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Register The Politics of Personality Destruction Through mind-numbing repetition and bizarre campaign-trail torture, our candidates can seem reduced to pale copies of themselves.
Illustration by Andrea Koch (Photo: 1994 Touchstone/Courtesy Everett Collection (Ed Wood Zombies); Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Landov (Clinton)) Spend enough time on the campaign trail and you really do wonder how presidential candidates manage to stay sane. Twenty-four hours into John McCains announcement tour, the venues have already started to run together in a blur of streamers, hot-dog stands, and high-school bands playing This Land Is Your Land in the same trumpet squall. The senator has received all manner of pointless tchotchkes and doodads. Twice, hes had to smileand act as if he found it so originalwhen his supporters gave him valedictory send-offs to the tune of Barbara Ann, a nod to the Bomb Iran wisecrack he made some weeks back. And somewhere between New Hampshire and South Carolina, the Arizona senator has gotten into a tense quarrel with the press corps, who cannot believe that a man who bills himself as a straight talker refused, just the day before, to answer their questions about Alberto Gonzales until theyd already filed their storiesat which point he told Larry King he thought the attorney general should resign. Well, the fact is, I wanted yesterdays stories to be about the announcement of our campaign, says McCain when confronted about the discrepancy at a press conference. Given Americas unconcern with the Geneva Conventions and McCains own harrowing history as a prisoner of war, perhaps Mark McKinnon, an adviser to the senator, could find a more delicate metaphor when he compares the process of running for president to torture. You have the same sensory stimuli over and over until it drives you crazy. Its also the last remaining freak show in the United States, which is hardly to everyones taste. Gary Bauer, a Republican Evangelical who made a quixotic primary bid in 2000, says he had a hard enough time coping with the butter lady at the Iowa State Fair. Her claim to fame was that she always brought sculptures made completely out of butter, he says. And well, youre going to think Im making this up, but guess what the sculpture was that year? The length of this roomhe points to the opposite wall of his Arlington, Virginia, office, maybe twelve feet awayand pretty darn deep. When Bob Dole ran for president in 1996, he says, the journalists who followed him knew his stump speech so well theyd recite it on the plane. After two days of following McCain, I realize I could probably do the same. Already I can reel off his jokes, his favorite rhetorical questions, and, of course, his tagline: Thats not good enough for America. Which raises a crucial question: If Im already sick of McCain, how does McCain feel? I get tired of some of it, he says, as we roll along on the Straight Talk Express. But therell always be new issues, new aspects of whatever the issues are. Any man with serious presidential ambitions cannot say how anesthetizing, peculiar, or extravagantly nuts he finds certain aspects of the modern American presidential campaign. But his response was disappointing somehow, and its only later that I realized why: It was rote. John McCain had probably been asked a dozen times before. Authenticity has become a dominant meme of this campaign season. From the very beginning of the 2008 cycle, both partiesor large segments of them, anywayseemed eager to find a presidential candidate who didnt suffer from a phoniness problem. Admittedly, Democrats experienced this desire more urgently than Republicans, because the men their party ran in the past two elections looked as if theyd been specifically selected for their extra coatings of polyurethane. With Al Gore, voters at least sensed that there was another man rattling around in there somewherea funnier man, one who cared deeply about the environment and had a gift for explaining why we should, tooand An Inconvenient Truth showed this to be true. With John Kerry, the problem ran deeper: To this day, its not clear what hes passionate about.
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