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

  Plus the single best part of every pre-scrum technical gear-up: watching the cameramen haul their heavy $40,000 rigs to their shoulders like rocket launchers and pull the safety strap tight under their opposite arm and ram the clips home with practiced ease, their postures canted under the camera’s weight. It is Jim C.’s custom always to say “Up, Simba” in a fake-deep bwana voice as he hefts the camera to his right shoulder, and he and Frank C. like to do a little pantomime of the way football players will bang their helmets together to get pumped for a big game, although obviously the techs do it carefully and make sure their equipment doesn’t touch or tangle cords.

  But so the techs’ assessment, then, is that Bush2’s going Negative is both tactically sound and politically near-brilliant, and that it forces McCain’s own strategists to walk a very tight wire indeed in formulating a response. What McCain has to try to do is retaliate without losing the inspiring high-road image that won him New Hampshire. This is why Mike Murphy took valuable huddle-with-candidate time to come down to the F&F and spoonfeed the Twelve Monkeys all this stuff about Bush’s attacks being so far over the line that they had no choice but to “respond.” Because the McCain2000 campaign has got to Spin today’s retaliation the same way nations Spin war, i.e. McCain has to make it appear that he is not being actually aggressive himself but is merely “repelling aggression.” It will require enormous discipline and cunning for McCain2000 to pull this off. And tomorrow’s “response ad”—in the techs’ opinion as the transcript’s passed around—this ad is not a promising start, discipline-and-cunning-wise, especially the “twists the truth like Clinton” line that the 12M jumped on Murphy for. This line’s too mean. McCain2000 could have chosen to put together a much softer and smarter ad patiently “correcting” certain “unfortunate errors” in Bush’s ads and “respectfully requesting” that the push-polling cease (with everything in quotes here being Jim C.’s suggested terms) and striking just the right high-road tone. The actual ad’s “twists like Clinton” does not sound high-road; it sounds pissy, aggressive. And it will allow Bush to do a React and now say that it’s McCain who’s violated the handshake-agreement and broken the 11th Commandment (= “Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican,” which Diehard GOPs take very seriously) and gone way over the line . . . which the techs say will of course be bullshit, but that it might be effective bullshit, and that it’s McCain’s aggressive ad that’s giving the Shrub the opening to do it.

  If it’s a mistake, then, why is McCain doing it? By this time the techs are on the bus, after the hotel-exit scrum but before the Saginaw-entrance scrum, and since it’s only a ten-minute ride they have their cameras down and sticks retracted but all their gear still strapped on, which forces them to sit up uncomfortably straight and wince at bumps, and in the Pimpmobile’s mirrored ceiling they look even more like sci-fi combat troops on their way to some alien beachhead. The techs’ basic analysis of the motivation behind “twists the truth like Clinton” is that McCain is genuinely, personally pissed off at the Shrub, and that he has taken Murphy’s leash off and let Murphy do what Murphy does best, which is gutter-fight. McCain, after all, is known for having a temper (though he’s been extremely controlled in the campaign so far and never shown it in public), and Jim C. thinks that maybe the truly ingenious thing the Shrub’s strategists did here was find a way to genuinely piss McCain off and make him want to go Negative even though John Weaver and the rest of the staff High Command had to have warned him that this was playing right into Bush2000’s hands. This analysis suddenly reminds Rolling Stone of the thing in The Godfather where Sonny Corleone’s fatal flaw is his temper, which Barzini and Tattaglia exploit by getting Carlo to beat up Connie and make Sonny so insanely angry that he drives off to kill Carlo and gets assassinated in Barzini’s ambush at that tollbooth on the Richmond Parkway. Jim C., sweating freely and trying not to cough with forty pounds of gear on, says he supposes there are some similiarities, and Randy van R.—the taciturn but cinephilic CNN cameraman—speculates that the Shrub’s brain-trust may actually have based their whole strategy on Barzini’s ingenious ploy in The Godfather, whereupon Frank C. observes that Bush’s equivalent to slapping Connie Corleone around was standing up with the wacko vet who claimed McCain dissed his Vietnam comrades, which at first looked kind of stupid and unnecessarily nasty of Bush but from another perspective might have been sheer genius if it made McCain so angry that his desire to retaliate outweighed his political judgment. * Because, Frank C. warns, this retaliation, and Bush’s response to it, and McCain’s response to Bush’s response—this will be all that the Twelve Monkeys and the rest of the pro corps are interested in, and if McCain lets things get too ugly he won’t be able to get anybody to pay attention to anything else.

  It would, of course, have been just interesting as hell for Rolling Stone to have gotten to watch the top-level meetings at which John McCain and John Weaver and Mike Murphy and the rest of the campaign’s High Command hashed all this out and decided on the Press Release and response ad, but of course strategy sessions like these are journalistically impenetrable, if for no other reason than that it is the media who are the real object and audience for whatever strategies these sessions come up with, the critics who’ll decide how it plays (with Murphy’s “special advance notice” in the F&F being the strategy’s opening performance, as everyone in the F&F Room was aware but no one said aloud).

  But it turns out to be good enough just to get to hear the techs pass the time by deconstructing today’s big moves, because events of the next few days bear out their analysis pretty much 100 percent. On Tuesday morning, on the Radisson’s TV in North Savannah SC, both Today and G.M.A. lead with “The GOP campaign takes an ugly turn” and show the part of McCain’s new ad where he says “twists the truth like Clinton”; and sure enough by midday the good old Shrub has put out a React where he accuses John S. McCain of violating the handshake-agreement and going Negative and says (the Shrub does) that he (the Shrub) is “personally offended and outraged” at being compared to W. J. Clinton; and at six THMs and -Avails in a row all around South Carolina McCain carps about the push-polling and “Governor Bush’s surrogates attacking [him] and accusing [him] of abandoning America’s veterans,” each time sounding increasingly reedy and peevish and with a vein that nobody’s noticed before starting to appear and pulse in his left temple when he starts in on the veteran thing; and then at a Press-Avail in Hilton Head the Shrub avers that he knows less than nothing about any so-called push-polling and suggests that the whole thing might have been fabricated as a sleazy political ploy on McCain2000’s part; and then on Wednesday A.M. on TV at the Embassy Suites in Charleston there’s now an even more aggressive ad that Murphy’s gotten McCain to let him run, which new ad accuses Bush of unilaterally violating the handshake-pledge and going Negative and then shows a nighttime shot of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s famous façade with its palisade of blatantly ejaculatory fountains in the foreground and says “Can America afford another politician in the White House that we can’t trust?,” which grammatical problems aside Frank C. says that that shot of the White House is really going low with the knife and that if McCain loses South Carolina it may very well be because of this ad; and sure enough by Wednesday night focus polls are showing that South Carolina voters are finding McCain’s new ad Negative and depressing, which focus polls the Shrub seizes on and crows about while meanwhile Bush2000’s strategists, “in response” to McCain’s “outrageous” equation of Bush2 with W. J. Clinton, which “impugns [Bush’s] character and deeply offends [him],” start running a new ad of their own that shows a clip of the handshake in NH and then some photo of McCain looking angry and vicious and says “John McCain shook hands and promised a clean campaign, then attacked Governor Bush with misleading ads” and then apparently just for good measure tosses in a quote from 4 Feb.’s NBC Nightly News that says “McCain solicited money from organizations appearing before his Senate Committee . . . and pressured agencies on behalf of his
contributors,” about which quote Jim C. (who, recall, works for NBC News) says the original NBC Nightly News report was actually just about Bush supporters’ charges that McCain had done these things, and thus that the ad’s quote is decontextualized in a really blatantly sleazy and misleading way, but of course by this time—Thursday 10 Feb., 0745h., proceeding in convoy formation to the day’s first THMs in Spartanburg and Greenville—it doesn’t matter, because there’ve been so many charges and deep offenses and countercharges that McCain’s complaining about the deceptive quote would just be one more countercharge, which Jim C. says is surely why Bush2000 felt they could mangle the quote and get away with it, which verily they appear to have done, because SC polls have both McCain’s support and the primary’s projected voter-turnout falling like rocks, and the techs are having to spend all their time helping their field producers find the “fighting words” in every tape and feed them to the networks because that’s all the networks want, and everyone on Bullshit 1&2 is starting to get severely dispirited and bored, and even the 12M’s strides have lost a certain pigeon-toed spring . . .

  . . . And then out of nowhere comes the dramatic tactical climax mentioned way above, which hits the media like a syringe of Narcan and makes all five networks’ news that night. It occurs at the Spartanburg THM, whose venue is a small steep theater in the Fine Arts Center of a small college nobody ever did find out the name of, and is so packed by the time the McCain2000 press corps gets there that even the aisles are full, so that everybody except the techs and their producers is out in the lobby, which is itself teeming with college kids who couldn’t get a seat either and are standing around taking notes for something called Speech Com 210—McCain’s visit’s apparently some sort of class assignment—and rather gratifying RS by continually looking over the 12M’s shoulders to see what they’re writing. Next to the free-pastry-and-sign-up-for-McCain2000-volunteering table is a heavy vertical oak joist or beam, to each of whose four sides has been attached somehow a 24-inch color monitor that’s tapping CNN’s video feed, which stays tight on McCain’s face against the backdrop’s huge flag (where do they get these giant flags? What happens to them when there’s no campaign? Where do you even store flags that size? Or is there just one, that McCain2000’s advance team has to take down afterward and hurtle with to the next THM to get it put up before McCain and the cameras arrive? Do Gore and the Shrub and all of the candidates each have their own giant flag?), and if you pick your path carefully you can orbit the beam very fast and see McCain delivering his 22.5 to all points of the compass at once. The lobby’s front wall is glass, and in the gravel courtyard just outside is a breathtaking twenty-part Cellular Waltz going on around two local news vans throbbing at idle and raising their 40-foot microwave transmitters, plus four well-dressed local male heads with hand mikes doing their standups, each attached to his tech by a cord. Compared to Schieffer and Bloom and the network talent on the S.T. Express, the local male heads always seem almost alienly lurid: their makeup makes their skin orange and their lips violet, and their hair’s all so gelled you can see things reflected in it. The local vans’ transmitters’ dishes, rising like huge ghastly flowers on their telescoping poles, all turn to face identically southwest toward Southeast Regional Microwave Relay #434B outside Greenville.

  To be honest, all the national pencils would probably be out here in the lobby even if the theater weren’t full, because after a few days McCain’s opening THM 22.5 becomes almost wrist-slittingly dull and repetitive. Journalists who’ve covered McCain since Christmas report that Murphy et al. have worked hard on him to become more “Message-Disciplined,” which in politicalspeak means reducing everything as much as possible to brief, memory-friendly slogans and then punching those slogans over and over. The result is that the McCain corps’ pencils have now heard every Message-Disciplined bit of the 22.5—from McCain’s opening joke about getting mistaken for a Grampa at his children’s school, to “It doesn’t take much talent to get shot down,” to “The Iron Triangle of money, lobbyists, and legislation,” to “Clinton’s feckless photo-op foreign policy,” to “As president, I won’t need any on-the-job training,” to “I feel like Luke Skywalker trying to get off the Death Star,” to “I’m going to beat Al Gore like a drum,” plus two or three dozen other bits that sound like crosses between a nightclub act and a motivational seminar—so many times that they just can’t stand it anymore, and while they have to be at the THMs in case anything big or Negative happens they’ll go anywhere and do just about anything to avoid having to listen to the 22.5 again, plus of course to the laughter and cheers and wild applause of a THM crowd that’s hearing it all for the first time, which is basically why they’re now all out here in the lobby ogling coeds and arguing about which silent-movie diva the poor local heads’ eyeshadow most resembles.

  In fairness to McCain, he’s not an orator and doesn’t pretend to be. His métier is conversation, back-and-forth. This is because he’s bright in a fast, flexible way that most candidates aren’t. He also genuinely seems to find people and questions and arguments energizing—the latter maybe because of all his years debating in Congress—which is why he favors Town Hall Q&As and constant chats with press in his rolling salon. So, while the media marvel at his accessibility because they’ve been trained to equate it with vulnerability, they don’t seem to realize they’re playing totally to McCain’s strength when they converse with him instead of listening to his speeches. In conversation he’s smart and alive and human and seems actually to listen and respond directly to you instead of some demographic abstraction you might represent. It’s his speeches and 22.5s that are canned and stilted, and also sometimes scary and Right-Wingish, and when you listen closely to some of them it’s as if some warm pleasant fog suddenly lifts and it strikes you that you’re not at all sure it’s John McCain you want to be your Commander in Chief of the War on Drugs or to choose the three or four new Justices who’ll probably be coming onto the Supreme Court in the next term, and you start wondering all over again what makes the guy so attractive.

  But then the doubts again dissolve when McCain starts taking questions at THMs, which by now is what’s underway in Spartanburg. McCain always starts this part by telling the crowd he invites “questions, comments, and the occasional insult from any U.S. Marines who might be here today” (which, again, gets radically less funny with repetition [apparently the Navy and Marines tend not to like each other] ). The questions always run the great vox populi gamut, from Talmudically bearded guys asking about Chechnya and tort reform to high-school kids reading questions off printed sheets their hands shake as they hold, from moms worried about their babies’ future SSI to ancient vets in Legion caps who call McCain “Lieutenant” and want to trade salutes, plus the obligatory walleyed fundamentalists trying to pin him down on whether Christ really called homosexuality an abomination (w/ McCain, to his credit, pointing out that they don’t even have the right Testament), and arcane questions about index-fund regulation and postal privatization, and HMO horror stories, and Internet porn, and tobacco litigation, and people who believe the Second Amendment entitles them to own grenade launchers. The questions are random and unscreened, and the candidate fields them all, and he’s never better or more human than in these exchanges, especially when the questioner is angry or wacko—McCain will say “I respectfully disagree” or “We have a difference of opinion” and then detail his objections in lucid English with a gentleness that’s never condescending. For a man with a temper, a reputation for suffering fools ungladly, McCain is unbelievably patient and decent with people at THMs, especially when you consider that he’s 63, sleep-deprived, in chronic pain, and under enormous pressure not to gaffe or get himself in trouble. He doesn’t. No matter how stale and Message-Disciplined the 22.5 at the beginning, in the Town Hall Q&As you get an overwhelming sense that this is a decent, honorable man trying to tell the truth to people he really sees. You will not be alone in this impression.

  Among the techs and
non-simian pencils, the feeling is that McCain’s single finest human moment of the campaign so far was at the Warren MI Town Hall Meeting on Monday, in the Q&A, when a middle-aged man in a sportcoat and beret, a man who didn’t look in any way unusual but turned out to be insane—meaning literally, as in DSM IV–grade schizophrenic—came to the mike and said the government of Michigan has a mind-control machine and influences brainwaves and that not even wrapping roll after roll of aluminum foil around your head with only the tiniest pinpricks for eyes and breathing stopped them from influencing brainwaves and says he wants to know if McCain is president will he use Michigan’s mind-control machine to catch the murderers and pardon the Congress and compensate him personally for sixty long years of government mind-control, and can he get it in writing. The question is not funny; the room’s silence is horrified. Think how easy it would have been for a candidate then to blanch or stumble, or have hard-eyed aides remove the man, or—worst—to have made fun of the guy in order to defuse everyone’s horror and embarrassment and try to score humor-points with the crowd, at which most of the younger pencils would probably have fainted dead away from cynical disgust because the poor guy is still standing there at the mike and looking earnestly up at McCain, awaiting an answer. Which McCain, incredibly, sees—the man’s humanity, the seriousness of these issues to him—and says yes, he will, he’ll promise to look into it, and yes he’ll put this promise in writing, although he “believe[s] [they] have a difference of opinion about this mind-control machine,” and in short defuses the insane man and treats him respectfully without patronizing him or pretending to be schizophrenic too, and does it all so quickly and gracefully and with such basic decency that if it was some sort of act then McCain is the devil himself. Which the techs, later, after the post-THM Press-Avail and scrum, degearing aboard the ghastly Pimpmobile, say McCain is not (the devil) and that they were, to a man, moved by the unfakable humanity of the exchange, and yet at the same time impressed with McCain’s professionalism in disarming the guy, and Jim C. urges Rolling Stone not to be so cynical as to reject out of hand the possibility that the two can coexist—human genuineness and political professionalism—because it’s the great yin-and-yang paradox of the McCain2000 campaign, and is so much more interesting than the sort of robotic unhuman all-pro campaign he’s used to that Jim says he almost doesn’t mind the grind this time.