Reporter Fondly Recalls Time Lindsey Graham Made Her Go Buy A Dress: ‘You Are Sticky. And You Are Icky’

Sipa via AP Images

Veteran political reporter and MS NOW contributor, Ashley Parker, raised some eyebrows with an anecdote she shared on social media about Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who passed away over the weekend.

“Like anyone who’s spent any time around politics, I have many Lindsey Graham stories. This is perhaps my favorite…” began Parker on, who is currently a staff writer at The Atlantic. She added in her Monday evening post:

I was covering Congress (Best! Beat! Ever!) for the NYT when the Mother Emanuel shooting happened in Charleston. It was summer, but I was wearing pants and a sweater that day because it was always SO freezing in the Capitol. Anyhow, news of the shooting came down, and the DC Bureau chief called me with an order: Get yourself to Charleston ASAP and glue yourself to Graham’s side.

She wanted a piece on the senator grappling with the unimaginable. So I headed straight to the airport, arriving in Charleston with just my backpack and what I’d be wearing to work that day, and linked up with Graham.

He had me meet him at a restaurant, where I told him I needed to shadow him for the next 48 hours. And he looked at me, with amused distaste, and said: “You are sticky. And you are icky. If you want to shadow me, go buy some nice new clothes—maybe a dress—and take a shower, and then we’ll talk.” (He was not wrong; I was sweaty and gross).

So I drove to a local big box store, bought a dress (he seemed to have a strong preference for a dress), and spent the next few days with him, resulting in this piece (which, for reasons not worth getting into, ended up being fairly different than the original assignment)

Parker then added a link to the story from 2015.

Parker quickly found critics online after sharing the story. Rolling Stone political reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez commented, “If any politician told me to put on a skirt if I wanted access to his response to a mass shooting that story would have been filed to my editor within 10 minutes.”

Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan added, “I have read this three times now. You could write an entire PhD thesis on this one tweet and every line of it.”

Below are some additional reactions:

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