Let’s pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA. Assuming you are demographically a Young Voter, it is again worth a moment of your valuable time to consider the implications of the techs’ last couple points. 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 please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is 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 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 thingas not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.
So anyway, by this time all the press in the Flint F&F Room are demodemizing and ejecting diskettes and packing up their stuff and getting ready to go cover John McCain’s 1800h speech at the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner in Saginaw, where a Republican dressed as Uncle Sam will show up on eight-foot stilts and totter around the dim banquet hall through the whole thing and nearly crash into the network crews’ riser several times and irritate the hell out of everyone, and where the Twelve Monkeys will bribe or bullshit the headwaiter into seating them at a no-show table and feeding them supper while all the rest of the press corps has to stand in the back of the hall and try to help the slightly mad Economist guy cabbage breadsticks when nobody’s looking. Watching the techs gear up to go scrum around McCain as he boards the Straight Talk Express is a little like watching soldiers outfit themselves for combat: there are numerous multipart packs and cases to strap across backs and chests and to loop around waists and connect and lock down, and pieces of high-priced machinery to load with filters and tape and bulbs and reserve power cells and connect to each other with complex cords and co-ax cable, and weasels to wrap around high-filter boom mikes, and sticks to choose and carefully telescope out all the way till they look like the probosces of some monstrous insect and bob, slightly — the soundmen’s sticks and mikes do — as the techs in the scrum keep pace with McCain and try to keep his head in the center of their shot and right underneath the long stick’s mike in case he says something newsworthy. McCain has on a fresh blue pinstripe suit, and his complexion is hectic with CF fever or tactical adrenaline, and as he passes through the Riverfront lobby toward the scrum there’s a faint backwash of quality aftershave, and from behind him you can see Cindy McCain using her exquisitely manicured hands to whisk invisible lint off his shoulders, and at moments like this it’s difficult not to feel enthused and to really like this man and want to support him in just about any sort of feasible way you can think of.
Plus there’s the single best part of every pre-scrum technical gear-up: watching the cameramen haul their heavy $40,000 rigs to their shoulders like rocket launchers and pull the safety strap tight under their opposite arm and ram the clips home with practiced ease, their postures canted under the camera’s weight. It is Jim C.’s custom always to say “Up, Simba” in a fake-deep bwana voice as he hefts the camera to his right shoulder, and he and Frank C. like to do a little pantomime of the way football players will bang their helmets together to get pumped for a big game, although obviously the techs do it carefully and make sure their equipment doesn’t touch or tangle cords.
But so the techs’ assessment, then, is that Bush2’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. What McCain has to try to do 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 spoon-feed the Twelve Monkeys all this stuff about Bush’s attacks being so far over the line that McCain had no choice but to “respond.” Because the McCain2000 campaign has got to spin today’s retaliation the same way nations spin war — i.e., McCain has to make it appear that he is not actually being 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 ad is not a promising start, discipline-and-cunning-wise, especially the “twists the truth like Clinton” line 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 angry, aggressive. And it will allow Bush to do a React and now say that it’s McCain who’s violated the handshake-agreement and broken the 11th Commandment (=“Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican,” which Diehard GOPs take very seriously) and gone way over the line … which the techs say will of course be bullshit, but it might be effective bullshit, and it’s McCain’s aggressive ad that’s giving the Shrub the opening to do it.
If it’s a mistake, then why is McCain doing it? By this time the techs are on the bus, after the hotel-exit scrum but before the Saginaw-entrance scrum, and since it’s only a ten-minute ride they have their cameras down and sticks retracted but all their gear still strapped on, which forces them to sit up uncomfortably straight and wince at bumps, and in the Pimpmobile’s mirrored ceiling they look even more like sci-fi combat troops on their way to some alien beachhead. 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 Mike Murphy’s leash off and let Murphy do what he does best, which is gutter-fight. McCain, after all, is known to have 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 here was find a way to genuinely, personally piss McCain off and make him want to go Negative even though John Weaver and the rest of the staff High Command had to have warned him that he’d be playing right into Bush2000’s hands. This analysis suddenly reminds Rolling Stone of the thing 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 that tollbooth on the Richmond Parkway. Jim C., sweating freely and trying not to cough with 40 pounds of gear on, says he supposes there are some similarities, and Randy van R. (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, whereupon Frank C. observes that Bush2’s analog to slapping Connie Corleone around was standing up with the wacko Vietnam vet who claimed that McCain abandoned his comrades, which at first looked kind of 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. Because, Frank C. warns, this retaliation, and Bush’s response to it, and McCain’s response to Bush’s response — this will be all that the Twelve Monkeys and the rest of the pro corps are interested in, and if McCain lets things get too ugly he won’t be able to get anybody to pay attention to anything else.