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

  Right now Bullshit l’s Press Liaison, Travis—23, late of Georgetown U and a six-month backpack tour of Southeast Asia during which he says he came to like fried bugs—is again employing his single most important and impressive skill as a McCain2000 staffer, which is the ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and in any position for 10-15-minute intervals, with a composed face and no unpleasant sounds or fluids, and then to come instantly and unfuzzily awake the moment he’s needed. It’s not clear whether he thinks people can’t tell he’s sleeping or what. Travis, who wears wide-wale corduroys and a sweater from Structure and seems to subsist entirely on Starburst Fruit Chews, tends to speak with the same deprecatory irony that is the whole staff’s style, introducing himself to new media today as either “Your press lackey” or “The Hervé Villechaize of Bullshit 1,” or both. His new trick is to go up to the front of the bus and hook his arm over the little brushed-steel safety bar above the driver’s head and lean against it so that from behind it looks as if he’s having an involved navigational conversation with the driver, and to go to sleep, and the driver—a 6'7" bald black gentleman named Jay, whose way of saying goodnight to a journalist at the end of the day is “Go on and get you a woman, boy!”—the driver knows exactly what’s going on and takes extra care not to change lanes or brake hard, and Travis, whose day starts at 0500 and ends after midnight just like all the other staffers, lives this way.

  McCain just got done giving a Major Policy Address on crime and punishment at the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy in Columbia, which is where the caravan is heading back to Charleston from. It was a resoundingly scary speech, delivered in a large airless cinderblock auditorium surrounded by razorwire and guard towers (the S.C.C.J.A. adjoined a penal institution so closely that it wasn’t at all clear where one left off and the other began) and introduced by some kind of very high-ranking Highway Patrol officer whose big hanging gut and face the color of rare steak seemed right out of Southern-law-enforcement central casting and who spoke approvingly and at some length about Senator McCain’s military background and his 100% conservative voting record on crime, punishment, firearms, and the War on Drugs. This wasn’t a Town Meeting Q&A-type thing; it was a Policy Address, one of three this week prompted by Bush2000’s charges that McCain is fuzzy on policy, that he’s image over substance. The speech’s putative audience was 350 neckless young men and women sitting at attention (if that’s possible) in arrow-straight rows of folding chairs, with another couple hundred law-enforcement pros in Highway Patrol hats and mirrored shades standing at Parade Rest behind them, and then behind and around all these the media—the actual audience for the speech—including NBC’s Jim C. and his sound man Frank C. (no relation) and the rest of the network techs on the ever-present fiberboard riser facing the stage and filming McCain, who as is S.O.P. first thanks a whole lot of local people nobody’s heard of and then w/o ado jumps right in to what’s far and away the scariest speech of the week, backed as always by a 30' x 50' American flag so that when you see B-film of these things on TV it’s McCain and the flag, the flag and McCain, a visual conjunction all the candidates try to hammer home. The seated cadets—none of whom fidget or scratch or move in any way except to blink in what looks like perfect sync—wear identical dark-brown khakis and junior models of the same round big-brimmed hats their elders wear, so that they look like ten perfect rows of brutal and extremely attentive forest rangers. McCain, who simply does not ever perspire, is wearing a dark suit and wide tie and has the only dry forehead in the hall. U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-SC, of impeachment-trial fame) and U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC, rated the single most fiscally conservative member of the ’98–’00 Congress) are up there on stage behind McCain as is S.O.P.; they’re sort of his living Letters of Introduction down here this week. Graham, as usual, looks like he slept in his suit, whereas Sanford is tan and urbane in a V-neck sweater and Guccis whose shine you could read by. Mrs. Cindy McCain is up there too as always, brittly composed and smiling at the air in front of her and thinking about God knows what. Half the buses’ press don’t listen to the speech; most of them are at different spots at the very back of the gym, walking in little unconscious circles with their cellular phones. (You should be apprised upfront that national reporters spend an enormous amount of time either on their cellphones or waiting for their cellphones to ring. It is not an exaggeration to say that when somebody’s cellphone breaks they almost have to be sedated.) The techs for CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, and Fox will film the whole speech, plus any remarks afterward, then they’ll unbolt their cameras from the tripods and go mobile and scrum McCain’s exit and the brief Press-Avail at the door to the Straight Talk Express, and then the field producers will call network HQ and summarize the highlights and HQ will decide which five- or ten-second snippet gets used for the nightly bit on the GOP campaign.

  It helps to conceive a campaign week’s events in terms of boxes, boxes inside other boxes, etc. The national voting audience is the great huge outer box, then the SC-electorate audience, mediated respectively by the inner layers of national and local press, just inside which lie the insulating boxes of McCain’s staff’s High Command who plan and stage events and Spin stuff for the layers of press to interpret for the layers of audience, and the Press Liaisons who shepherd the pencils and heads and mediate their access to the High Command and control which media get rotated onto the S.T. Express (which is itself a box in motion) and then decide which of these chosen media then get to move all the way into the extreme rear’s salon to interface with McCain himself, who is the campaign’s narrator and narrative at once, a candidate whose biggest draw of course is that he’s an anticandidate, someone who’s open and accessible and “thinks outside the box,” but who is in fact the campaign’s Chinese boxes’ central and inscrutable core box, and whose own intracranial thoughts on all these boxes and layers and lenses and on whether this new kind of enclosure is anything like Hoa Lo’s dark box are pretty much anyone in the media’s guess, since all he’ll talk about is politics.

  Plus Bullshit 1 is also a box, of course, just as anything you can’t exit till somebody else lets you out becomes, and right now there are 27 members of the national political media on board, halfway to Charleston. A certain percentage of them aren’t worth introducing you to because they’ll get rotated back off the Trail tonight and be gone tomorrow, replaced by somebody else you’ll just start to recognize by the time they rotate out. That’s what these pros call it, the Trail, the same way musicians talk about the Road. The schedule is fascist: Wakeup call and backup alarm at 0600h., Express Checkout, Baggage Call at 0700 to throw bags and techs’ gear under the bus, haul ass to McCain’s first THM at 0800, then another, then another, maybe an hour off to F&F someplace if ODTs permit, then usually two big evening events, plus hours of dead highway DT between functions, finally getting in to that night’s Marriott or Hampton Inn at like 2300 just when Room Service closes so you’re begging rides from FoxNews to find a restaurant still open, then an hour at the hotel bar to try to shut your head off so you can hit the rack at 0130 and get up at 0600 and do it all again. Usually it’s four to six days for the average pencil and then you go off home on a gurney and your editor rotates in fresh meat. The network techs, who are old hands at the Trail, stay on for months at a time. The McCain2000 staff have all been doing this full-time since Labor Day, and even the young ones look like the walking dead. Only McCain seems to thrive. He’s 63 and practically Rockette-kicks onto the Express every morning. It’s either inspiring or frightening.

  Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes tour of everything that’s happening on BS1 at 1330h. A few of the press are slumped over sleeping, open-mouthed and twitching, using their topcoats for pillows. The CBS and NBC techs are in their usual place on the couches way up front, their cameras and sticks and boom mikes and boxes of tapes and big Duracells piled around them, discussing obscure stand-up comedians of the early ’70s and trading Press Badges from New Hampshire and Iowa and Delaware, which Press Ba
dges are laminated and worn around the neck on nylon cords and apparently have a certain value for collectors. Jim C., who looks like a chronically sleep-deprived Elliott Gould, is also watching Travis’s leather bookbag swing metronomically by its overshoulder strap as Travis leans there and sleeps. All the couches and padded chairs face in, perpendicular to BS1’s length, instead of a regular bus’s forward-facing seats. So everyone’s legs are always in the aisle, but there’s none of the normal social anxiety about your legs maybe touching somebody else on a bus’s leg because nobody can help it and everyone’s too tired to care. Right behind each set of couches are small white plastic tables with recessed cup-receptacles and AC outlets that work if Jay can be induced to turn on the generator (which he will unless he’s low on fuel); and the left side’s table has two pencils and two field producers at it, and one of the pencils is Alison Mitchell, as in the Alison Mitchell, who is the NY Times’ daily eye on McCain and a marquee journalist but is not (refreshingly) one of the infamous Twelve Monkeys, a slim calm kindly lady of maybe 45 who wears dark tights, pointy boots, a black sweater that looks home-crocheted, and a perpetual look of concerned puzzlement, as if life were one unending search for clarification. Alison Mitchell is usually a regular up on the Straight Talk Express but today has a tight 1500h. deadline and is using BS1’s superior current to whip out the story on her Apple Powerbook. (Even from outside the bus it’s easy to tell who’s banging away on a laptop right then, because their windowshades are always down against daytime glare, which is every laptop-journalist’s great nemesis.) An ABC field producer across the table from A. Mitchell is trying to settle a credit-card dispute on his distinctive cellphone, which is not a headset phone per se but consists of an earplug and a tiny hanging podular thing he holds to his mouth with two fingers to speak, a device that manages to make him look simultaneously deaf and schizophrenic. People in both seats behind the table are reading USA Today (and this might be worth noting: the only newsdaily read by every single member of the national campaign press is, believe it or not, USA Today, which always appears as if by dark magic under everybody’s hotel door with their Express Checkout bill every morning, and is free, and media are as susceptible to good marketing as anybody else). The local TV truck’s muffler gets louder the farther back you go. About two-thirds of the way down the aisle is a little area that has the bus’s refrigerator and the liquor cabinets (the latter unbelievably well-stocked on yesterday’s Pimpmobile, totally empty on BS1) and the bathroom with the hazardous door. There’s also a little counter area piled with Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes, and a sink whose water nobody ever uses (for what turn out to be good reasons). Krispy Kremes are sort of the Deep South equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, ubiquitous and cheap and great in a sort of what-am-I-doing-eating-dessert-for-breakfast way, and are a cornerstone of what Jim C. calls the Campaign Diet.

  Behind the buses’ digestive areas is another little lounge, which up on the Express serves as McCain’s press salon but which on Bullshit 1 is just an elliptic table of beige plastic ringed with a couch it’s just a bit too high for, plus a fax machine and multiple jacks and outlets, the whole area known to the Press Liaisons as the ERPP (= Extreme Rear Press Palace). Right now Mrs. McCain’s personal assistant on the Trail, Wendy—who has electric-blue contact lenses and very complex and rigid blond hair and designer outfits and immaculate makeup and and accessories and French nails and can perhaps best be described as a very Republican-looking young lady indeed—is back here at the beige table eating a large styrofoam cup of soup and using her cellphone to try to find someplace in downtown Charleston where Mrs. McCain can get her nails done. All three walls in the ERPP are mirrored, an unsettling echo of yesterday’s reflective bus (except here the mirrors have weird little white ghostly shapes embedded in the plate, apparently as decorations), so that you can see not only everybody’s reflections but all sorts of multi-angled reflections of those reflections, and so on, which on top of all the jouncing and swaying keeps most people up front despite the ERPP’s wealth of facilities. Just why Wendy is arranging for her mistress’s manicure on a press bus is unclear, but Mrs. McC.’s sedulous attention to her own person’s dress and grooming is already a minor legend among the press corps, and some of the techs speculate that things like getting her nails and hair done, together with being almost Siametically attached to Ms. Lisa Graham Keegan (who is AZ’s Education Superintendent and supposedly traveling with the Senator as his “Advisor on Issues Affecting Education” but is quite obviously really along because she’s Cindy McCain’s friend and confidante and the lone person in whose presence Mrs. McC. doesn’t look like a jacklighted deer), are the only things keeping this extremely fragile person together on the Trail, where she’s required to stand under hot lights next to McCain at every speech and THM and Press-Avail and stare cheerfully into the middle distance while her husband speaks to crowds and lenses—in fact some of the cable-network techs have a sort of running debate about what Cindy McCain’s really looking at as she stands onstage being scrutinized but never getting to say anything . . . and anyway everybody understands and respects the enormous pressure Wendy’s under to help Mrs. McC. keep it together, and nobody makes fun of her for things like getting more and more stressed as it becomes obvious that there’s some special Southeast-U.S. idiom for “manicure” that Wendy doesn’t know, because nobody she talks to on the cellphone seems to have any idea what she means by “manicure.” Also back here, directly across from Wendy, is an unbelievably handsome guy in a very green cotton turtleneck, a photographer for Reuters, sitting disconsolate in a complex nest of wires plugged into just about every jack in the ERPP; he’s got digital photos of the Columbia speech in his Toshiba laptop and has his cellphone plugged into both the wall and the laptop (which is itself plugged into the wall) and is trying to file the pictures via some weird inter-Reuters email, except his laptop has decided it doesn’t like his cellphone anymore (“like” = his term) and he can’t get it to file.

  If this all seems really static and dull, by the way, then understand that you’re getting a bona fide media-eye look at the reality of life on the Trail, 85% of which consists of wandering around killing time on Bullshit 1 while you wait for the slight meaningful look from Travis that means he’s gotten the word from his immediate superior Todd (28 and so obviously a Harvard alum it wasn’t worth asking) that after the next stop you’re getting rotated up into the big leagues on the Express to sit squished and paralyzed on the crammed red press-couch in back and to listen to John S. McCain and Mike Murphy answer the Twelve Monkeys’ questions and to look up-close and personal at McCain and the way he puts his legs way out on the salon’s floor and crosses them at the ankle and sucks absently at his right bicuspid and twirls the coffee in his McCain2000.com mug and to try to penetrate the innermost box of this man’s thoughts on the enormous hope and enthusiasm he’s generating in press and voters alike . . . which you should be told up-front does not and cannot happen, this penetration, for two reasons. The smaller reason (1) is that when you are finally rotated up into the Straight Talk salon you discover that most of the questions the Twelve Monkeys ask back here are simply too vapid and obvious for McCain to waste time on, and he lets Mike Murphy handle them, and Murphy is so funny and dry and able to make such deliciously cruel sport of the 12M—

  MONKEY: If, say, you win here in South Carolina, what do you do then?

  MURPHY: Fly to Michigan that night.

  MONKEY: And what if, hypothetically, you, say, lose here in South Carolina?

  MURPHY: Fly to Michigan that night win or lose.

  MONKEY: Can you perhaps talk about why?

  MURPHY: ’Cause the plane’s already paid for.

  MONKEY: I think he means can you explain why specifically Michigan?

  MURPHY: ’Cause it’s the next primary.

  MONKEY: I think what we’re trying to get you to elaborate on if you will Mike is: what will your goal be in Michigan?

  MURPHY: To get a whole lot of votes.
That’s part of our secret strategy for winning the nomination.

  —that it’s often hard even to notice McCain’s there or what his face or feet are doing because it takes almost all your concentration not to start giggling like a maniac at Murphy and the way the 12M all nod somberly at him and take down whatever he says in their identical steno notebooks. The larger and more complex reason (2) is that this also happens to be the week in which John S. McCain’s anticandidate status threatens to dissolve before almost everyone’s eyes and he becomes increasingly opaque and paradoxical and in certain ways indistinguishable as an entity from the Shrub and GOP Establishment against which he’d defined himself and shone so in New Hampshire, which of course is a whole other story.

  What’s hazardous about Bullshit 1’s lavatory door is that it opens and closes laterally, sliding with a Star-Trekish whoosh at the light touch of the DOOR button just inside—i.e., you go in, lightly push DOOR to close, attend to business, lightly push DOOR again to open: simple—except that the DOOR button’s placement puts it only inches away from the left shoulder of any male journalist standing over the commode attending to business, a commode without rails or handles or anything to (as it were) hold on to, and even the slightest leftward lurch or lean makes said shoulder touch said button—which remember this is a moving bus—causing the door to whoosh open while you’re right there with business underway, and with the consequences of suddenly whirling to try to stab at the button to reclose the door while you’re in medias res being too obviously horrid to detail, with the result that by 9 February the great unspoken rule among the regulars on Bullshit 1 is that when a male gets up and goes two-thirds of the way back into the lavatory anybody who’s back there clears the area and makes sure they’re not in the door’s line of sight; and the way you can tell that a journalist is a local or newly rotated onto the Trail and this is their first time on BS1 is the small strangled scream you always hear when they’re in the lavatory and the door unexpectedly whooshes open, and usually the grizzled old Charleston Post and Courier pencil will give a small smile and call out “Welcome to national politics!” as the new guy stabs frantically at the button, and Jay at the helm will hit the horn with the heel of his hand in mirth, taking these long and mostly mindless DTs’ fun where he finds it.