Taibbi: Political Absurdity Hits the Iowa Caucuses

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted October 2, 2007.

I was back on the campaign trail for only about four hours before I started to feel unhappy again; this was back a few weeks ago, on actor Fred Thompson's kickoff tour (see "Running on Empty" in the current Rolling Stone), specifically on a bus run between Des Moines and Council Bluffs on the afternoon of Thompson's first day of campaigning.

Thompson had had a rough start to his presidential experience. His people had chosen to start things off by having a cow-eyed former Miss Iowa named Carolyn Haugland sing the national anthem for the large crowd of press and supporters gathered at a Des Moines convention center. Haugland is something every state should have -- a right-wing beauty queen with a Hannitoid political blog ("That's when it dawned on me," she writes, "Bin Laden isn't just a terrorist. He's worse -- a liberal!") who eschews post-pageant catalog work for stridently patriotic campaign performances. Her anthem would have been fine, except that she has a mild lisp. She ended up sounding like Robin Williams doing Elmer Fudd doing Bruce Springsteen doing "Fire." "Oah de wam-m-m-pahts we watch ..." she belted. "Wuh so gaow-want-wee stwee-e-e-e-ming. And de wockets wed gware ...!"

From there Thompson's handlers cued his campaign video, entitled The Hunt For Red November. The signature propaganda piece in a campaign that labors openly to blur media fantasy and political reality, the video is additionally confusing in that it starts off with a photo array of Democratic candidates Edwards, Hillary and Obama, interspersed with a dramatic "Hunt For Red November" title frame set against a frankly "Red" background. I thought they were trying to say something about the "Reds" on the other ticket, and so did someone in the crowd behind me. "Do they mean communiss?" I heard someone whisper in an Iowan twang.

So I ran to Todd Harris, the Thompson campaign's press guy, just to check. He seemed pissed by the question. "No," he sighed. "Red November, red state. Republican."

"Right," I said, "but in the original movie, it was Red like Lenin Red, and you've got Hillary and Edwards there all covered in red ... Do we want a Red November, or do we not want a Red November?"

"We want it. Now it means Republican," he said, trying to smile, then walked away.

After that Thompson gave his first stump speech, an understated thing designed to cast him, in stark contrast to the other flawed candidates of his party, as a pure nice-guy conservative. A good actor, Thompson's aw-shucks demeanor and near-constant emphasis on his humble roots and decided lack of megalomaniacal instinct makes his stump speech into a kind of political version of the late Phil Hartman's famous "I'm just a simple caveman!" SNL skit, which when you think about it is a near-perfect sales pitch for Red State voters.

The other reporters were bitching about how vapid it was, but I thought it was going over well -- until a woman just a few feet to my left collapsed unconscious on the ground with a fainting fit near the tail end of Thompson's presentation. Seeing the fracas in the back of the room, the candidate cut his speech short abruptly, forcing his campaign-opening rhetorical salvo to end not with hoots and cheers and resounding applause but ambiguously, with whispers and murmurs and frantic rubbernecking at the back of the room.

The woman got up after about ten minutes and walked away, apparently OK.

After the speech, I retreated along with the rest of the reporters to a cavernous filing room a floor below and immediately fell into a glum mood. The presidential campaign ritual in this country has obviously devolved into a deeply flawed phenomenon, one that tends to produce incompetent or inappropriate leaders and fails to really touch the population on any level anymore beyond disgust and resentment. Two straight (well, one-and-a-half straight) victories by the lunkhead George Bush are only part of the evidence on that score. Even more ominous were the 2006 midterm elections, a revoltingly idealism-free spectacle in which 80 percent of the money spent on television advertising across the country during the campaign season was devoted to negative ads.

The numbers released by the CQ Political Moneyline group following that race are startling. In 2004, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $13.8 million on ads for congressional races; 99 percent of that money was on "positive" ads. In 2006, they spent $14.4 million, but only 17 percent on positive messages; an amazing 83 percent went for attack ads.

The Republican numbers were similar. In 2004, the NRCC spent $19.5 million on ads, and the split was 54-46 percent positive-negative. In 2006, they nearly doubled the money spent, burning $33 million, and the numbers were 89-11 percent in favor of attack ads. By 2008 the process of turning national elections into a vote against this or that much-loathed candidate should be more or less complete.

This is why I hate showing up at functions like this Thompson thing and seeing everyone, from campaign staff to press reps to audience members, looking so content of disposition and cheered of conscience, like they're joining up with a neighborhood can drive. Like there isn't something totally fucked up and insane about the whole thing. In the filing room after the event, the reporters sleepily puttered around the buffet table in between sessions at their computers sending the nothing details of Thompson's nothing speech out into the world; there were chuckles as CBS radio reporter Peter King screamed his way through 15 or 20 takes of a four-sentence remote report on Thompson's debut, while a pair of TV guys in the back joked about the culinary shortcomings of this campaign. "I hope it isn't warm cheese cubes again tonight," one cracked, as he stared at a sad little plastic miniplate of warmed jalapeno jack. "I hate warm cheese cubes."

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Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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