David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

React ( n )= 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-degree ring of techs (see Tech ) and heads around a candidate as he makes his way from the Straight Talk Express into an event or vice versa; ( v ) = to gather around a moving candidate in such a ring.

Shrub = GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush (also sometimes referred to as Dubya or Bush 2).

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 disbursing those enormous sums to exactly the candidate the donor had wanted to give to in the first place.

Stand-up = A head doing 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.

Talent = A marquee network head who flies in for just one day, gets briefed by a field producer, and does a stand-up on the campaign, as in “We got talent coming in tomorrow, so I need to get all this B-film archived.” Recognizable talent this week includes Bob Schieffer of CBS, David Bloom of NBC, and Judy Woodruff of CNN.

Tech = A TV news camera or sound technician. (N.B.: In the McCain corps this week, all the techs are male, while over 80 percent of the field producers are female. No credible explanation ever obtained.)

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 DT s 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 high-end journalists and political-analysis guys from important papers and weeklies and news services (e.g. Copley, W. Post,WSJ, Newsweek, UPI, Ch. Tribune,National Review,Atlanta Constitution, etc.) 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, oxfordcloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100 percent buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus 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 briefly back onto Bullshit 1 they always sit together identically huffy and pigeon-toed with their attaché cases in their laps and always end up discussing esoteric books on political theory and public policy in voices that are all the exact same plummy Ivy League honk. The techs (who wear old jeans and surplus-store parkas and also all tend to hang in a pack) pretty much try to 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 tight as the bark on a tree 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 hardworking journalist just like them even if he didn’t have a portable Paul Stuart steamer for his slacks.

Weasel = The weird gray fuzzy thing that sound techs put over their sticks’ 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 .)

It’s now precisely 1330h on Tuesday, 8 February 2000, on Bullshit 1, proceeding southeast on I-26 back toward Charleston SC. There’s now 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 that there’s more than one campaign bus. Here in South Carolina there are three, a veritable convoy of Straight Talk, plus FoxNews’s green SUV and the MTV crew’s sprightly red Corvette and two much-antenna’d local TV vans (one of which has muffler trouble). On DTs like this, McCain’s always in his personal red recliner next to pol. 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 already drawing away. The Straight Talk Express’s driver is a leadfoot and the other drivers hate him. 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 McCain2000 staff has to do is rent different buses and decorate the nicest one with STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS and McCAIN2000.COM in each new state. In Michigan yesterday there was just the STE plus one bus for non-elite press, which had powder-gray faux-leather couches and gleaming brushed-steel fixtures and a mirrored ceiling from front to back; it creeped everyone out and was christened the Pimpmobile. The two press buses in South Carolina 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.

Right now Bullshit l’s Press Liaison, Travis—23, late of Georgetown U and a six-month backpack tour of Southeast Asia during which he says he came to like fried bugs — is again employing his single most important and impressive skill as a McCain2000 staffer, which is the ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and in any position for ten-to-fifteen-minute intervals, with a composed face and no unpleasant sounds or fluids, and then to come instantly and unfuzzily awake the moment he’s needed. It’s not clear whether he thinks people can’t tell he’s sleeping or what. Travis, who wears wide-wale corduroys and a sweater from Structure and seems to subsist entirely on Starburst Fruit Chews, tends to speak with the same deprecatory irony that is the whole staff’s style, introducing himself to new media today as either “Your press lackey” or “The Hervé Villechaize of Bullshit 1,” or both. His latest trick is to go up to the front of the bus and hook his arm over the little brushed-steel safety bar above the driver’s head and to lean against it so that from behind it looks as if he’s having an involved navigational conversation with the driver, and to go to sleep, and the driver — a 6'7" bald black gentleman named Jay, whose way of saying goodnight to a journalist at the end of the day is “Go on and get you a woman, boy!”—knows exactly what’s going on and takes extra care not to change lanes or brake hard, and Travis, whose day starts at 0500 and ends after midnight just like all the other staffers, lives this way.