David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

It would, of course, have been just interesting as hell for Rolling Stone to have gotten to watch the top-level meetings at which John McCain and John Weaver and Mike Murphy and the rest of the campaign’s High Command hashed all this out and decided on the press release and response ad, but of course strategy sessions like these are journalistically impenetrable, if for no other reason than that it is the media who are the true object and audience for whatever strategy these sessions come up with, the critics who’ll decide how well it all plays (with Murphy’s special little “advance notice” spiel in the Flint F&F being the strategy’s opening performance, as everyone in the room was aware but no one said aloud).

But it turns out to be enough just getting to hear the techs kill time by deconstructing today’s big moves, because events of the next few days bear out their analysis pretty much 100 percent. 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 good old Shrub has put out a React where he accuses John S. McCain of violating the handshake-agreement and going Negative and says (the Shrub does) that he (the Shrub) is “personally offended and outraged” at being compared to Bill Clinton; and at six THMs and — Avails in a row all around South Carolina McCain carps about the push-polling and “Governor Bush’s surrogates’ attacking [him] and accusing [him] of abandoning America’s veterans,” each time sounding increasingly reedy and peevish and with a vein that nobody’s noticed before appearing to bulge and throb in his left temple when he starts in on the veteran thing; 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 AM 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 new ad accuses Bush of unilaterally violating the handshake-agreement and going Negative and then shows a nighttime shot of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s famous facade 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?” about which nobody mentions the grammatical problems but Frank C. says that the 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 McCain’s new ad Negative and depressing, polls that the Shrub then seizes on and crows about while meanwhile Bush2000’s strategists, “in response” to McCain’s “outrageous” equation of Bush 2with W. J. Clinton, which “impugns [Bush’s] character and deeply offends [him],” start running a new ad of their own that shows a clip of the handshake in New Hampshire and then some photo of McCain looking angry and vicious and says “John McCain shook hands and promised a clean campaign, then attacked Governor Bush with misleading ads,” then apparently just for good measure tosses in a sound bite from 4 Feb.’s NBC Nightly News that says “McCain solicited money from organizations appearing before his Senate Committee … and pressured agencies on behalf of his contributors,” about which Jim C. (who, recall, works for NBC News) says the original NBC Nightly News report was actually just about Bush supporters’ charges that McCain had done these things, and thus that the ad’s bite is decontextualized in a really blatantly sleazy and misleading way, but of course by this time — Thursday, 10 Feb., 0745h, proceeding in convoy formation to the day’s first THMs in Spartanburg and Greenville — it doesn’t matter, because there’ve been so many deeply offended charges and countercharges that McCain’s complaining about the deceptive NBC bite would just be one more countercharge, which Jim C. says is surely why Bush2000 felt they could distort the bite and get away with it, which verily they appear to have done, because SC polls have both McCain’s support and the primary’s projected voter turnout falling like rocks, and the techs are having to spend all their time helping their field producers find the “fighting words” in every speech’s tape because that’s all the networks want, and everyone on Bullshit 1 & 2 is starting to get severely dispirited and bored, and even the 12M’s strides have lost a certain pigeon-toed spring …

… And then out of nowhere comes the dramatic tactical climax mentioned way above, which hits the media like a syringe of epinephrine and makes all five networks’ news that night. It occurs at the Spartanburg THM, whose venue is a small steep theater in the Fine Arts Center of a little college nobody ever did find out the name of, and is so packed by the time the McCain2000 press corps gets there that even the aisles are full, so that everybody except the techs and their producers is out in the lobby, which is itself teeming with college kids who couldn’t get a seat either and are standing around taking notes for something called Speech Com 210—McCain’s visit’s apparently some sort of class assignment — and rather delighting Rolling Stone by continually looking over the 12M’s shoulders to see what they’re writing. Next to the free-pastry-and-sign-up-for-McCain2000-volunteering table is a huge oak column or stanchion or something, to each of whose four sides has been attached somehow a 24-inch color monitor that’s tapping CNN’s video feed, which stays tight on McCain’s face against the backdrop’s huge flag (Where do they get these giant flags? What happens to them when there’s no campaign? Where do they go? Where do you even store flags that size? Or is there maybe just one, which McCain2000’s advance team has to take down afterward and hurtle with to the next THM to get it put up before McCain and the cameras arrive? Do Gore and the Shrub and all the other candidates each have their own giant flag?), and if you pick your path carefully you can orbit the column very quickly and see McCain delivering his 22.5 to all points of the compass at once. The lobby’s front wall is glass, and in the gravel courtyard just outside is a breathtaking 20-part Cellular Waltz going on around two local news vans throbbing at idle and raising their 40-foot microwave transmitters, plus four well-dressed local male heads with hand mikes doing their stand-ups, each attached to his tech by a cord. Compared to Schieffer and Bloom and the network talent on the ST Express, the local male heads always seem almost alienly lurid: their makeup makes their skin orange and their lips violet, and their hair’s all so gelled you can see the heads’ surroundings reflected in it. The local vans’ transmitters’ dishes, rising like great ghastly flowers on their telescoping poles, all turn to face identically south, their pistils aimed at Southeast Regional Microwave Relay #434B near Greenville.

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 wrist-slittingly dull and repetitive. Journalists who’ve covered McCain since Christmas report that Murphy et al. have worked hard on him to become more “message-disciplined,” which in politicalspeak means reducing everything as much as possible to brief, memory-friendly slogans and then punching those slogans over and over. The result is that the McCain corps’ pencils have now heard every message-disciplined bit of the 22.5—from McCain’s opening joke about getting mistaken for a grampa at his children’s school, to “It doesn’t take much talent to get shot down,” to “the Iron Triangle of money, lobbyists, and legislation,” to “Clinton’s feckless photo-op foreign policy,” to “As president, I won’t need any on-the-job training,” to “I’m going to beat Al Gore like a drum,” plus two or three dozen other lines that sound like crosses between a nightclub act and a motivational seminar — so many times that they just can’t stand it anymore; and while they have to be at the THMs in case anything big or Negative happens, they’ll go anywhere and do just about anything to avoid having to listen to the 22.5 again, plus of course to the laughter and cheers and wild applause of a THM crowd that’s hearing it all for the first time, which is basically why the pencils are all now out here in the lobby ogling coeds and arguing about which silent-movie diva’s the poor local heads’ eyeshadow most resembles.