realignment of the Republican Party in the quarter-century since the ban was passed in 1993, with several moderate Republicans helping to overcome Owen Lassiter's veto, and the conventional wisdom looks compelling to the handicappers in Washington. Especially with the failure of the last three presidents to find an effective legislative solution to gun violence in the country, as the number of mass shootings shows no sign in stopping.
That's not what Lauren Parker-Seaborn sees when she looks at the situation. "Over 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks, including 80 percent of all gun owners," she says, "Three-quarters of Americans, including most Republicans, want stricter gun control. An assault weapons ban that would make the AR-15 that we see used again and again in mass shootings has 70 percent support, including, again, majority support among Republican voters…If there wasn't an entire industry that has decided profits are worth more than people's lives, or their votes, then this wouldn't even be worth discussing."
Those are strident words. But they are buttressed by news about the NRA—the most powerful and prominent special interest group that is opposed to new gun control legislation— and its shambolic finances. Reporting a net loss of $46 million last year in part due to what appears to be shoddy investments, the venerable organization, started by Union Civil War veterans nearly 150 years ago to teach marksmanship and firearm safety, has also been the target of investigations by state regulators in New York (where the organization is chartered) and others over its status as a tax-free non-profit. Additionally, several members of the association's board of directors have been implicated in double-dealing at the organization's expense, misusing the donations and dues from the organization's 5 million members. It's conceivable that even with a president who supports "get[ting] the guns", the NRA might not be able to cow legislators into opposing new gun control legislation.
With a Republican-controlled Senate, Parker-Seaborn is under no illusions about the possibility of universal background checks in this Congress. "It's not about this cycle," she says, stretching on the foldable beach chair she's sitting on. "It's about the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that." She's read the polling data, just like others in Washington. Younger voters (aged 18 to 29) support almost all forms of gun control at a higher rate than their elders, and as firearm ownership continues to decline from its high point in the mid-1970s (when nearly 55% of Americans lived in a home with at least one firearm compared to 32% in 2016), it is likely that at some point, gun control opponents will find themselves politically, if not actually, out-gunned.
The Supreme Court's
Brewer v. New York City decision affirming the individual right to own a handgun for "traditionally lawful purposes" such as home self-defense, puts a backstop on quite a few gun control proposals, but Parker-Seaborn doesn't bat an eye when presented with the Court's ruling.
"The majority decision still gives Congress the ability to put certain limits on firearm ownership and the types of weapons civilians are allowed to own," she says, "so while it throws up legal hurdles to quite a few options, there's still things Congress and state legislatures can do to make communities safer." She lists a few things states can do, such as introducing red-flag laws, which allow police to temporarily seize the firearms of someone a judge deems a potential danger to themselves or others, and passing state laws that require a background check to be run on any gun sale or transfer in that state.
But she admits that the only solution will have to be federal. "We've seen what happens without any kind of federal legislation: one state passes gun control legislation to stop gun violence in its communities, and guns acquired in neighboring states with looser gun laws get brought in and used in crimes," she says. "The only way we're going to get gun violence, including suicides using handguns— something that rarely gets talked about whenever this is brought up—down is through Congress doing what the American people want and passing common sense gun legislation."
It's words like that that have enraged hardcore conservatives, who have castigated Parker-Seaborn as an "coastal elitist" who unfairly demonizes gun owners. The First Lady laughs at the first charge. "I mean, I can't help that I grew up near an ocean, can I?" she says. "But I don't have anything against people who own guns legally and use them responsibly—it’s the small portion who get guns and misuse them, that I'm worried about. Especially with all the high-capacity assault rifles or easily-concealable handguns that are floating around."
So, she's going to keep pressing for a solution, hopeful that demographic and political change will led to Americans electing a Congress that will take strong action on the country's problem with gun violence and mass shootings. It might make her unpopular with some sections of the country, but Lauren Parker-Seaborn has a higher calling than national popularity.
"I don't want there to be a need for active shooter drills, or a market for bulletproof backpacks. I don't want thirty more years to go by without feeling like I've done something so that other children don't have to go through what I went through because of a gun." She says, as her nieces splash about in the surf. She checks her watch and calls out that it's time to leave. Her nephew trudges over, left behind in Marty's wake as the Jack Russell Terrier speeds towards his owner. Her nieces walk over, telling her excitedly about the seashells they found. Policy discussions, constitutional debates, and questions about whether she should be opining on such a topic are gone, for now. Now, as she patiently listens to six year-old Leilani Parker talk about the pretty shell she found while eight-year old Ava dries off, she's not the First Lady, or the style icon for professional women—she's Aunt Lauren, who would really like to hear more about the pretty shell her niece found on a secluded California beach.
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