The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub

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Prologue: Who Cares?

Since You're Reading "Rolling Stone," the chances are you're an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There's hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up ... assuming you give a shit about data. In fact, even if you're reading other stuff in RS, it's doubtful you're going to read much of this article — such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the Political Process evokes in us now, in this post-Watergate-post-Iran-Contra-post-Whitewater-post-Lewinsky era, an era when politicians' statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their sincerity or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability. And no generation has been marketed and Spun and pitched to as ingeniously and relentlessly as today's demographic Young. So when Senator John McCain says, in Michigan or South Carolina (which is where Rolling Stone sent the least professional pencil it could find to spend the standard media Week on the Bus with a candidate who'd never ride higher than he is right now), when McCain says "I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something," it's hard to hear it as anything more than a marketing angle, especially when he says it as he's going around surrounded by cameras and reporters and cheering crowds ... in other words, Being Somebody.

And when Senator John McCain also says — constantly, thumping it at the start and end of every speech and THM — that his goal as president will be "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest," it's hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important and talked-about human being on earth, which is of course their real "cause," to which they appear to be so deeply devoted that they can swallow and spew whole mountains of noble-sounding bullshit and convince even themselves that they mean it. Cynical as that may sound, polls show it's how most of us feel. And it's beyond not believing the bullshit; mostly we don't even hear it, dismiss it at the same deep level where we also block out billboards and Muzak.

But there's something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain's military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It's very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we've all heard so much about it and partly because it's so off-the-charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man's life. But it's worth considering for a minute, because it's what makes McCain's "causes greater than self-interest" line easier to hear.

You probably already know what happened. In October of '67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain's arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you'd be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the lifevest's toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there's film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it's grainy and McCain's face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90° to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison — a.k.a. the "Hanoi Hilton," of much movie fame — where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can't lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it's important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant's office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain's father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true — both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused. The U.S. military's Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who'd been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a "punishment cell." Maybe you've heard all this before; it's been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? You simply can't know for sure. None of us can. It's hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you'd react.

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he's capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches in early February you can feel like maybe it isn't just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it's maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: the guy does — did — want your vote, after all.

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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.

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Behind the buses' digestive areas is another couch-intensive section, in which 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 accessories and French nails and can perhaps best be described as a very Republican-looking young lady indeed — is 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. 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 stuff 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 "Adviser on Issues Affecting Education" but is quite obviously really along because she's Cindy McCain's friend and confidante and the only 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 she'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 out 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."

If this all seems really static and dull, by the way, then understand 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 I while you wait for the slight significant look from the Press Liaison which means 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 his aide-de-camp 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 upfront does not and cannot happen, this penetration, partly for the reason 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 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 delicious 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 mean can you explain why specifically Michigan?

Murphy: It's the next primary.

Monkey: I think what we're trying to get you to elaborate on, 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 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 whatever he says down in their absolutely identical steno notebooks.

What's hazardous about Bullshit I'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 I is that when any male gets up and goes two-thirds of the way back into the lavatory anybody who's back there clears the immediate 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 BS I 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.

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Who Even Cares Who Cares?

It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn't seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000's adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to dislike — what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.

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One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he's a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in Student Government and Band, whereas McCain was a Varsity wrestler and a hellraiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates. At 63, he's funny, and smart, and he'll make fun of himself and his wife and his staff and other pols and the Trail, and he'll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don't ever mind because it's the sort of shit that makes you feel like here's this very cool, important guy who's noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit. Sometimes he'll wink at you for no reason. If all this doesn't sound like that big a deal, you have to remember that most of these pro reporters have to spend a lot of time around politicians, and most politicians are painful to be around. As one political columnist told Rolling Stone and another pencil new to the Trail, "If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you'd be way more impressed with [McCain]. It's that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act." And the grateful press on the Trail transmit — maybe even exaggerate — McCain's humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to "lead" and "inspire" them.

There are, of course, still some groups of Young Voters way, way into modern politics. There's Rowdy Ralph Reed's far-Right Christians, for one, and then way out at the other end of the spectrum there's ACT UP and the sensitive men and angry womyn of the PC Left. What's interesting is that what gives these small fringe blocs so much power is the basic failure of mainstream Young Voters to get off their ass and vote. It's like we all learned in jr. high social studies: if I vote and you don't, my vote counts double. And it's not just the fringes that benefit — the fact is that it's to some very powerful Establishments' advantage that most young people hate politics and don't vote. This, too, deserves to be thought about, if you can stand it.

There's another thing John McCain always says. He makes sure he concludes every speech and THM with it, so the buses' press hear it about too times this week. He always pauses a second for effect and then says: "I'm going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don't agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth." This is McCain's closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder: why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well it's obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They're cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain's resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters' pain, but relief from it. Because we've been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It's ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts. It denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if hard experience seems to teach that everything you're supposed to believe in's really a game based on lies. Young Voters have been taught well and thoroughly. You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember "No new taxes" and "Out of the loop" and "No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time" and "Did not inhale" and "Did not have sex with that woman" and etc. etc. It's depressing and painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously with such a straight face that you just know they have to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't fall all over themselves for a top politician who actually seemed to talk to you like you were a person, an intelligent adult worthy of respect? A politician who all of a sudden out of nowhere comes on TV as this total long-shot candidate and says that Washington is paralyzed, that everybody there's been bought off, and that the only way to really "return government to the people" the way all the other candidates claim they want to do is to outlaw huge unreported political contributions from corporations and lobbies and PACs ... all of which are obvious truths that everybody knows but no recent politician's had the stones to say. Who wouldn't cheer, hearing stuff like this, especially from a guy we know chose to sit in a dark box for four years instead of violate a Code? Even in A.D. 2000, who among us is so cynical that he doesn't have some good old corny American hope way down deep in his heart, lying dormant like a spinster's ardor, not dead but just waiting for the Right Guy to give it to? That John S. McCain III opposed making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday, or that he thinks clear-cut logging is good for America, or that he feels our present gun laws are not clinically insane — this stuff counts for nothing with these Town Hall crowds, all on their feet, cheering their own ability to finally really fucking cheer.

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Negativity

7-13 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 surprise; next week is the mad dash to SC's 2/19 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 Pan Am Still Stenciled on Tail. Spartan-burg 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. 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. Congressman Lindsey Graham Hosts Weird BBQ for a Lot of Flinty-Eyed Men in Down Vests and Trucker's Hats in Seneca SC. 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-Conference in Greenville. Book Signing at Chapter 11 Books in Atlanta. 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," a Press Liaison 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.

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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 buses' media are at 1500h. on 2/7 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 divided 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 PM deadlines can finish their stories and File and Feed. 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 the whole F&F Room is up and running and alive with the quaduple ding of Windows booting up, the honk and static of modem connections, the multiphase clicking of forty-plus keyboards, the needly screech of fax machines saying hello to New York and Atlanta and the murmur of people on headset phones doing same.

Outside the Riverfront's side doors off the parking lot, where it's so cold and windy you have to smoke with mittens on, an OTS with Jim C. and his longtime friend and partner Frank C. means getting to bitch about the 12 Monkeys, and here Jim and Frank discourse with no small sympathy on the brutality of these campaign reporters' existence — subsisting on the Campaign Diet, which is basically sugar and caffeine (diabetes is apparently the Black Lung of political journalism), always on the road in some sort of box for weeks at a time, very alone, connected to loved ones only by cellphone and 1-800 answering service. Rolling Stone mentions being in hotels every night, which a CBS sound guy on BS2 had said was probably the McCain 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, etc. 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 art-work bolted to the wall, the 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. RS asks whether it could possibly be coincidence that over half of all indoor suicides take place in chain hotels. Jim and Frank say they get the idea. RS references the terrible oxymoron of "hotel guest." Hell could easily be a chain hotel. Is it any accident 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.

Monday, the first and only File and 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 cell-phone 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. says what's interesting is that media south of the equator do the exact same Cellular Waltz but that down there all their circles are reversed.

The reason for all the lobby's Waltzing was that during the OTS word 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 two Press Liaisons are passing out even now, and of which part of the first page is reproduced here:

Bush Campaign Caught Red-Handed With Negative Ads, Unethical "Push-Polling"

Outraged South Carolinians Unite Against False Advertising, Universally-Condemned Negative Polling Practice, McCain Volunteer Army Waiting With Tape Recorders to Catch Bush in the Act COLUMBIA, SC---Deceptive TV ads and negative "push polls" conducted by phone in South Carolina last night by a polling firm employed by Texas Governor George W. Bush's campaign...

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 now indeed just come down to Spin this abrupt change of tone in the campaign's rhetoric. Murphy, who is only 37 but seems a lot 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. Among political pros, Murphy has the reputation of being (1) smart and funny as hell and (2) a real attack-dog, working for clients like Oliver North and Michigan's own John Engler in campaigns that were absolute operas of nastiness, and known for turning out what the NY Times rather delicately called "some of the most rough-edged commercials in the business." He's leaning back against a wall and surrounded in a 180° arc by the Twelve Monkeys, all of whom have 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.

He then 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 welching 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, a practice that's regarded as the absolute bottom-feeder of sleazy campaign tactics. 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 McCain's well-documented personal bio and heroic legislative efforts on behalf of vets for nearly twenty years is just so clearly over the line of even minimal personal decency and honor that it pretty much necessitates some sort of response.

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The Twelve Monkeys, who are 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 the harried Press Liaisons are now distributing from a fresh copier-box and which features, in part:

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....

His ad twists the truth like Clinton. We're all pretty tired of that...."

— of which ad-transcript the 12M point out that in particular the "twists the truth like Clinton" part seems Negative indeed, since in 'oo comparing a GOP candidate to Bill Clinton is roughly equivalent to claiming that he wears ladies' underwear under his black robes while presiding over Satanic masses.

The network techs, while checking their equipment and starting to gear up for the scrum of McCain's exit 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 Bush's Negativity and McCain's response from a tactical point of view.

Leaving aside their coolness and esprit de corps, be advised that Rolling Stone's single luckiest journalistic accident this week was his bumbling 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 to-day'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 it distasteful in the extreme, 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 advisers, and these advisers are the best that $70 million and the full faith and credit of the GOP Establishment can buy, 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. 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. Worse, the CBS cameraman points out, if Bush then turns around and retaliates against the retaliation, and McCain has to re-retaliate against Bush's retaliation, and so on, then the whole GOP race could quickly degenerate into 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, RS and an underage local pencil from one of those weekly things that people can pick up free at Detroit supermarkets point out, both scribbling just as furiously with the techs as the 12M did 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 even in the Shrub's 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 patiently explaining 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 million and 100% of its own credibility invested in the Shrub. CNN's Mark A. inserts 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 Die-hards 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. Which fact then in turn, the 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 and 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' point. 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 parties, who are not dumb and are keenly aware that it's 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.

But so the techs' assessment, then, is that Bush'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, then, 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 have no choice but to "respond." Because the McCain2000 campaign has got to Spin today's retaliation the same way nations Spin war: 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 is not a promising start, discipline-and-cunning-wise, especially the "twists the truth like Clinton" part 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 pissed off, aggressive. And it will allow Bush to do a React and now say that it's McCain who's violated the handshake-agreement ... 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.

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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 was to find a way to genuinely piss McCain off and make him want to go Negative even though the staff High Command had to have warned him that this was playing right into Bush's strategists' hands. This analysis suddenly reminds Rolling Stone of the part 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 the toll-booth. Jim C., sweating heavily with forty pounds of gear on, says he supposes there are some similarities, and Randy (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, and Frank C. observes that Bush's equivalent to slapping Connie Corleone around was probably his standing up with the wacko vet who claimed McCain dissed his Vietnam comrades, which at first looked 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.

And events of the next few days bear out the techs' analysis pretty much 100%. On Tuesday morning, on the Radisson's TV in North Savannah SC, both Today and GMA 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 Shrub has put out a React where he accuses John S. McCain of violating the handshake-agreement and going Negative and adds that he is "personally offended and outraged" at being compared to W.J. Clinton; 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 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 the new ad Negative and depressing, and the next couple days' polls then have both McCain's support and the primary's projected voter-turnout falling like a rock, and the daily pencils are having to churn out piece after piece about all the endless picayune charges and counter-charges, and everyone on Bullshit 1 and 2 is starting to get severely dispirited and bored, and even the 12M's strides have lost a certain spring...

... And then out of nowhere comes the dramatic tactical climax mentioned supra, which hits the media like a syringe of Narcan and makes all five networks' news that night. It occurs at the Spartanburg SC THM, whose venue is a small steep theater in the Fine Arts Center of a small college nobody could ever find out the name of, and is so packed by the time the press corps gets there that even the aisles are full, so that everybody except the techs and their producers is out in the lobby.

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 Mike Murphy and Co. have worked hard on him to become more "Message-Disciplined," which in politicalspeak means reducing everything important to brief, memory-friendly slogans — "the Iron Triangle of money, lobbyists and legislation," "I'm going to beat Al Gore like a drum" — and then punching those slogans over and over.

In fairness to McCain, he's not an orator and doesn't pretend to be. His metier 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 often don't seem to realize they're playing totally to McCain's strength when they converse with him instead of listening to his speeches. It's McCain's speeches and 22.5's that are canned and stilted, and also sometimes scary and Right-wingish, and when you listen closely to 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 choosing the head of the EPA or the at least three new Justices who'll be coming onto the Supreme Court in the next term, and you start wondering all over again what makes him so attractive.

But then the doubts again dissolve when McCain starts taking questions at THMs, which by now is what's underway in Spartanburg. 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 kids' future SSI to old 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 considered homosexuality "an abomination," 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 wrong — 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, McCain is unbelievably patient and decent with people at THMs, especially when you consider that he's 63, in chronic pain, sleep-deprived, 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.

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And so but then in the Spartanburg Q&A, after two China questions and one on taxing Internet commerce, a totally demographically average thirty-something middle-class soccer mom in rust-colored slacks and big round glasses gets picked and stands up and somebody brings her the mike. It turns out her name is Donna Duren, of right here in Spartanburg SC, and she says she has a 14-year-old son named Chris, in whom Mr. and Mrs. Duren have been trying to inculcate family values and respect for authority and a non-cynical idealism about America and its duly elected leaders. They want him to find heroes he can believe in, she says. Donna Duren's whole story takes a while, but nobody's bored, and even on the monitors in the lobby you can sense a change in the theater's voltage, and the national pencils start moving in and elbowing people aside (which they're really good at) to get close to the monitors. Mrs. Duren says that Chris — clearly a sensitive kid — was "made very very upset" by the Lewinsky scandal and all the R-rated revelations and the appalling behavior of Clinton and Starr and Tripp and pretty much everybody on all sides during the impeachment thing, and Chris had a lot of very upsetting and uncomfortable questions that Mr. and Mrs. D. struggled to answer, and that basically it was a really hard time but they got through it. And then last year, at more or less a trough in terms of idealism and respect for elected authority, she says, Chris discovered John McCain and McCain2000.com, and got interested in the campaign, and his parents apparently read him some G-rated parts of Faith of My Fathers, and the upshot is that young Chris finally found a public hero he could believe in: John S. McCain III. It's impossible to know what McCain's face is doing during this story because the monitors are taking CNN's feed, and Randy of CNN's lens is staying hard and steady on Donna Duren, who appears so iconically prototypical and so thoroughly exudes the special quiet dignity of an average American who knows she's average and just wants a decent, non-cynical life for herself and her family that she can say things like "family values" and "hero" without anybody rolling their eyes. But then last night, Mrs. D. says, as they were all watching non-violent TV in the family room, the phone suddenly rang upstairs, and Chris went up and got it, and Mrs. D. says a little while later he came back down into the family room crying and just terribly upset and told them the phone call had been a man who started talking to him about the 2000 campaign and then asked Chris if he knew that John McCain was a liar and a cheater and that anybody who'd vote for John McCain was either stupid or un-American or both. That caller had been a push-poller for Bush2000, Mrs. Duren says, knuckles on her mike-hand white and voice almost breaking, and she says she just wanted Senator McCain to know about it, about what happened to Chris, and wants to know whether anything can be done to keep people like this from calling innocent young kids and plunging them into disillusionment and confusion about whether they're stupid for trying to have heroes they believe in.

At which point (0853h.) two things happen out here in the Fine Arts Center lobby. The first is that the national pencils disperse in a radial pattern, each dialing his cellphone, and the network field producers all come barreling out of the theater doors pulling their cellphone antennas out with their teeth, and everybody tries to find a little empty area to Waltz in while they call the gist of this riveting Negativity-related development in to networks and editors and try to raise their counterparts in the Bush-2000 press corps to see if they can get a React from the Shrub on Mrs. Duren's story, at the end of which story the second thing happens, which is that CNN's Randy finally pans to McCain and you can see McCain's facial expression, which is pained and pale and actually looks more distraught even than Mrs. Duren's face had looked. And what McCain does, after looking silently at the floor a second, is — apologize. He doesn't lash out at Bush or at push-polling or appear to try to capitalize politically in any way. He looks sad and compassionate and regretful and says that the only reason he got into this race in the first place was to try to help inspire young Americans to feel better about devoting themselves to something, and that a story like what Mrs. Duren took the trouble to come down here to the THM this morning and tell him is just about the worst thing he could hear, and that if it's OK with Mrs. D. he'd like to call her son and apologize personally on the phone and maybe tell Chris that yes there are some bad people out there but that it's never a mistake to believe in something, that politics is still worthwhile as a Process to get involved in, and he really does look upset, McCain does, and almost as what seems like an afterthought he says that one thing Donna Duren and other concerned parents and citizens can do is call the Bush campaign and tell them to stop this push-polling, that Governor Bush is a good man with a family of his own and it's difficult to believe he'd ever endorse his campaign doing things like this if he knew about it, and that he (McCain) will be calling Bush again personally for like the umpteenth time to ask him to stop the Negativity, and McCain's eyes look ... wet, as in teary, which maybe is just a trick of the techs' TV lights but is nevertheless disturbing, the whole thing is disturbing, because McCain seems upset in a way that's almost too dramatic. He takes a couple more THM questions, then stops abruptly and says he's sorry but he's just so incredibly upset about the Chris Duren thing that he's having a hard time concentrating on anything else, and he asks the THM crowd's forgiveness, and thanks them, and forgets his Message Discipline and doesn't finish with he'll always. Tell them. The truth but they applaud like mad anyway, and the lobby's monitors' feed is cut as Randy and Jim C. et al go shoulder-held to join the scrum as McCain starts to exit.

And now none of this is simple at all, especially not McCain's exaggerated-seeming distress about Chris Duren, and a small set of disturbing and possibly very cynical interconnected thoughts and questions start whirling around in the journalistic head. Like the fact that Donna Duren's story was a far more devastating indictment of the Shrub's campaign tactics than anything McCain himself could say, and is it possible that McCain, on the theater's stage, wasn't aware of this? Is it possible that some part of McCain could realize that what happened to Chris Duren is very much to John S. McCain's political advantage, and yet he's still such a decent, uncalculating guy that all he feels is horror and regret that a kid was disillusioned? Was it human compassion that made him apologize first instead of criticizing Bush2000, or is McCain just maybe shrewd enough to know that Mrs. D.'s story had already nailed Bush to the wall and that by apologizing and looking distraught McCain could help underscore the difference between his own human decency and Bush's uncaring Negativity? Is it possible that he really actually had tears in his eyes? And come to think of it hey, why would a push-poller even be interested in trying to push-poll somebody too young to vote? Does Chris Duren maybe have a really deep-sounding phone voice or something? But wouldn't you think a push-poller would ask somebody's age before launching into his spiel? And how come nobody asked this question, not even the jaded 12M, out in the lobby? What were they thinking?

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Bullshit I is empty except for Jay, who's grabbing a nap on one of the couches, and through the port windows you can see all the techs and heads and talent in a king-size scrum around Mrs. Donna Duren in the gravel courtyard, and there's the additional cynical thought that doubtless some enterprising network crew is even now pulling up in front of poor Chris Duren's junior high (which unfortunately tonight on TV turns out to be just what happened). The bus idles empty for a very long time — the post-event scrums and standups last longer than the whole THM did — and then when the BSI regulars finally do pile in they're all extremely busy trying to type and phone and file, and all the techs have to get their Sony DVS-series Digital Editors out and help their producers find and time the clip of Mrs. Duren's story and McCain's response so they can feed it to the networks right away, and the Twelve Monkeys have as more or less one body stormed the Straight Talk Express, which is just up ahead on I-85 and riding very low in the stern from all the weight in McCain's rear salon. The point is that none of the usual media pros are available to interface with and help deconstruct the Chris Duren Incident and help try to figure out what to be cynical about and what not to and which of the many disturbing questions the whole Incident provokes are paranoid or irrelevant and which ones might be journalistically valid ... such as was McCain really serious about calling Chris Duren? How was he going to get the Durens' phone number when Mrs. D. was scrummed solid the whole time he and the staff were leaving? And where were Mike Murphy and the other High Command through that whole thing, who can usually be seen Cell-Waltzing in the shadows at every THM but today were nowhere in sight? Is it just possible that McCain — maybe not even consciously — played up his reaction to Mrs. Duren's story and framed his distress to give himself a plausible, good-looking excuse to get out of the Negative spiral that's been hurting him so badly in the polls that Jim and Frank say he may well lose SC if things keep on this way? Is it too cynical even to consider such a thing?

Because at the following day's first Press-Avail, John S. McCain issues a plausible, good-looking, highly emotional statement to the whole scrummed corps. This is on a warm, pretty 2/11 morning outside the Embassy Suites (or maybe Hampton Inn) in Charleston, right after Baggage Call. McCain informs the press that the case of young Chris Duren has caused him such distress that after a great deal of late-night soul-searching he's now ordered his staff to cease all Negativity and to pull all the McCain2000 response ads in South Carolina regardless of whether the Shrub pulls his own Negative ads or not.

And of course framed as it is in the distressed context of the Chris Duren Incident, McCain's decision in no way now makes him look wimpy or appeasing, but rather like a truly decent, honorable, high-road guy who doesn't want young people's political idealism fucked with in any way if he can help it. It's a masterful statement, and a stirring and high-impact Press-Avail, and everybody in the scrum seems impressed and in some cases deeply and personally moved, and nobody (including Rolling Stone) ventures to point out aloud that, however unfortunate the phone call was for the Durens, it turned out to be fortunate as hell for McCain2000 in terms of this week's tactical battle, that actually the whole thing couldn't have worked out better for McCain2000 if it had been ... well, like, scripted, if like say Mrs. Donna Duren had been a trained actress or gifted amateur who'd been somehow secretly approached and rehearsed and paid and planted in that crowd of over 300 random unscreened questioners where her raised hand in that sea of average voters' hands was seen and chosen and she got to tell a moving story that made all five networks last night and damaged Bush badly and now has released McCain from this week's tactical box. Any way you look at it (and there's a long DT to think about it), yesterday's Incident and THM were an almost incredible stroke of political luck for McCain, or else a stroke of something else that no one — not Rolling Stone, not the Twelve Monkeys or even the totally sharp and unsentimental and astute Jim C. — ever once broaches or mentions out loud, which might be understandable, since maybe even considering whether it was even possible would be so painful it would just break your heart and make it hard to go on, which is what the press and staff and Straight Talk caravan and McCain himself have to do all day, and the next, and the next — go on.

* * * * * * *

Suck It Up

Paradox: It is impossible to talk about the really important stuff in politics without using terms that have become such awful clichés they make your eyes glaze over and are hard to even hear. One such term is "leader," which all the big candidates use all the time — as in "providing leadership," "a proven leader," "a new leader for a new century," etc. — and have reduced to such a platitude that it's hard to try to think about what "leader" really means and whether indeed what today's Young Voters want is a leader. The weird thing is that the word "leader" itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn't cliché or boring at all; in fact he's sort of the opposite of cliché and boring.

Obviously, a real leader isn't just somebody who has ideas you agree with, nor is it just somebody you happen to think is a good guy. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with "inspire" being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own. It's a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you "looked up to" (interesting phrase) and wanted to be just like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a Scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend's parent, or a supervisor in a summer job. And yes, all these are "authority figures," but it's a special kind of authority. If you've ever spent time in the military, you know how incredibly easy it is to tell which of your superiors are real leaders and which aren't, and how little rank has to do with it. A leader's real "authority" is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn't ever get to on your own.

Lincoln was, by all available evidence, a real leader, and Churchill, and Gandhi, and King. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, and certainly Marshall and maybe Eisenhower. (Of course Hitler was a real leader too, a very powerful one, so you have to watch out; all it is is a weird kind of power.)

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Probably the last real leader we had as U.S. President was JFK, forty years ago. It's not that Kennedy was a better human being than the seven presidents we've had since: we know he lied about his WWII record, and had spooky Mob ties, and screwed around more in the White House than poor Clinton could ever dream of. But JFK had that weird leader-type magic, and when he said things like "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" nobody rolled their eyes or saw it as just political bullshit. Instead, a lot of them felt inspired. And the decade that followed, however fucked up it was in other ways, saw millions of Young Voters devote themselves to social and political causes that had nothing to do with getting a great job or owning nice stuff or finding the best parties; and the '60s were, by most accounts, a generally cleaner and happier time than now.

So it's worth thinking about why, when John McCain says he wants to be president in order to inspire a generation of young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest (which means he's saying he wants to be a real leader), a great many of those young Americans will yawn or roll their eyes or make some ironic joke instead of feeling totally inspired the way they did with Kennedy. True, JFK's audience was more "innocent" than we are: Vietnam hadn't happened yet, or Watergate, or the Savings and Loan scandal, etc. But there's also something else. The science of sales and marketing was still in its drooling infancy in 1961 when Kennedy was saying "Ask not..." The young people he inspired had not been skillfully marketed to all their lives. They knew nothing of Spin. They were not totally, terribly familiar with salesmen.

Now you have to pay close attention to something that's going to seem real obvious. There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. Because a salesman's ultimate, overriding motivation is his own self-interest. If you buy what he's selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying really is in your interest (and it really might be) — still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman's ultimately after is something for himself. And this awareness is painful ... although admittedly it's a tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious. But if you're subjected to enough great salesmen and salespitches and marketing concepts for long enough — like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say — it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.

Some people believed that Ronald W. Reagan (1981-88) was our last real leader. But not many of them were young. Even in the '80s, most younger Americans, who could smell a marketer a mile away, knew that what Reagan really was was a great salesman. What he was selling, of course, was the idea of himself as a leader. And if you're under, say, 35 this is what pretty much every U.S. President you've grown up with has been: a very talented salesman, surrounded by smart, expensive political strategists and media consultants and Spinmasters who manage his "campaign" (as in "advertising campaign") and help him sell us on the idea that it's in our interests to vote for him. But the real interests that drove these guys were their own. They wanted, above all, To Be The President, wanted the mind-bending power and prominence, the historical immortality — you could smell it on them. (Young Voters tend to have an especially good sense of smell for this sort of thing.) And this is why these guys weren't real leaders: because their deepest, most elemental motives were selfish, there was no chance of them ever inspiring us to transcend our own selfishness. Instead, they helped reinforce our market-conditioned belief that everybody's ultimately out for himself and that life is about selling and profit and that words and phrases like "service" and "justice" and "community" and "patriotism" and "duty" and "Give government back to the people" and "I feel your pain" and "Compassionate Conservatism" are just the politics industry's proven salespitches, exactly the same way "Anti-Tartar" and "Fresher Breath" and "Four Out of Five Dentists Surveyed Recommend" are the toothpaste industry's pitches. We may vote for them, the same way we may go buy toothpaste. But we're not inspired. They're not the real thing.

Yes, this is simplistic. All politicians sell, always have. FDR and JFK and MLK and Gandhi were great salesmen. But that's not all they were. People could smell it. That weird little extra something. It had to do with "character" (which, yes, is also a cliché — suck it up).

All of this is why watching John McCain hold Town Hall Meetings and be all conspicuously honest and open and informal and idealistic and no-bullshit and say "I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something" and "We're on a national crusade to give government back to the people" in front of these cheering crowds just seems so much more goddamn complicated than watching old b/w clips of John Kennedy's speeches. It feels impossible, in February '00, to tell whether John McCain is a real leader or merely a very talented political salesman, just another entrepreneur who's seen a new market-niche and devised a way to fill it.

Because here's another paradox: Spring 2000 — midmorning in America's hangover from the whole Lewinsky-and-impeachment thing — represents a moment of almost unprecedented cynicism and disgust with national politics, a moment when blunt, I-don't-give-a-shit-if-you-elect-me honesty becomes an incredibly attractive and salable and electable commodity. A moment when an anticandidate can be a real candidate. But of course if he becomes a real candidate, is he still an anticandidate? Can you sell someone's refusal to be sold?

There are a lot of elements of the McCain2000 campaign — naming and touting the bus for "Straight Talk," the timely publication of Faith of My Fathers, the much-hyped "openness" and "spontaneity" of the Express's media salon, the Message-Disciplined way McCain thumps "Always. Tell you. The truth" — that indicate some very shrewd, clever marketers are trying to market this candidate's rejection of shrewd, clever marketing. Is this bad? Is it hypocritical? Is it hypocritical that one of McCain's ads' lines in South Carolina is "... telling the truth even when it hurts him politically," which of course since it's an ad means that McCain's trying to get political benefit out of his indifference to political benefit? What's the difference between hypocrisy and paradox? Does the whole thing seem awfully confusing?

The fact of the matter is that if you are a true-blue, marketing-savvy Young Voter, the only real certainty you're going to feel about John McCain's 2000 campaign is that it produces in you a very modern and very American kind of confusion, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that's there's nothing left anywhere but salesmen. When your cynicism's winning, you'll find it's possible to see even McCain's most attractive qualities as just marketing angles. His famous habit of bringing up his own closet's skeletons, for example — bad grades, messy divorce, indictment as one of the Keating Five — this could be real honesty and openness, or it could just be McCain's shrewd way to preempt criticism by criticizing himself before anyone else gets the chance. The humble way he talks about his heroism as a POW — "It doesn't take much talent to get shot down"; "I wasn't a hero, but I was fortunate enough to serve my time in the company of heroes" — this could be real humility, or it could be McCain's clever way of appearing both heroic and humble.

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The confusion you'll feel is not all your fault. There's a very real, very American tension between what John McCain's appeal is and the way that appeal must be structured and packaged in order to make him politically viable. To get you to buy. And sometimes McCain himself seems a little too good at the packaging, as with for example recall 2/10's Chris Duren Incident in Spartanburg and McCain's enormous distress and his promise to phone and apologize personally to the disillusioned kid. So the next afternoon, at a pre-F&F Press-Avail back in North Charleston, the new unilaterally non-Negative McCain informs the corps that he's going up to his hotel room right now to call young Chris. The phone call is to be "a private one between this young man and me," McCain says. Then a Press Liaison steps in looking very serious and announces that only network techs will be allowed in the room, and while they can film the whole call, only the first ten seconds of audio will be permitted. "Ten seconds, then we kill the sound," the Liaison says, looking hard at Frank C. and the other audio guys. "This is a private call, not a media event." So why let TV cameras film McCain making it? And why only ten seconds of sound? Why not either sound or no sound?

The answer is modern and American and shrewd and right out of Marketing 101. McCain's campaign wants to publicize McCain keeping his promise and calling a traumatized kid, but also to publicize the fact that McCain is calling him "privately" and not exploiting Chris Duren for crass political purposes. There's no other possible reason for the ten-second audio cutoff, which of course will require networks that run the film to explain why there's no sound after the initial Hello, which of course will make McCain look doubly good, both caring and nonpolitical. Does the shrewd calculation of appeal here imply that McCain doesn't really care about Chris and want to buck him up and restore the kid's faith in the Political Process? Not necessarily. But what it does mean is that McCain2000 wants to have it both ways, rather like modern corporations who give to charity and then try to reap PR benefits by hyping their altruism in their ads. Does stuff like this mean the gifts and phone call aren't "good"? The answer depends on how gray-area-tolerant you are about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same. Nobody else can tell you how to see it or convince you you shouldn't yawn and turn away in disgust. Maybe McCain deserves the disgust; maybe he's really just another salesman.

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone's nonprofessional pencil, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism every bit as much as you fear your credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you're apt to find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark box in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of reprieve and a certain Young Voter named John McCain's refusal to violate a Code. Because there were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. But the paradox here is that this box that makes McCain "real" is: impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. That's why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, be apprised that a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both: the final paradox — the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other boxes and enigmas that layer McCain — is that whether he's For Real depends now less on what's in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

Glossary of Relevant Campaign-Trail vocab (Mostly Courtesy of Jim C. and the network-news techs)

22.5 The press corps' shorthand for McCain's opening remarks at THMs (see THM), which remarks are always the same and always take exactly 22 and a half minutes.

Baggage call The grotesquely early A.M. time when you've got to have your suitcase back in the bus's bowels and have a seat staked out and be ready to go or else you get left behind and have to try to wheedle a ride to the first THM (see THM) from Fox News, which is a drag in all kinds of ways.

Bundled Money A way to get around the Federal Election Commission's $1,000 limit for individual campaign contributions. A wealthy donor can give $1,000 for himself, and then can say that yet another $1,000 comes from his wife, and another $1,000 from his kid, and another from his Aunt Edna, etc. The Shrub's (see Shrub) favorite trick is to designate CEOs and other top corporate executives as "Pioneers," who each pledge to raise $100,000 for Bush2000 — $1,000 comes from them individually, and the other 99 one-grand contributions come "voluntarily" from their employees. McCain makes a point of accepting neither bundled money nor soft money (see soft money).

DT Drive Time, the slots in the daily schedule set aside for caravaning from one campaign event to another.

F&F An hour or two in the afternoon when the campaign provides downtime and an F&F Room for the press corps to File and Feed (see File and Feed).

File and Feed What print and broadcast press, respectively, have to do every day, i.e. print reporters have to finish their daily stories and file them via fax or e-mail to their papers, while the techs (see tech) and field producers have to find a satellite or Gunner (see Gunner) and feed their film, standups (see standup), and anything else their bosses might want to the network HQ.

Gunner A portable satellite-uplink rig that the networks use to feed on-scene from some campaign events. Gunner is the company that makes and/or rents out these rigs, which consist of a blinding white van with a boat-trailerish thing on which is an eight-foot satellite dish angled upward 40° at the southwest sky and emblazoned in fiery blue caps Gunner Global Uplinks for News, Networking, Entertainment.

Head Local or network TV correspondent.

Odt Optimistic Drive Time, which refers to the daily schedule's nagging habit of under-estimating the amount of time it takes to get from one event to another, causing the Straight Talk Express driver to speed like a maniac and to incur the rabid dislike of the official Bullshit I driver, whose name is Jay.

Ots Opportunity to Smoke.

Pencil A member of the Trail's print press.

Press-avail (or -avail) Brief scheduled opportunity for traveling press corps to interface as one body w/McCain or staff High Command, often deployed for Reacts (see React).

React McCain's or McCain2000 High Command's on-record response to a sudden major development in the campaign, usually some tactical move or allegation from the Shrub (see Shrub).

Scrum (n) The moving 360° ring of techs (see tech) and heads around the candidate as he makes his way from the Straight Talk Express into an event or vice versa; (v) to gather around the candidate in such a ring.

The Shrub GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush.

Soft Money The best-known way to finesse the FEC's limit on campaign contributions. Enormous sums are here given to a certain candidate's political party instead of to the candidate, but the party then by some strange coincidence ends up dispersing those enormous sums to exactly the candidate the donor had wanted to give to in the first place.

Standup A head giving a remote report from some event McCain's at.

Stick A sound tech's (see tech) black telescoping polymer rod (full extension = 9'7") with a boom microphone at the end, used mostly for scrums and always the most distinctive visible feature thereof because of the way a fully extended stick wobbles and boings when the sound tech (which, again, see tech) walks with it.

Tech A TV news camera or sound technician.

Thm Town Hall Meeting, McCain2000's signature campaign event, where the 22.5 is followed by an hour-long unscreened Q&A with the audience.

The Twelve Monkeys (or 12M) The techs' private code-name for the most elite and least popular pencils in the McCain press corps, who on DTs are almost always allowed into the red-intensive salon at the very back of the Straight Talk Express to interface with McCain and political consultant Mike Murphy. The 12M are a dozen marquee journalists and political-analysis guys from the really important papers and weeklies and news services, and tend to be so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost surreal — twelve immaculate and wrinkle-free navy-blue blazers, half-Windsored ties, pleated chinos, oxford-cloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100% buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus always a uniform self-seriousness that reminds you of every overachieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every scrum and Press-Avail and line for Continental Breakfast in the hotel lobby before Baggage Call, and whenever any of them are rotated however briefly back onto Bullshit I they always sit together identically huffy and pigeon-toed with their attaché cases in their laps and always end up discussing incredibly esoteric books on political theory and public policy in voices that are all the exact same languid honk. The techs (who all wear old jeans and surplus-store parkas and also all tend to hang in a pack) avoid and try to pretty much ignore the Twelve Monkeys, who in turn treat the techs the way someone in an executive washroom treats the attendant. As you might already have gathered, Rolling Stone dislikes the 12M intensely, for all the above reasons, plus the fact that they're tighter than a duck's butt when it comes to sharing even very basic general-knowledge political information that might help somebody write a slightly better article, plus the issue of two separate occasions at late-night hotel check-ins when one or more of the Twelve Monkeys just out of nowhere turned and handed Rolling Stone their suitcases to carry, as if Rolling Stone were a bellboy or gofer instead of a hard-working journalist just like them even if he didn't have a portable Paul Stuart steamer for his blazer.

Weasel The weird gray fuzzy thing sound techs put over their boom mikes at scrums to keep annoying wind-noise off the audio. It looks like a large floppy mouse-colored version of a certain popular kind of fuzzy bathroom slipper. (N.B.: Weasels, which are also sometimes worn by sound techs as headgear during OTS's when it's really cold, are thus sometimes also known as "tech toupees.")

[From Issue 838 — April 13, 2000]