Consider the Lobster (22 page)

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.

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.

McCain just got done giving a Major Policy Address on crime and punishment at the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy in Columbia, which is where the caravan is heading back to Charleston from. It was a resoundingly scary speech, delivered in a large airless cinderblock auditorium surrounded by razor wire and guard towers (the SCCJA adjoined a penal institution so closely that it wasn’t clear where one left off and the other began) and introduced by some kind of very high-ranking Highway Patrol officer whose big hanging gut and face the color of rare steak seemed right out of southern-law-enforcement central casting and who spoke approvingly and at some length about Senator McCain’s military background and his 100 percent conservative voting record on crime, punishment, firearms, and the war on drugs. This wasn’t a Town Meeting Q&A-type thing; it was a Major Policy Address, one of three this week prompted by Bush2000’s charges that McCain is fuzzy on policy, that he’s image over substance. The speech’s putative audience was 350 neckless young men and women sitting at attention (if that’s possible) in arrow-straight rows of folding chairs, with another couple hundred law enforcement pros in Highway Patrol hats and mirrored shades standing at parade-rest behind them, and then behind and around them the media—the real audience for the speech—including NBC’s Jim C. and his soundman Frank C. (no relation) and the rest of the network techs on the ever-present fiberboard riser facing the stage and filming McCain, who as is SOP first thanks a whole lot of local people nobody’s heard of and then w/o ado jumps right into what’s far and away the most frightening speech of the week, backed as always by a 30' ¥ 50' American flag so that when you see B-film of these things on TV it’s McCain and the flag, the flag and McCain, a visual conjunction all the candidates try to hammer home. The seated cadets—none of whom fidget or scratch or move in any way except to blink in what looks like perfect sync—wear identical dark-brown khakis and junior models of the same round big-brimmed hats their elders wear, so that they look like ten perfect rows of brutal and extremely attentive forest rangers. McCain, who does not ever perspire, is wearing a dark suit and wide tie and has the only dry forehead in the hall. US congressmen Lindsey Graham (R-SC, of impeachment-trial fame) and Mark Sanford (R-SC, rated the single most fiscally conservative member of the ’98-’00 Congress) are up there onstage behind McCain, as is also SOP; they’re sort of his living letters of introduction down here this week. Graham, as usual, looks like he slept in his suit, whereas Sanford is tan and urbane in a V-neck sweater and Guccis whose shine you could read by. Mrs. Cindy McCain is up there too, brittly composed and smiling at the air in front of her and thinking about God knows what. Half the buses’ press don’t listen to the speech; most of them are at different spots at the very back of the auditorium, walking in little unconscious circles with their cellular phones. (You should be apprised up front that national reporters spend an enormous amount of time either on their cell phones or waiting for their cell phones to ring. It is not an exaggeration to say that when somebody’s cell phone breaks they almost have to be sedated.) The techs for CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, and Fox will film the whole speech plus any remarks afterward, then they’ll unbolt their cameras from the tripods and go mobile and scrum McCain’s exit and the brief Press-Avail at the door to the Straight Talk Express, and then the field producers will call network HQ and summarize the highlights and HQ will decide which five- or ten-second snippet gets used for their news’s nightly bit on the GOP campaign.