American Rhapsody (49 page)

We said our unofficial campaign slogan was “Burn it down!” in honor of Stokely Carmichael and black power, or “Eradicate evil!” in honor of George Lucas and Ronald Reagan.

Murphy told the scrums there was a line he wanted me to use in a debate with the Crown Prince. “When there's a world hot spot, there's no second chance.”

I told them I had come up with a line the Crown Prince could use in his campaign. “When the scouting reports come in to the Texas Rangers, there is only one lonely man in a dark office.”

“This campaign,” Murphy said, “is the amazing Wallendas!”

“Quick,” I said to him, “hand me a chair!”

“I'll get your unicycle for you,” Murphy said.

After a while, the scrums realized that this was a movable circus and they started to enjoy themselves. Connie Stevens was on the bus with us one day, and I said to them, “I first met Connie at a USO dinner.” They all wrote it down. Then I said, “But I was with her vicariously several times.” They all wrote it down. Then I yelled, “I hate Eddie Fisher!” and they all stopped writing.

In a more serious vein, I told them that if I was ever elected president, I'd hold weekly press conferences like JFK and would also meet with ten members of Congress each week for a televised question and answer session.

“Couldn't that be embarrassing?” one of the scrums asked, like he'd just found a revelation in the Torah.

“Absolutely,” I said.

Something wild was going on out there. I could feel it in the crowds, which were bigger and more gaga at each stop. I saw something in the way they wanted to touch me that put chills down my back. I saw something in their eyes when they looked at me that humbled me. “No more Clinton-Gore! No more Clinton-Gore!” they yelled when they saw me, yelling it like we'd yelled “Beat Army!” at the Naval Academy, their faces blazing, their voices hoarse.

There were people with signs saying
VEGETARIANS FOR MCCAIN! HIPPIES FOR MCCAIN! CARNIVORES FOR MCCAIN!
There were signs that said
CINDY IS A BABE!
One day, I saw a mob of people come tramping through a muddy construction site just to get a look at me. My book was a big best-seller by now, and they came to the town hall meetings and rallies, holding it close to their hearts. A mother told us she had been at a Bush rally and had left because her three-year-old kept asking to see me.

I kept telling them the same thing: “I won't lie to you! I won't embarrass you! We have to reform this government!”

I said, “I'm going to beat Al Gore like a drum!” and the crowds went crazy.

I said, “This is the beginning of the end of the truth-twisting politics of Bill Clinton and Al Gore,” and they screamed, “No more Clinton-Gore! No more Clinton-Gore! No more Clinton-Gore!”

Our rallies ended in pandemonium.
Star Wars
blasting. Confetti guns showering the air. The deejay we'd hired with the five earrings, who'd just come off tour with the Foo Fighters and Nine Inch Nails, spinning Fat Boy Slim. A tape of Dick Vitale yelling, “Let's do it, baby! Let's do it!”

We took a day away from New Hampshire and spent it in New York, and I saw the same electric zip in the crowds there, like they'd eaten the wrong Arizona mushrooms. The Crown Prince and his rubber-mouthed governor pal, Pataki, another footstool volunteer, were trying to keep me off the ballot. Murphy suggested we hold a press conference across the street from the Russian embassy. “In Russia, there will be more than one name on the ballot,” I said. “In New York, unless something happens, there will be only one name on the ballot—George W. Bush!” The crowds kept screaming, “No more Clinton-Gore! No more Clinton-Gore!”

We weren't prepared for what happened on election night in New Hampshire. Nineteen points! The Crown Prince was humiliated. He didn't even want to call me. He tried to have an aide call one of my aides, and only when my aide told him to stuff it did the Crown Prince make his obligatory call. Nineteen points! The biggest primary turnout in New Hampshire's history! The biggest new voter turnout in New Hampshire's history! The biggest young voter turnout in New Hampshire's history!

Oh, what a great ride!
We got the covers of all three Communist news magazines. Red Army commandant Mike Wallace said he was considering taking a leave from
60 Minutes
to become my press secretary. Commissar Jay Leno was faxing us jokes to use on the stump. We raised $5 million on the Internet in the next week. They were talking about “the McCain Mutiny.” There were people out there who called themselves “McCainiacs.” An aide to Al Gore said, “McCain's not just a man. He's become an idea. The idea that he's not just politics as usual. It's powerful stuff.” The latest poll showed me dead even with the Crown Prince in South Carolina, our next primary stop, where I'd been twenty-seven points behind last week.

The Crown Prince looked like he'd peed himself in public. His highness fled back to Austin amid stories that he traveled with his own fluffy pillow.

“I think you're going to be nominated,” Murphy said to me, “and then you're going to be president.”

And then Murphistopheles, who had no business saying this, added, “You poor devil.”

We knew South Carolina was a major part of the Crown Prince's attempt to rig the game—the redneck and fundamentalist fire wall erected to keep him safe from any damage those crazy Yankees might have done. It was the primary purposely scheduled immediately after New Hampshire for that reason, an attempt to get the Bible-thumping populace to whitewash whatever graffiti may have been sprayed on the Crown Prince's royal carriage.

But we thought we could beat Bush at his own game. There were more veterans in South Carolina than in any other state, and when we arrived, at three in the morning, we were greeted by a crowd of cheering kids. Our bus was pulled over by an inbred Highway Patrolman, who stopped us because he wanted to meet me. Still, it was a state where T-shirts were being sold with Lincoln's picture and the words
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS
—“thus ever to tyrants”—which that other androgynous wimp actor had shouted before he shot Lincoln.

When the Crown Prince made his first appearance in the state at Bob Jones University, the musk of his New Hampshire pee still in his pores, we knew how scared he was. Bob Jones didn't permit interracial dating, didn't permit gay alumni to visit, considered Catholicism a satanic cult and the Pope the Antichrist. Bob Jones was the symbol of the old-time, racist, lynching South, the Eagle's Nest of the cross and pitchfork Nazis. George and Laura Bush were introduced there as “sweet spirits who love the Lord.” By appearing there, the Crown Prince came out of the Compassionate Conservative closet and was sending a frantic SOS to the South Carolina Reich to save him because he was one of them.

When I first saw the Crown Prince in South Carolina, I thought he was trying to impersonate me. He had a big sign behind him that said he was now the Reformer. He, who had spent much of his life within the shadow of the White House, was now the Outsider. He had a bus now. He was doing his best to string entire paragraphs together. He moved his private security detail out of camera range. He suddenly attended town hall meetings and what he called “media avails.” He had stolen whatever had worked for us, even our chant. His people walked through crowds yelling, “No more Clinton-Gore! No more Clinton-Gore!” And now they had their own confetti guns, their red-white-and-blue Nixon balloons stashed somewhere in an Austin castle.

I was pissed. “This stuff isn't going to work,” I said to Murphy, “it's transparent.”

“You've got to remember,” Murphy said, “Republicans are the Stupid party.”

When Dan Quayle became the first prominent Republican to fly into the state to endorse the Crown Prince, I saw how right Murphy was. With David Letterman and others saying George W. Bush was “the next Dan Quayle,” they brought Quayle in to endorse him? What
was
this? A ritualistic passing on of dunce hats? Final proof of the genetic enervation of the aristocracy? A piece of wicked political sabotage Murphistopheles had pulled off?

Then the Crown Prince stood there smirking next to that clown who attacked me for “forgetting about veterans once he returned from Hanoi.” This was slashing at the place in my heart where I live and breathe! Nothing is more sacred to me than veterans' benefits and rights.

We couldn't let it go. It hurt too much. Bush had stood there simpering while that crotch rot told his sordid lie. “We will run a tough campaign,” Murphy said. “Like McCain said, we're ready to punch back. We're not Bill Bradley.”

Murphy wrote an ad saying the Crown Prince “twists the truth like Bill Clinton.” The Crown Prince ran around in circles, shrieking. It was like I'd pissed into the fountain of holy water at St. Peter's. Comparing George W. Bush to Bill Clinton? It was a burn-at-the-stake offense! After beheading and dismemberment! The crosses and the pitchforks in the farm fields of the South Carolina Reich were raised to the sky!

Oberführer Pat Robertson attacked my campaign chairman, Warren Rudman, as a “vicious bigot” in taped phone calls all over the state. This was like Bill Clinton calling George Washington a liar. Chris Matthews of
Hardball
saw it for what it was: “They went after Warren Rudman because he is Jewish. They were playing that card.” Of course they were. The card was part of the Bob Jones hand. Get the crosses and the pitchforks out to support the Crown Prince against the niggers, the Catlicks, the kikes, the faggots, the dykes, and John McCain.

Trying to say that he didn't know about the Robertson tape was another transparent Crown Prince lie. Sitting right at George W. Bush's table as a paid campaign consultant, part of his official team, was Babyface Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, which was founded by Robertson. Storm trooper Reed was Oberführer Robertson's pet ferret.

I went on a talk show in South Carolina one day and a caller asked me, “Did you ever commit adultery with prostitutes in Subic Bay?”

 . . .

That was nothing, though, compared to what I discovered was going on . . . in E-mails, faxes, leaflets, talk shows, and telephone “push polls” organized by the crosses and the pitchforks as the Crown Prince smirked, turned away, and held his nose. This is what they were saying about me and my family:

I wasn't tortured during the war. I had sex with another POW and several of my captors. I had ratted out other POWs in Hanoi. Cindy was a drug addict, unfit for the White House. Cindy had to have a hysterectomy because I'd given her a venereal disease. Cindy's dad had ties to a murder. Cindy had a deformed uterus and that's why I was cheating on her. I was having an affair with Connie Stevens. I helped arrange the murder of a man who was going to expose us. I had black illegitimate children. My adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget, was one of them, her mother a black prostitute.

They were trying to dirty me so badly that those who believed I was something new and clean in the dirty world of politics wouldn't come out to vote. They were trying to kill the magic. They were trying to disillusion those who, for the first time in a long time, believed in someone. They didn't want new voters; they wanted only their corrupt friends and allies to vote. They wanted to depress America and make her more cynical. They didn't want excitement; they wanted boredom. They wanted to kill hope. They didn't want anything to change. They were the cancerous sphincter muscles of the status quo, their reek undisguised by the perfume of holy water.

When a woman at a rally told me about how her fourteen-year-old son broke down in tears after getting a push-poll call telling him I was a liar and a cheat, I told Murphy we weren't running any more negative ads.

“They're killing us,” Murphy said. “We've got to run them. People say they don't like negative ads, but negative information is an important part of their decision making. It works.”

“I don't care,” I said. “I don't want to wake up after a victory and feel dirty. I'm not going to take the low road to the White House.”

I thought about the Crown Prince and remembered him boyishly hugging me at the first debate in New Hampshire. It was all this “I love ya, man! You're my buddy! I'm proud of ya!” Then I'm suddenly this awful guy and the only thing that has changed is that I beat him like a drum in New Hampshire.

Our campaign was never the same after South Carolina. Chris Matthews was on the mark again. He called what George W. Bush did a “scorched-earth campaign . . . close to the allied bombing of Dresden.”

I'd put it a little differently. It was Adolf Hitler's rampaging goons celebrating Kristallnacht.

We won Michigan, killing off Engler's footstool dreams forever, and the Crown Prince never even called to congratulate me, but I didn't give a shit about that by then. I was still angry. No, I was
horrified
by what I'd seen in South Carolina. South Carolina took me back to Hanoi: rats scuttling in the cell, open, seeping sores, a turd floating in a well.

I'd started talking about it in Michigan already, about “the Christian Right, the Extreme Right,” about “the bunch of idiots who run Bob Jones University.” I said, “My friends, my party has lost its way. I think a lot of Americans feel that the Republican party doesn't represent them anymore and that we have too narrow a focus. I believe we have to make sure that everyone is on the playing field, that there is an equal opportunity for everybody, that we will not favor one group over another, particularly as a result of financial contributions.”

And then I flew my Skyhawk into Virginia Beach, Virginia, Pat Robertson's home, and I targeted Robertson and his smarmy Axis ally, Jerry Falwell, personally: “We are the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson,” I said. “The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics . . . . Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan on the Left or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson on the Right.”