The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub

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, that moment seems to underlie McCain's "greater than self-interest" line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb that'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. 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 we've seen, 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 Town Hall Meetings — something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like "service" and "sacrifice" and "honor" might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. 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?

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Substantially farther behind the scenes than you're apt to want to be

It's now precisely 1330h. On Tuesday, 8 February '00, aboard Bullshit 1, proceeding southeast on 1-26 toward Charleston SC. There's 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 post-New Hampshire that there's now more than one campaign bus. Here in South Carolina there are three, a veritable convoy of Straight Talk, plus Fox News's green SUV and the MTV crew's sprightly red Corvette and two much-an-tennae'd local-TV vans (one of which has severe muffler trouble). On DTs like this McCain's always in his personal red recliner next to political consultant Mike Murphy's red recliner in the little press salon he and Murphy have in the back of the lead bus, the well-known Straight Talk Express, which is up ahead and gaining. Bullshit 1 is the caravan's second bus, a luxury Grumman with good current and workable phone jacks, and a lot of the national pencils use it to pound out copy on their laptops and send faxes and e-mail stuff to their editors. The campaign's logistics are dizzyingly complex, and one of the things the staff has to do is rent different buses and decorate the nicest one with Straight Talk Express and McCain2000.com in each new state. The two press buses in SC 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.

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) to interface with McCain himself, 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 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 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.

Bullshit 1 is also a box, of course, just as anything you can't exit till somebody tells you becomes, and right now there are 27 members of the national political media on board, halfway to Charleston, where a certain percentage of them will get rotated back off the Trail tonight and be gone tomorrow. That's what these pros call it, the Trail, the same way musicians talk about the Road. The schedule is fascist: Wake-up call and backup alarm at 0600h., Express Checkout, Baggage Call at 0700 to throw bags and techs' gear under the bus, DT 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 Interstate DT between functions, finally getting in to the night's Marriott or Hampton Inn at like 2300 just when Room Service closes so you're begging rides from Fox News 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 has 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 Dura-cells piled around them, discussing obscure stand-up comedians of the early '70s and trading Press badges from New Hampshire and Iowa and Delaware. NBC's Jim C., who looks like a chronically sleep-deprived Elliott Gould, is also watching the Press Liaison's leather bookbag swing metronomically by its overshoulder strap as the Liaison leans against the driver's seat and secretly dozes. All the couches and padded chairs face in, perpendicular to BSI'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 touching somebody else on a bus's leg because nobody can help it and they're too tired to care. About two-thirds of the way down the aisle is a little area that has the bus's refrigerator and the liquor cabinets (totally empty on BSI) and the bathroom with the hazardous door. There's also a little counter area piled with Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes, plus 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.