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

  This document is unusual not only because McCain2000’s Press Releases are normally studies in bland irrelevance—“McCAIN TO CONTINUE CAMPAIGNING IN MICHIGAN TODAY”; “McCAIN HAS TWO HELPINGS OF POTATO SALAD AT SOUTH CAROLINA VFW PICNIC”—but because no less a personage than Mike Murphy has indeed now just come down to Spin this abrupt change of tone in the campaign’s rhetoric. Murphy, who is only 37 but seems older, is the McCain campaign’s Senior Strategist, a professional political consultant who’s already had eighteen winning Senate and gubernatorial campaigns and is as previously mentioned a constant and acerbic presence in McCain’s press salon aboard the Express. He’s a short, bottom-heavy man, pale in a kind of yeasty way, with baby-fine red hair on a large head and sleepy turtle eyes behind the same type of intentionally nerdy hornrims that a lot of musicians and college kids now wear. He has short thick limbs and blunt exremities and is always seen either slumped low in a chair or leaning on something. Oxymoron or no, what Mike Murphy really looks like is a giant dwarf. Among political pros, he has the reputation of being (1) smart and funny as hell and (2) a real attack-dog, working for clients like Oliver North, New Jersey’s Christine Todd Whitman, and Michigan’s own John Engler in campaigns that were absolute operas of nastiness, and known for turning out what the NY Times delicately called “some of the most rough-edged commercials in the business.” He’s leaning back against the F&F Room’s wall in that way where you have your hands behind your lower back and sort of bounce forward and back on the hands, wearing exactly what he’ll wear all week—viz. yellow twill trousers and brown Clark Wallabies and an ancient and very cool-looking leather jacket—and surrounded in a 180º arc by the Twelve Monkeys, all of whom have steno notebooks or tiny professional tape recorders out and keep clearing their throats and pushing their glasses up with excitement.

  Murphy says he’s “just swung by” to provide the press corps with “some context” on the strident Press Release and to give the corps advance notice that the McCain campaign is also preparing a special “response ad” which will start airing in South Carolina tomorrow. Murphy uses the words “response” or “response ad” nine times in two minutes, and when one of the Twelve Monkeys interrupts to ask whether it’d be fair to characterize this new ad as Negative, Murphy gives him a long styptic look and spells “r-e-s-p-o-n-s-e” out very slowly. Where he’s leaning and bouncing against is the part of the wall between the F&F door and the little round table still piled with uneaten sandwiches (to which the hour has not been kind), and the Twelve Monkeys and some field producers and lesser pencils form a perfect half-scrum around him, with various press joining the back or peeling away to go out and Cell-Waltz these new developments in to HQ.

  Mike Murphy tells the hemispheric scrum that the Press Release and new ad reflect the McCain2000 campaign’s decision, after much agonizing, to respond to what he says is G. W. Bush’s welshing on the two candidates’ public handshake-agreement in January to run a bilaterally positive campaign. For the past five days, mostly in New York and SC, the Shrub has apparently been running ads that characterize McCain’s policy proposals in what Murphy terms a “willfully distorting” way. Plus there’s the push-polling (see P. Release supra), a practice that is regarded as the absolute bottom-feeder of sleazy campaign tactics (Rep. Lindsey Graham, introducing McCain at tomorrow’s THMs, will describe push-polling to South Carolina audiences as “the crack cocaine of modern politics”). But the worst, the most obviously unacceptable, Murphy emphasizes, was the Shrub standing up at a podium in SC a couple days ago with a wild-eyed and apparently notorious “fringe veteran” who publicly accused John McCain of “abandoning his fellow veterans” after returning from Vietnam, which, Murphy says, without going into Senator McCain’s well-documented personal bio and heroic legislative efforts on behalf of vets for nearly twenty years (Murphy’s voice rises an octave here, and blotches of color appear high on his cheeks, and it’s clear he’s personally hurt and aggrieved, which means that either he maybe really personally likes and believes in John S. McCain III or else has the frightening ability to raise angry blotches on his cheeks at will, the way certain great actors can make themselves cry on cue) is just so clearly over the line of even minimal personal decency and honor that it pretty much necessitates some sort of response.

  The Twelve Monkeys, who are also old pros at this sort of exchange, keep trying to steer Murphy away from what the Shrub’s done and get him to give a quotable explanation of why McCain himself has decided to run this “response ad,” a transcript of which Travis and Todd are now distributing from a fresh copier-box and which is, with various parties’ indulgence, also now replicated here—

  AUDIO:

  McCAIN—

  I guess it was bound to happen.

  Governor Bush’s campaign is getting desperate with a negative ad about me.

  The fact is, I will use the surplus money to fix Social Security, cut your taxes, and pay down the debt.

  Governor Bush uses all the surplus for tax cuts, with not one new penny for Social Security or the debt.

  His ad twists the truth like Clinton.

  We’re all pretty tired of that.

  As President, I’ll be conservative, and always tell you the truth, no matter what.

  —of which ad-transcript the 12M point out that in particular the “twists the truth like Clinton” part seems Negative indeed, since in ’00 comparing a GOP candidate to Bill Clinton is roughly equivalent to claiming that he wears ladies’ underwear while presiding over Black Masses. But Mike Murphy—part of whose job as Senior Strategist is to act as a kind of diversionary lightning rod for any tactical criticism of McCain himself—says that he, Mike Murphy, was actually the driving force behind the ad’s “strong response,” that he “pushed real hard” for the ad and finally got “the campaign” to agree only after “a great deal of agonizing, because Senator McCain’s been very clear with you guys about wanting a campaign we can all be proud of.” One thing political reporters are really good at, though, is rephrasing a query ever so slightly so that they get to keep asking the same basic question over and over when they don’t get the answer they want, and after several minutes of this they finally get Murphy to bring his hands out and up in a kind of what-are-you-gonna-do and to say: “Look, I’m not going to let them go around smearing my guy for five days without retaliating,” which then leads to several more minutes of niggling semantic questions about the difference between “respond” and “retaliate,” at the end of which Murphy, reaching slowly over and poking at one of the table’s sandwiches with clinical interest, says: “If Bush takes down his negative ads, we’ll pull the response right away. Immediately. Quote me,” then turning to go. “That’s all I swung by to tell you.” The back of his leather jacket has a spot of what’s either White-Out or bird guano on it. Murphy’s hard not to like, though in a very different way from his candidate. Where McCain comes off almost brutally open and direct, Murphy’s demeanor is sly and cagey in a twinkly-eyed way that makes you think he’s making fun of his own slyness. He can be direct, though. One of the scrum’s oldest and most elite 12M calls out one last time that surely after all there aren’t any guns to candidates’ heads in this race, that surely Mike (the Monkeys call him Mike) would have to admit that simply refusing to “quote, ‘respond’” to Bush and thereby “staying on the high road” was something McCain could have done; and Murphy’s dernier cri, over his dappled shoulder, is: “You guys want a pacifist, go support Bradley.”

  For the remainder of the at least half hour before John McCain is finally ready to get back on the Express (N.B. that McCain is later revealed to have had a sore throat today, apparently sending the staff High Command into paroxysms of terror that he was coming down with the same Campaign Flu that’s been ravaging the press corps [Jim C.’s own Campaign Flu will turn into bronchitis and then probably slight pneumonia, and for three days in South Carolina the whole rest of Bullshit 1’s regulars will rearrange themselves to give Jim a couch to hi
mself to sleep on during long DTs, because he’s really sick, and it isn’t until Friday that there’s enough free time for Jim even to go get antibiotics, and still all week he’s up and filming every speech and scrum, and is in RS’s opinion incredibly manly and uncomplaining about the Campaign Flu, unlike the Twelve Monkeys, many of whom keep taking their temperatures and feeling their glands and whining into their cellphones to be rotated out, so that by midweek in SC there are really only nine Monkeys, then eight Monkeys, although the techs, out of respect for tradition, keep referring to them as the Twelve Monkeys], and it emerged that the Flint F&F was so protracted because Mrs. McC. and Wendy and McCain2000 Political Director John Weaver had McCain up there gargling and breathing steam and pounding echinacea) to head over to Saginaw, the techs, while checking their equipment and gearing up for the scrum at the Riverfront’s main doors, listen to Rolling Stone’s summary of the Press Release and Murphy’s comments, confirm that the Shrub has indeed gone Negative (they’d heard about all this long before the Twelve Monkeys et al., because the techs and field producers are in constant touch with their colleagues on the Shrub’s buses, whereas the Monkeys’ Bush2000 counterparts are as aloof and niggardly about sharing info as the 12M themselves), and kill the last of the time in the Flint F&F by quietly analyzing Bush2’s Negativity and McCain’s response from a tactical point of view.

  Leaving aside their aforementioned coolness and esprit de corps, you should be apprised that Rolling Stone’s one and only real journalistic coup this week is his happening to bumble into hanging around with these camera and sound guys. This is because network news techs—who all have worked countless campaigns, and who have neither the raging egos of journalists nor the self-interested agenda of the McCain2000 staff to muddy their perspective—turn out to be way more acute and sensible political analysts than anybody you’ll read or see on TV, and their assessment of today’s Negativity developments is so extraordinarily nuanced and sophisticated that only a small portion of it can be ripped off and summarized here.

  Going Negative is risky. Countless polls have shown that voters find Negativity distasteful, and if a candidate is perceived as going Negative, it usually costs him. So the techs all agree that the first question is why Bush2000 started playing this card. One possible explanation is that the Shrub was so personally shocked and scared by McCain’s win in New Hampshire that he’s now lashing out like a spoiled child and trying to hurt McCain however he can. The techs reject this, though. Spoiled child or no, G. W. Bush is a creature of his campaign advisors, and these advisors are the best that $70 million and the full faith and credit of the GOP Establishment can buy, and are not spoiled children but seasoned tactical pros, and if Bush2000 has gone Negative there must be solid political logic behind the move.

  This logic turns out to be indeed solid, even brilliant, and the NBC, CBS, and CNN techs flesh it out while the ABC cameraman puts several emergency sandwiches in his lens bag for tonight’s flight south on a campaign plane whose provisioning is notoriously inconsistent. The Shrub’s attack leaves McCain with two options. If he does not retaliate, some SC voters will credit McCain for taking the high road. But it could also come off as wimpy, might compromise McCain’s image as a tough, take-no-shit guy with the balls to take on the Washington kleptocracy. Not responding could also look like “appeasing aggression,” which for a candidate whose background is military and who spends a lot of time talking about rebuilding the armed forces and being less of a candy-ass in foreign policy would not be good, especially in a state with a higher percentage of both vets and gun nuts than any other (which SC’s got). So McCain pretty much has to strike back, the techs agree. But this is extremely dangerous, for by retaliating—which of course (despite all Murphy’s artful dodging) means going Negative himself—McCain runs the risk of looking like just another ambitious, win-at-any-cost politician, when after all so much time and effort and money has gone into casting him as the 180º opposite of that. Plus an even bigger reason why McCain can’t afford to let the Shrub “pull him down to his level” (this in the phrase of the CBS cameraman, a Louisianan who’s quite a bit shorter than the average tech and so besides all his other equipment has to lug a little aluminum stepladder around to stand on with his camera during scrums, which decreases his mobility but is compensated for by what the other techs agree is an almost occult ability to always find the perfect place to set up his ladder and film at just the right angle for what his HQ wants—Jim C. says the tiny Southerner is “technically about as good as they come”) is that if Bush then turns around and retaliates against the retaliation and so McCain then has to re-retaliate against Bush’s retaliation, and so on, the whole GOP race could quickly degenerate into just the sort of boring, depressing, cynical charge-and-counter-charge contest that turns voters off and keeps them away from the polls . . . especially Young Voters, cynicism-wise, Rolling Stone and the underage pencil from the free Detroit weekly thing venture to point out, both now scribbling just as furiously with the techs as the 12M were with Murphy. The techs say well OK maybe but that the really important tactical point here is that John S. McCain cannot afford to have voters get turned off, since his whole strategy is based on exciting the people and inspiring them and pulling more voters in, especially those who’d stopped voting because they’d gotten so disgusted and bored with all the Negativity and bullshit of politics. In other words, RS and the Detroit free-weekly kid propose to the techs, it’s maybe actually even in the Shrub’s own political self-interest to let the GOP race get ugly and Negative and have voters get so bored and cynical and disgusted with the whole thing that they don’t even bother to vote. Well no shit Sherlock H., the ABC techs in essence respond, good old Frank C. then explaining more patiently that, yes, if there’s a low voter-turnout, then the majority of the people who get off their ass and do vote will be the Diehard Republicans, meaning the Christian Right and the party faithful, and these are the groups that vote as they’re told, the ones controlled by the GOP Establishment, an Establishment that’s got $70,000,000 and 100% of its own credibility invested in the Shrub. CNN’s Mark A. takes time out from doing special stretching exercises that increase bloodflow to his arms (sound techs are very arm-conscious, since positioning a boom mike correctly in a scrum requires holding 10-foot sticks and 4.7-pound boom mikes [that’s 4.7 without the weasel] horizontally out from the tops of their fully extended arms for long periods [which try this with an industrial broom or extension pruner sometime if you think it’s easy], with the added proviso that the heavy mike at the end can’t wobble or dip into the cameras’ shot or [God forbid, and there are horror stories] clunk the candidate on the top of the head) in order to insert that this also explains why the amazingly lifelike Al Gore, over in the Democratic race, has been so relentlessly Negative and depressing in his attacks on Bill Bradley: since Gore, like the Shrub, has his party’s Establishment behind him, with all its organization and money and the Diehards who’ll fall into line and vote as they’re told, it’s in Big Al’s (and his party’s bosses’) interest to draw as few voters as possible into the Democratic primaries, because the lower the overall turnout, the more the Establishment voters’ ballots actually count (w/r/t which reasoning see also WHO EVEN CARES WHO CARES, supra). Which fact then in turn, the short but highly respected CBS cameraman says, helps explain why, even though our elected representatives are always wringing their hands and making concerned sounds about low voter-turnouts, nothing substantive ever gets done to make politics less ugly or depressing or to actually induce more people to vote: our elected representatives are incumbents, and low turnouts favor incumbents for the same reason soft money does.

  Let’s pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA. If you are demographically a Young Voter, it is again worth a moment of your valuable time to consider the implications of the techs’ last couple points. If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major pa
rties, who rest assured are not dumb and are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV Spring Break on Primary Day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

  So anyway, by this time all the press in the Flint F&F Room are demodemizing and ejecting diskettes and packing up their stuff and getting ready to go cover John McCain’s 1800h. speech at the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Saginaw, where a Republican dressed as Uncle Sam will show up on 8Zfoot stilts and totter around the dim banquet hall through the whole thing and nearly crash into the network crews’ riser several times and bug the hell out of everyone, and where the Twelve Monkeys will bribe or bullshit the headwaiter into seating them at a no-show table and feeding them supper while all the rest of the press corps has to stand in the back of the hall and try to help the slightly mad Economist guy cabbage breadsticks when nobody’s looking. Watching the techs gear up to go scrum around McCain as he boards the Express is a little like watching soldiers outfit themselves for combat: there are numerous multi-part packs and devices and cases to strap across backs and chests and to loop around waists and connect and lock down, and pieces of high-priced machinery to load with filters and tape and bulbs and reserve power cells and connect to each other with complex cords and co-ax cable, and weasels to wrap around high-filter boom mikes and sticks to choose and carefully telescope out all the way til they look like probosces of some monstrous insect and bob, slightly—the sound men’s sticks and mikes do—as the techs in the scrum keep pace with McCain and try to keep his head in the center of their shot and right underneath the long stick’s mike in case he says something newsworthy. McCain has on a fresh blue pinstripe suit, and his complexion is hectic with CF fever or tactical adrenaline, and as he passes through the Riverfront lobby toward the scrum there’s a faint backwash of quality aftershave, and from behind him you can see Cindy McCain using her exquisitely manicured hands to whisk lint off his shoulders, and at moments like this it’s extremely hard not to feel enthused and to really like this man and want to support him in just about any sort of feasible way you can think of.