Paula Broadwell Had Aspirations for a Career in Politics or Show Business, Which Are Pretty Much the Same Field Anyway

Before she was a well-known paramour, Paula Broadwell had dreams. Big dreams. The kind of dreams reserved for guileless high school dropouts from Oklahoma who come to Hollywood with nothing but a suitcase and an as-yet-unknown proclivity for heroin. Paula Broadwell wanted to be a star.

According to a report in the New York Post (so, you know, super credible), Broadwell had been on the hunt earlier this year for “an agent or brand manager in New York to raise her profile and told friends she’d had interest from “both parties” because of her military background.” An unnamed source informed the Post — no doubt in one of those old-timey steakhouses with velvet curtains on each booth — that Broadwell was hoping to take advantage of the media attention she was receiving during promotion for her book and “leverage [that attention] into a production company or becoming a regular contributor on TV.”

If you have a soul, you’ll find the cruel, Shakespearean irony in Broadwell’s eventual rise to national prominence a trifle upsetting. Upsetting, that is, until you also learn that if the whole showbiz thing didn’t work out for her, Broadwell wanted to maybe run for office, or even “brand herself as a fitness expert,” because the world is glaringly short of branded fitness experts. At this point, it seems impossible for the media to not characterize Broadwell as a sort of fame-hungry Harpy, but people who actively try to “brand” themselves tend to be pretty icky so it’s hard to wave the “leave Paula alone!” banner, especially if she was so keen to raise her public profile while carrying on an affair with the Judi Dench of American espionage.