David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

For the remainder of the at least half hour more before John McCain is finally ready to get back on the Express (N.B.: McCain is later revealed to have had a sore throat today, apparently sending his staff into paroxysms of terror that he was coming down with the same Campaign Flu that’s been ravaging the press corps [Jim C.’s own Campaign Flu will turn into bronchitis and then probably slight pneumonia, and for three days in South Carolina the whole rest of Bullshit 1’s regulars will rearrange themselves to give Jim a couch to himself to sleep on during long DTs, because he’s really sick, and it isn’t until Friday that there’s enough free time for Jim even to go get antibiotics, and still all week he’s up and filming every speech and scrum, and in RS’ s opinion he is incredibly brave and uncomplaining about the Campaign Flu, unlike the Twelve Monkeys, many of whom keep taking their temperatures and feeling their glands and whining into their cell phones to be rotated out, so that by midweek in SC there are really only nine Monkeys, then eight Monkeys, although the techs, out of respect for tradition, keep referring to them as the Twelve Monkeys], and it later emerges that the Flint F&F was so protracted because Mrs. McC. and Wendy and McCain2000 Political Director John Weaver had McCain up there gargling and breathing steam and pounding echinacea) to head over to Saginaw, the techs, while checking their equipment and gearing up for the scrum 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 2’s Negativity and McCain’s response from a tactical point of view.

Leaving aside their aforementioned coolness and esprit de corps, you should be apprised that Rolling Stone’ s one and only journalistic coup this week is his happening to bumble 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 political self-interest of the McCain2000 staff to muddy their perspective — turn out to be more astute and sensible political analysts than anybody you’ll read or see on TV, and their assessment of today’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. Polls have shown that most voters find Negativity big-time distasteful, and if a candidate is perceived as getting nasty, it usually costs him. So the techs all agree that the first big question is why Bush2000 started playing the Negativity 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, Governor Bush is a creature of his campaign advisors, and these advisors are the best that $70,000,000 and the full faith and credit of the GOP Establishment can buy, and they are not spoiled children but seasoned tactical pros, and if Bush2000 has gone Negative there must be solid political logic behind the move.

This logic turns out to be indeed solid, even inspired, 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 keeping to the high road. But it could also come off as wimpy, and so compromise McCain’s image as a tough, take-no-shit guy with the courage to face down the Washington kleptocracy. Not responding might also look like “appeasing aggression,” which for a candidate whose background is military and who spends a lot of time talking about rebuilding the armed forces and being less of a candy-ass in foreign policy would not be good, especially in a state with a higher percentage of both vets and gun nuts than any other (which SC is). So McCain pretty much has to hit 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, when of course so much time and effort and money have already gone into casting him as the exact opposite of that. Plus an even bigger reason McCain can’t afford to let the Shrub “pull him down to his level” (this in the phrase of the CBS cameraman, a Louisianan who’s quite a bit shorter than the average tech and so besides all his other equipment has to lug a little aluminum stepladder around to stand on with his camera during scrums, which decreases his mobility but is compensated for by what the other techs agree is an almost occult talent for always finding the perfect place to set up his ladder and film at just the right angle for what his HQ wants — Jim C. says the tiny southerner is “technically about as good as they come”) is that if Bush then turns around and retaliates against the retaliation and so McCain then has to re-retaliate against Bush’s retaliation, and so on and so forth, then the whole GOP race could quickly degenerate into just the sort of boring, depressing, cynical, charge-and-countercharge contest that turns voters off and keeps them away from the polls … especially Young Voters, cynicism-wise, Rolling Stone and the underage pencil from the free Detroit weekly thing venture to point out, both now scribbling just as furiously with the techs as the 12M were 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 actually in the Shrub’s own 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 explaining more patiently 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 as already mentioned has got all its cash and credibility invested in the Shrub. CNN’s Mark A. takes time out from doing special stretching exercises that increase blood-flow to his arms (sound techs are very arm-conscious, since positioning a boom mike correctly in a scrum requires holding ten-foot sticks and 4.7-pound boom mikes [that’s 4.7 without the weasel] horizontally out by their fully extended arms for long periods [which try this with an industrial broom or extension pruner sometime if you think it’s easy], with the added proviso that the heavy mike at the end can’t wobble or dip into the cameras’ shot or [God forbid, and there are horror stories] clunk the candidate on the top of the head) in order to insert 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 Diehards 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 short but highly respected CBS cameraman says, helps explain why, even though our elected representatives are always wringing their hands and making concerned noises about low voter turnouts, nothing substantive ever gets done to make politics less ugly or depressing or to actually induce more people to vote: our elected representatives are incumbents, and low turnouts favor incumbents for the same reason soft money does.