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

  And are these crowds all stupid, or naïve, or all over 40? Look again. And if you still think Young Voters as a generation have lost the ability (or transcended the need) to believe in a politician, take a good look at Time magazine’s shots of the South Carolina Rave, or at the wire photos of Young NH Voters on the night McCain won there.

  Then look at the photos of McCain’s own face that night. He’s the only one not smiling. Why? Can you guess? Yes: it’s because now he might possibly win. At the start, on PBS and C-SPAN, in his shitty little campaign van with just his wife and a couple aides, he was running about 3% in the polls. And it’s easy (or at least comparatively easy) to tell the truth when there’s nothing to lose. New Hampshire changed everything. The 7 Feb. issues of all three big newsmagazines have good shots of McCain’s face right at the moment the NH results are being announced. It’s worth looking hard at his eyes in these photos. Now there’s something to lose, or to win. Now it gets complicated, the campaign and the chances and the strategy; and complication is dangerous, because the truth is rarely complicated. Complication usually has more to do with mixed motives, gray areas, compromise. On the news, the first ominous rumble of the new complication was McCain bobbing and weaving around questions about South Carolina’s Confederate flag. That was a couple days ago. Now everybody’s watching. Don’t think the Trail’s press have nothing at stake in this. There are two big questions about McCain now, today, as everyone starts the two-week slog through SC. The easy question, the one all the pencils and heads spend their time on, is whether he’ll win. The other—the one posed by those photos’ eyes—is hard to even put into words.

  NEGATIVITY

  7 to 13 February is pitched to Rolling Stone as a “down week” on the GOP Trail, an interval almost breathtaking in its political unsexiness. Last week was the NH shocker; next week is the mad dash to SC’s 19 Feb. primary, which the Twelve Monkeys all believe could now make or break both McCain and the Shrub. This week is the trenches: flesh-pressing, fundraising, traveling, poll-taking, strategizing, grinding out eight-event days in Michigan and Georgia and New York and SC. The Daily Press Schedule goes from 12-point type to 10. Warren MI Town Hall Meeting in Ukrainian Cultural Center. Saginaw County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner. Editorial Meeting w/Detroit News. Press Conference at Weird Meth-Lab-Looking Internet Company in Flint. Redeye to North Savannah on Chartered 707 with Faint PanAm Still Stenciled on Tail. Spartanburg SC Town Hall Meeting. Closed Circuit TV Reception for McCain Supporters in Three States Broadcast Out of Charleston. AARP Town Forum. North Augusta THM. Live Town Hall Forum at Clemson U with Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball. Goose Creek THM. Press Conference in Greenville. Door-to-Door Campaigning with Congressmen Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford and Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) and About 300 Media in Florence SC. NASCAR Tour and Test-Drive at Darlington Raceway. National Guard Armory THM in Fort Mill. Six Hours Flying for Two-Hour Fundraiser with NYC Supporters. Congressman Lindsey Graham Hosts Weird BBQ for a Lot of Flinty-Eyed Men in Down Vests and Trucker’s Hats in Seneca SC. Book Signing at Chapter 11 Books in Atlanta. Taping of Tim Russert show for CNBC. Greer THM. Cyber-Fundraiser in Charleston. Larry King Live with Larry King Looking Even More Like a Giant Bug Than Usual. Press-Avail in Sumter. Walterboro THM. On and on. Breakfast a Krispy Kreme, lunch a sandwich in Saran and store-brand chips, supper anyone’s guess. Everyone but McCain is grim and stolid. “We’re in maybe a little bit of a trough in terms of excitement,” Travis concedes in his orientation for new pencils on Monday morning . . .

  . . . Until that very day’s big tactical shift, which catches the McCain press corps unawares and gets all sorts of stuff underway for midweek’s dramatic tactical climax, the Chris Duren Incident, all of which is politically sexy and exciting as hell, though not quite in the kind of way you cheer for.

  The big tactical shift starts in the F&F Room of something called the Riverfront Hotel in the almost unbelievably blighted and depressing Flint MI, where all the Express’s and Pimpmobile’s media are at 1500h. on 7 February while McCain is huddled with the staff High Command in a suite upstairs. There is no more definitive behind-scene locale in a primary campaign than the F&F Room, which is usually some hotel’s little third-string banquet- or meeting room off the lobby that McCain2000 rents (at the media’s expense, precisely prorated and tallied, just like each day’s seat on the buses and plane and the continental breakfasts before Baggage Call and even the F&F Rooms’ “catered lunches,” which today are weird bright-red ham on Wonder Bread, Fritos, and coffee that tastes like warm water with a brown crayon in it, and the pencils all bitch about the McCain2000 food and wistfully recount rumors that the Bush2000 press lunches are supposedly hot and multi-food-group and served on actual plates by unctuous men with white towels over their arm) so that those media with P.M. deadlines can write their stories and File and Feed. In Flint, the F&F Room is a 60' x 50' banquet room with fluorescent chandeliers and overpatterned carpet and eight long tables with fax machines and outlets and jacks and folding chairs (padded) for the corps to sit in and open notebooks and set up laptops and Sony SX- and DVS-Series Digital Editors and have at it. By 1515h., each chair is filled by a producer or pencil trying to eat and type and talk on the phone all at once, and there’s an enormous bespectacled kid of unknown origin and status going around with NoGlare™ Computer Screen Light Filters and Power Strip™ Anti-Surge Eight-Slot Adapters and offering technical support for people whose laptops or phones are screwing up, and Travis and Todd and the other Press Liaisons are handing out reams of daily Press Releases, and the whole F&F Room is up and running and alive with the quadruple-ding of Windows booting up, the honk and static of modem connections, the multiphase clicking of 40+ keyboards, the needly screech of fax gear saying Hi to New York and Atlanta and the murmur of people on headset phones doing same. The Twelve Monkeys have their own long table and are seated there in some very precise hierarchical order known only to them, each positioned exactly the same with his ankles crossed under his chair and a steno notebook and towering bottle of Evian at his left hand.

  Everyone seems very touchy about anybody looking over their shoulder to see what they’re working on.

  Those McCain2000 media without a daily deadline—meaning the techs, a very young guy from one of those weeklies that people can pick up free at Detroit supermarkets, and (after having no luck wandering around the tables trying to look over people’s shoulders) Rolling Stone—are at the back of the F&F room on a sort of very long makeshift ottoman composed of coats and luggage and non-hard cases of electronic gear. Even network techs, who are practically Zen masters at waiting around and killing time, are bored out of their minds at today’s F&F, where after racing back and forth to get all their gear off the bus in this scary neighborhood and making a chaise of it here in the back there’s nothing to do but they also can’t really go anywhere because their field producer might suddenly need help feeding tape. The way the techs handle deep boredom is to become extremely sluggish and torpid, so that lined up on the ottoman they look like an exhibit of lizards whose rock isn’t hot enough. Nobody reads. Pulse rates are about 40. The ABC cameraman lets his eyes almost close and naps in an unrestful way. The CBS and CNN techs, who like cards, today are not even bothering to play cards but are instead describing memorable card-games they’ve been in in the past. When Rolling Stone rejoins the techs on the ottoman there’s a brief and not unkind discussion of deadline-journalism’s privations and tensions and why looking over reporters’ shoulders when they’re typing is a faux pas. There are a lot of undistributed Power Strip Adapters lying around, and for a while the techs do a gentle snipe-hunting-type put-on of the Detroit free-weekly kid involving plugging in a whole lot of multi-outlet Power Strips and playing something they claim is called Death Cribbage, complete with rules and fake anecdotes about games of Death Cribbage in past F&F Rooms, until Jim C. finally explains that they’re just kidding and says the kid (who’s extremely nervous-seeming and eager to please) might as well put al
l the Power Strips back.

  It’s taken less than a day to learn that the network techs—most of whom, granted, look and dress like aging roadies but are nevertheless 100% pro when it comes time to scrum or film a THM—are exponentially better to hang out with and listen to than anybody else on the Trail. It’s true that McCain’s younger staff and Press Liaisons are all very cool and laid-back and funny, with a very likable sort of Ivy League–frathouse camaraderie between them (their big thing this week is to come up to each other and pantomime karate-chopping the person’s neck and yell “Hiiii-ya!” so loudly it annoys the Twelve Monkeys), but their camaraderie is insular, sort of like a military unit that’s been through hard combat together, and even at the late-night bars they’re oddly cautious and reserved around pencils, and even off-record won’t talk very much about themselves or the campaign, clearly warned by the High Command to avoid diverting attention from their candidate or letting something slip that could hurt him in the press.

  Even the techs can be guarded if you come on too much like press. Here at the Flint F&F one of the sound guys recounts an unverified and almost incredible incident involving some older tech friends of his actually smoking dope in the lavatory of then-candidate Jimmy Carter’s campaign plane in Feb. ’76—“There was some really wild shit went on back then, a lot more, like, you know, relaxed than the Trail is now”—but when asked for these older friends’ names and phone numbers (another serious faux pas, Jim C. explains later), the sound guy’s face clouds and he refuses both the names and permission to put the narrative in the RS notebook under any attribution less general than “one of the sound guys,” so the incident is mentioned here only as unverified, and for the rest of the week this particular sound guy clams up completely whenever he sees Rolling Stone anyplace around, which feels both sad and kind of flattering.

  “OTS” is, as previously mentioned, Trailese for Opportunity To Smoke, which with very few exceptions only the techs seem to do—a lot—and which is sternly prohibited on the buses, even if you promise to exhale very carefully out the window; and so just about the only good thing about F&Fs is that they’re basically one long OTS, although even here you have to go all the way outside in the cold and look at Flint and the techs are required to get OTS-permission from their producers and let them know exactly where they’ll be. Outside the Riverfront’s side door off the parking lot, where it’s so cold and windy you have to smoke with mittens on (a practice Rolling Stone in no way recommends), Jim C. and his long-time friend and partner Frank C. detail various other Trail faux pas and expand with no small sympathy on the brutality of these campaign reporters’ existence: living out of suitcases and trying to keep their clothes pressed; praying that night’s hotel has Room Service; subsisting on the Campaign Diet, which is basically sugar and caffeine (diabetes is apparently the Black Lung of political journalism). Plus constant deadlines, and the pencils’ only friends on the Trail are also their competitors, whose articles they’re always reading but trying to do it secretly so they don’t look insecure. Four young men in jackets over sweatshirts with the hoods all the way up are circling the press’s Pimpmobile bus and boosting each other up to try the windows, and the two veteran techs just roll their eyes and wave. The Pimpmobile’s driver is nowhere in sight; no one knows where drivers go during F&Fs (though there is speculation). Also not recommended is trying to smoke in a high wind while jumping up and down in place. Plus, the NBC techs say, it’s not just campaigns: political media are always on the road in some type of box for weeks at a time, very alone, connected to loved ones only by cellphone and 1-800 answering service. Rolling Stone speculates that this is maybe why everybody in the McCain2000 press corps, from techs to 12M, sports a wedding band: it’s important to feel like there’s someone to come home to. (His wife’s slightly obsessive micromanagement of his health aside, Jim C. credits her presence on the Trail with preserving his basic sanity, at which Frank C. drolly credits his own wife’s absence from the Trail with preserving same.) Neither tech smokes filtereds. Rolling Stone mentions being in hotels every night, which before the faux pas shut him down as a source the anonymous sound guy had said was probably the McCain campaign media’s number-one stressor. The Shrub apparently stays in five-star places with putting greens and spurting-nymph fountains and a speed-dial number for the in-house masseur. Not McCain2000, which favors Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn, Hilton, Signature Inn, Radisson, Holiday Inn, Embassy Suites. Rolling Stone, who is in no way cut out to be a road journalist, invokes the soul-killing anonymity of chain hotels, the rooms’ terrible transient sameness: the ubiquitous floral design of the bedspreads, the multiple low-watt lamps, the pallid artwork bolted to the wall, the schizoid whisper of ventilation, the sad shag carpet, the smell of alien cleansers, the Kleenex dispensed from the wall, the automated wakeup call, the lightproof curtains, the windows that do not open—ever. The same TV with the same cable with the same voice saying Welcome To ____________ on its Channel 1’s eight-second loop. The sense that everything’s been touched by a thousand hands before. The sounds of others’ plumbing. RS asks whether it’s any wonder that over half of all U.S. suicides take place in chain hotels. Jim and Frank say they get the idea. Frank raises a ski glove in farewell as the young men at the bus give up and withdraw. RS references the chain hotel’s central paradox: the form of hospitality with none of the feeling—cleanliness becomes sterility, the politeness of the staff a vague rebuke. The terrible oxymoron of “hotel guest.” Hell could easily be a chain hotel. Is it any coincidence that McCain’s POW prison was known as the Hanoi Hilton? Jim shrugs; Frank says you get used to it, that it’s better not to dwell. Network camera and sound techs earn incredible overtime for staying in the field with a campaign over long periods. Frank C. has been with McCain2000 w/o break since early January and won’t rotate out until Easter; the money will finance three months off during which he’ll engineer Indie records and sleep til eleven and not think once of hotels or scrums or the weird way your kidneys hurt after jouncing all day on a bus.

  Monday, the first and only File & Feed in Michigan, is also the day of Rolling Stone’s introduction to the Cellular Waltz, one of the most striking natural formations of the Trail. There’s a huge empty lobbylike space you have to pass through to get from the Riverfront’s side doors back to the area where the F&F and bathrooms are. It takes a long time to traverse this space, a hundred yards of nothing but flagstone walls and plaques with the sad pretentious names of the Riverfront’s banquet halls and conference rooms—the Oak Room, the Windsor Room—but on return from the OTS now out here are also half a dozen different members of the F&F Room’s press, each fifty feet away from any of the others, for privacy, and all walking in idle counterclockwise circles with a cellphone to their ear. These little orbits are the Cellular Waltz, which is probably the digital equivalent of doodling or picking at yourself as you talk on a regular landline. There’s something oddly lovely about the Waltz’s different circles here, which are of various diameters and stride-lengths and rates of rotation but are all identically counterclockwise and telephonic. We three slow down a bit to watch; you couldn’t not. From above—like if there were a mezzanine—the Waltzes would look like the cogs of some strange diffuse machine. Frank C. says he can tell by their faces something’s up. Jim C., who’s got his elderberry in one hand and cough syrup in the other, says what’s interesting is that media south of the equator do the exact same Cellular Waltz but that down there all the circles are reversed.

  And it turns out Frank C. was right as usual, that the reason press were dashing out and Waltzing urgently in the lobby is that sometime during our OTS word had apparently started to spread in the F&F Room that Mr. Mike Murphy of the McCain2000 High Command was coming down to do a surprise impromptu -Avail regarding a fresh two-page Press Release (still slightly warm from the Xerox) which Travis and Todd are passing out even now, and of which the first page is reproduced here: