Up, Simba!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate Read online

  Here’s what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. (There is still an N.V. statue of McCain by this lake today, showing him on his knees with his hands up and eyes scared and on the pediment the inscription “McCan—famous air pirate” [sic].) Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the lifevest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90º to the side with the bone sticking out. This is all public record. Try to imagine it. He finally got tossed on a Jeep and taken only like five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison—a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton, of much movie fame—where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. The media profiles all talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without a general would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was mostly delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then, after he’d hung on like like that for several months and his bones had mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up, they brought him to the prison commandant’s office and closed the door and out of nowhere offered to let him go. They said he could just . . . leave. It turned out that U.S. Admiral John S. McCain II had just been made head of all naval forces in the Pacific, meaning also Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. And John S. McCain III, 100 lbs and barely able to stand, refused the offer. The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a way longer time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The prison commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break McCain’s ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Forget how many movies stuff like this happens in and try to imagine it as real. Refusing release. He spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a special closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different profiles of McCain this year. It’s overexposed, true. Still though, take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between McCain getting offered early release and his turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer: What difference would one less POW make? Plus maybe it’d give the other POWs hope and keep them going, and I mean 100 pounds and expected to die and surely the Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to you if you need a real doctor or else you’re going to die, plus if you could stay alive by getting out you could make a promise to God to do nothing but Total Good from now on and make the world better and so your accepting would be better for the world than your refusing, and maybe if Dad wasn’t worried about the Vietnamese retaliating against you here in prison he could prosecute the war more aggressively and end it sooner and actually save lives so you could actually save lives if you took the offer and got out versus what real purpose gets served by you staying here in a box and getting beaten to death, and by the way oh Jesus imagine it a real doctor and real surgery and painkillers and clean sheets and a chance to heal and not be in agony and to see your kids again, your wife, to smell your wife’s hair . . . can you hear it? What would be happening in your head? Would you have refused the offer? Could you have? You can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the levels of pain and fear and want in that moment, much less to know how you’d react. None of us can know.

  But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, mostly in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: McCain does want your vote, after all.

  But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68—right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him—that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign (see sub), that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb it’s hard to ignore. The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered—voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. And yes, literally: “moral authority,” that old cliché, much like so many other clichés—“service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism”—that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain of recent seasons, though—arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire THMs—something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us hear clichés as more than just clichés and start trying to think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. To think about whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is?

  GLOSSARY OF RELEVANT CAMPAIGN TRAIL VOCAB, MOSTLY COURTESY OF JIM C. AND THE NETWORK NEWS TECHS

  22.5 = The press corps’ shorthand for McCain’s opening remarks at THMs (see THM), which remarks are always the same and always take exactly 22½ minutes.

  B-film = Innocuous little audio-free shots of McCain doing public stuff—shaking hands, signing books, getting scrummed (see Scrum), etc.—for use behind a TV voice-over report on the day’s campaigning, as in “The reason the techs (see Tech) have to feed (see Feed) so much irrelevant and repetitive daily footage is th
at they never know what the network wants to use for B-film.”

  Baggage Call = The grotesquely early A.M. time, listed on the next day’s schedule (N.B.: The last vital media-task of the day is making sure to get the next day’s schedule from Travis), when you have to get your suitcase back in the bus’s bowels and have a seat staked out and be ready to go or else you get left behind and have to try to wheedle a ride to the first THM (see THM) from FoxNews, which is a drag in all kinds of ways.

  Bundled Money = A way to get around the Federal Election Commission’s $1,000 limit for individual campaign contributions. A wealthy donor can give $1,000 for himself, then he can say that yet another $1,000 comes from his wife, and another $1,000 from his kid, and another from his Aunt Edna, etc. The Shrub’s (see Shrub) favorite trick is to designate CEOs and other top corporate executives as “Pioneers,” who each pledge to raise $100,000 for Bush2000—$1,000 comes from them individually, and the other 99 one-grand contributions come “voluntarily” from their employees. McCain makes a point of accepting neither bundled money nor soft money (see Soft Money).

  Cabbage (v) = To beg, divert, or outright steal food from one of the many suppertime campaign events at which McCain’s audience sits at tables and gets supper and the press corps has to stand around at the back of the room and gets nothing.

  DT = Drive Time, the slots in the daily schedule set aside for caravaning from one campaign event to another.

  F&F = An hour or two in the afternoon when the campaign provides downtime and an F&F Room for the press corps to file and feed (see File and Feed).

  File and Feed = What print and broadcast press, respectively, have to do every day, i.e. print reporters have to finish their daily stories and file them via fax or email to their papers, while the techs (see Tech) and field producers have to find a satellite or Gunner (see Gunner) and feed their film, B-film, standups (see Standup), and anything else their bosses might want to the network HQ. (For alternate meaning of feed, see Pool.)

  Gunner = A portable satellite-uplink rig that the networks use to feed on-scene from some campaign events. Gunner is the company that makes and/or rents out these rigs, which consist of a blinding white van with a boat-trailerish thing on which is an eight-foot satellite dish angled upward 40º at the southwest sky and emblazoned in fiery blue caps GUNNER GLOBAL UPLINKING FOR NEWS, NETWORKING, ENTERTAINMENT.

  Head = Local or network TV correspondent (see also Talent).

  OTC = Opportunity To Crash, meaning a chance to grab a nap on the bus (placement and posture variable).

  ODT = Optimistic Drive Time, which refers to the daily schedule’s nagging habit of underestimating the amount of time it takes to get from one event to another, causing the Straight Talk Express driver to speed like a maniac and to incur the rabid dislike of Jay and the Bullshit 2 driver (on the night of 9 Feb., one BS2 driver actually quit on the spot after an especially hair-rising ride from Greenville to Clemson U., and an emergency replacement driver [who wore a brown cowboy hat with two NRA pins on the brim and was so obsessed with fuel economy that he refused ever to turn on BS2’s generator, causing all BS2 press who needed working AC outlets to crowd onto BS1 and turning BS2 into a veritable moving tomb used only for OTCs] had to be flown in from Cincinnati, which is apparently the bus company’s HQ).

  OTS = Opportunity To Smoke.

  Pencil = A member of the Trail’s print press.

  Pool (v) = Refers to occasions when, because of space restrictions or McCain2000 fiat, only one network camera-and-sound team is allowed into an event, and by convention all the other networks get to feed (meaning, in this case, pool) that one team’s tape.

  Press-Avail (or -Avail) = Brief scheduled opportunity for traveling press corps to interface as one body w/ McCain or staff High Command, often deployed for Reacts (see React). Less formal than a Press Conference, which usually draws extra local pencils and heads and is uncancelable, whereas -Avails are often bagged because of ODTs and related snafus.

  React (n) = McCain’s or McCain2000 High Command’s on-record response to a sudden major development in the campaign, usually some tactical move or allegation from the Shrub (see Shrub).

  Scrum (n) = The moving 360º ring of techs (see Tech) and heads around a candidate as he makes his way from the Straight Talk Express into an event or vice versa; (v) to gather around a moving candidate in such a ring.

  Shrub, the = GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush (also sometimes referred to as “Dubya” and/or “Bush2”).

  Soft Money = The best-known way to finesse the FEC’s limit on campaign contributions. Enormous sums are here given to a certain candidate’s political party instead of to the candidate, but the party then by some strange coincidence ends up dispersing those enormous sums to exactly the candidate the donor had wanted to give to in the first place.

  Standup = A head giving a remote report from some event McCain’s at.

  Stick = A sound tech’s (see Tech) black telescoping polymer rod (full extension = 9'7") with a boom microphone at the end, used mostly for scrums and always the most distinctive visible feature thereof because of the way a fully extended stick wobbles and boings when the sound tech (which, again, see Tech) walks with it.

  Talent = A marquee network head who flies in for just one day, gets briefed by a field producer, and does a standup on the campaign, as in “We got talent coming in tomorrow, so I need to get all this B-film archived.” Recognizable talent this week includes B. Schieffer of CBS, D. Bloom of NBC, and J. Woodruff of CNN.

  Tech = A TV news camera or sound technician. (N.B.: In the McCain corps this week, all the techs are male, while over 80% of the field producers are female. No reasonable explanation ever obtained.)

  THM = Town Hall Meeting, McCain2000’s signature campaign event, where the 22.5 is followed by an hour-long unscreened Q&A with the audience.

  Twelve Monkeys, the (or 12M) = The techs’ private code-name for the most elite and least popular pencils in the McCain press corps, who on DTs are almost always allowed into the red-intensive salon at the very back of the Straight Talk Express to interface with McCain and political consultant Mike Murphy. The 12M are a dozen marquee journalists and political-analysis guys from important papers and weeklies and news services (e.g. Copley, W. Post, W.S.J., Newsweek, UPI, Tribune, National Review, Atlanta Constitution, etc.) and tend to be so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost surreal—twelve immaculate and wrinkle-free navy-blue blazers, half-Windsored ties, pleated chinos, oxfordcloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100% buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus always a uniform self-seriousness that reminds you of every overachieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every scrum and Press-Avail and line for Continental Breakfast in the hotel lobby before Baggage Call, and whenever any of them are rotated however briefly back onto Bullshit 1 they always sit together identically huffy and pigeon-toed with their attaché cases in their laps and always end up discussing incredibly esoteric books on political theory and public policy in voices that are all the exact same languid honk. The techs (who all wear old jeans and surplus-store parkas and also all tend to hang in a pack) avoid and try to pretty much ignore the Twelve Monkeys, who in turn treat the techs the way someone in an executive washroom treats the attendant. As you might already have gathered, Rolling Stone dislikes the 12M intensely, for all the above reasons, plus the fact that they’re tighter than a duck’s butt when it comes to sharing even very basic general-knowledge political information that might help somebody write a slightly better article, plus the issue of two separate occasions at late-night hotel check-ins when one or more of the Twelve Monkeys just out of nowhere turned and handed Rolling Stone their suitcases to carry, as if Rolling Stone were a bellboy or gofer instead of a hardworking journalist just like them even if he didn’t have
a portable Paul Stuart steamer for his blazer.

  Weasel = The weird gray fuzzy thing sound techs put over their boom mikes at scrums to keep annoying wind-noise off the audio. It looks like a large floppy mouse-colored version of a certain popular kind of fuzzy bathroom slipper. (N.B.: Weasels, which are also sometimes worn by sound techs as headgear during OTSs when it’s really cold, are thus sometimes also known as tech toupees.)

  SUBSTANTIALLY FARTHER BEHIND THE SCENES THAN YOU’RE APT TO WANT TO BE

  It’s now precisely 1330h. on Tuesday, 8 February 2000, on Bullshit 1, proceeding southeast on I-26 back toward Charleston SC. There’s now so much press and staff and techs and stringers and field producers and photographers and heads and pencils and political columnists and hosts of political radio shows and local media covering John McCain and the McCain2000 phenomenon that there’s more than one campaign bus. Here in South Carolina there are three, a veritable convoy of Straight Talk, plus FoxNews’s green SUV and the MTV crew’s sprightly red Corvette and two much-antennae’d local TV vans (one of which has muffler trouble). On DTs like this McCain’s always in his personal red recliner next to Mike Murphy’s red recliner in the little press salon he and political consultant Mike Murphy have in the back of the lead bus, the well-known Straight Talk Express, which is up ahead and already receding. The Straight Talk Express’s driver is a leadfoot and the other drivers hate him. Bullshit 1 is the caravan’s second bus, a luxury Grumman with good current and workable phonejacks, and a lot of the national pencils use it to pound out copy on their laptops and send faxes and email stuff to their editors. The campaign’s logistics are dizzyingly complex, and one of the things the McCain2000 staff has to do is rent different buses and decorate the nicest one with STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS and MCCAIN2000.COM in each new state. In Michigan yesterday there was just the S.T.E plus one bus for non-elite press, which had powder-gray faux-leather couches and gleaming brushed-steel fixtures and a mirrored ceiling from front to back; it creeped everyone out and was christened the Pimpmobile. The two press buses in South Carolina are known as Bullshit 1 and Bullshit 2, names conceived as usual by the extremely cool and laid-back NBC News cameraman Jim C. and—to their credit—immediately seized on and used with great glee at every opportunity by McCain’s younger Press Liaisons, who are themselves so cool and unpretentious it’s tempting to suspect that they are professionally cool and unpretentious.