David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, mostly in a dark box, alone, tapping messages 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 is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit — the man does want your vote, after all.

But so that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68—right before John McCain refused, with all his basic primal human self-interest howling at him — that moment is hard to blow off. For the whole week, through Michigan and South Carolina 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 deep sort of reverb that’s hard to ignore. The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of maybe the only kind Vietnam has to offer us, a hero because of not what he did but 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. And yes, literally: “moral authority,” that old cliché, like so many other clichés—“service,” “honor,” “duty”—that have become now just mostly words, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain of recent seasons, 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 THMs — something about him made a lot of us feel that the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or dollars, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a smell from childhood or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us hear clichés as more than just clichés and start us trying to think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether the words actually stand for something. To think 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 our culture has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is?

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 221/2 minutes.

B-film = Innocuous little audio-free shots of McCain doing public stuff — shaking hands, signing books, getting scrummed (see Scrum ), etc. — for use behind a TV voice-over report on the day’s campaigning, as in “The reason the techs [see Tech ] have to feed [see Feed ] so much irrelevant and repetitive daily footage is that they never know what the network wants to use for B-film .”

Baggage Call = The grotesquely early AM time, listed on the next day’s schedule (N.B.: the last vital media-task of the day is making sure to get the next day’s schedule from Travis), by which you have to get 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 FoxNews, 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, then he 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,” each of whom pledges 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 b undled money nor s oft money (see Soft Money ).

Cabbage ( v ) = To beg, divert, or outright steal food from one of the many suppertime campaign events at which McCain’s audience all sit at tables and get supper and the press corps has to stand around foodless at the back of the room.

DT = Drive Time, the slots in the daily schedule set aside for caravanning 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 newspapers, while the techs (see Tech ) and field producers have to find a satellite or Gunner (see Gunner ) and feed their film, B-film,stand-ups (see Stand-up ), and anything else their bosses might want to the network HQ. (For alternate meaning of feed, see Pool .)

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 40 degrees upward at the southwest sky and emblazoned in fiery blue caps GUNNER GLOBAL UPLINKING FOR NEWS, NETWORKING, ENTERTAINMENT.

Head = Local or network TV correspondent (see also Talent ).

ODT = Optimistic Drive Time, which refers to the daily schedule’s nagging habit of underestimating 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 thereby to incur the rabid dislike of Jay and the Bullshit 2 driver. (On the night of 9 February, one BS2 driver actually quit on the spot after an especially hair-rising ride from Greenville to Clemson U, and an emergency replacement driver [who wore a brown cowboy hat with two NRA pins on the brim and was so obsessed with fuel economy that he refused ever to turn on BS2’s generator, causing all BS2 press who needed working AC outlets to crowd onto BS1 and turning BS2 into a veritable moving tomb used only for OTC s] had to be flown in from Cincinnati, which is apparently the bus company’s HQ.)

OTC = Opportunity to Crash, meaning a chance to grab a nap on the bus (placement and posture variable).

OTS = Opportunity to Smoke.

Pencil = A member of the Trail’s print press.

Pool ( v ) = Refers to occasions when, because of space restrictions or McCain2000 fiat, only one network camera-and-sound team is allowed into an event, and by convention all the other networks get to feed (meaning, in this case, pool ) that one team’s tape.

Press-Avail (or just 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 ). An Avail is less formal than a press conference, which latter usually draws extra local pencils and heads and is uncancelable, whereas Avails are often bagged because of ODT s and related snafus.