From Parading the Elephant: Dispatches from the Dumb Season 
M. Taibbi

4

RUDYNATION

The encounter I had with Giuliani—not just his face as I stared him down in a gorilla costume, but the way his staff berated me for making a joke of their perfect, suave, heroic candidate—has me thinking a lot about the people who run these campaigns. The entire campaign ecosystem—from the tried and tested elite campaign managers, all the way down to the grunts and goons who actually do the work—they’re all so different from those who work inside their rival in-groups. I’ve met more of these people in the last few months than a sane man should, and I can tell who’s a Rudy staffer from a Lott staffer from a McChrystal staffer (unfortunately).

The Giuliani operation is a truly demonic group, led by people who four years ago worked to look as authentic and middle-American as possible for the George Bush 2000 campaign. This time, they’ve all decided to wear casual work attire, and act more insufferable as to annoy any poor journalist who may want to learn more about their “candidate.” I put candidate in quotes because you cannot consider Rudy Giuliani a coherent candidate, nor could you call him a coherent person, because he was conjured in a laboratory by Republican operatives looking for a chance in hell at getting back into power.

I remember having a chance to sit down with one of his guys from New York—his mafiosos, which are completely separate from the Dubya 2000, Dole ’96, Bush ’92/’88 veterans who run most of the ground operations—and I asked about how Mayor Giuliani was “personally taking the grave slander against his name by the Democratic Party, the media, Trent Lott, John McCain, Stan McChrystal, Joe Scarborough, and anyone who doesn’t own a Rudy 2004 bumper sticker.” Needless to say, he was peeved, but he gave me a gruff answer anyway.

“Mayor Giuliani has thick skin, it’ll take a lot more than that to get through to him.”

“Is he a fucking robot?” I asked him honestly.

“Those sickos are talking about a bonafide war hero, the first commander of the incoming ‘War on Terror,’” he said, referring to Giuliani’s batshit plan to full-send the already costly war in Afghanistan, and invade Iraq, probably Iran too, knowing him.

“Yeah, but, I mean, what else are they supposed to do?” He glared me down. “He’s the frontrunner, why wouldn’t they attack him?”

“He’s a good man, and he deserves to be president, no matter the cost.”

If only it were that simple.

As I said, the Giuliani campaign is a masculine affair. One of their top aides alone has more ego than Al Gore has ever had in his life. I’ve done far worse to a campaign, just within this year, than I did to Rudy Giuliani when I showed up to his campaign HQ wearing that gorilla costume. When Rudy had shown his shocked “having a stroke and dying” face, his staffers finally intervened. You wouldn’t know they were staff—I thought they were bodyguards, but they clearly weren’t—these two big muscular men walk up to me, shoving me away from the candidate. If Rudy wasn’t in the room, I was completely sure the two would have began beating me up for debt money. This is the campaign mafia, the Rudy Giuliani 2004 campaign, made even worse by the fact their candidate was beginning to flame out before the Iowa caucus.

Leaving those sickos, my ego the only thing more bruised than my body, I decided to walk to one of the other campaign headquarters (they’re all packed within the same quadrant of suburban Des Moines). The Giuliani campaign HQ is really big, easily the biggest in the field, a reflection of just how elite his inner-circle is within Republican politics. The rest of these people almost pale in comparison, especially the small fish like Dick Lugar and Alan Keyes. Lugar’s team used to have a bigger place, back when he was a relevant candidate who people thought actually had a shot, but now we all know he’s just a dead man walking. On the other hand, Alan Keyes has never gained the kind of positive attention that his people expected, which meant their plans to buy a bigger headquarters went down in flames quickly.

Even those who manage to get within an inch of the coveted ‘frontrunner’ title don’t have the same luxury “America’s Mayor” does. Most of John McCain’s team are already beginning the move to New Hampshire, his big upset state four years ago. This is a guy who still leads in plenty of statewide polls here, and he’s already doing events in Manchester starting this weekend. I can only wonder how he would have fared against Gore in 2000. Either way, those within his staff who are still in Iowa seem resigned to their situation, even with the flux of former Giuliani staff who have recently found refuge within their campaign, alongside Cellucci’s and McChrystal’s. I begged them to tell me why they’d leave when you could make the argument McCain is leading here right now, given Rudy’s poll numbers seem to collapse every few days.

They told me that Stanley McChrystal’s late entrance into the campaign had made it virtually impossible. What? I asked. General McChrystal? The guy who jogs all day? He was just a vote-splitter, but not enough of one to seriously affect the results of the caucus in any meaningful way. He was rocketing skyward in the polls, but I, along with many others on the ground, brushed it off as a fad waiting to pass. His campaign was too… dull. Dick Lugar had polled in third place at one point, when he landed a zinger about President Gore’s foreign policy in one of the many Republican debates, but he was back to irrelevance by the end of the week. McChrystal would be no different.

Then, they told me that they weren’t scared of vote-splitting; most of them thought that McChrystal might win the caucus itself, which I thought was insane. It was going to be Giuliani, obviously, maybe Lott if he got extremely lucky; I would have even said McCain if these obviously useless staffers weren’t the only ones left in the state. The guy shook his head, rambled on about something akin to ‘just wait for New Hampshire,’ and I decided to leave before It got any more depressing.

McChrystal’s people are very weird due to the fact the campaign was born out of nowhere. It’s mostly led by some of the older Giuliani refugees, and others who have been waiting for this kind of candidate, one who they could make a winner and grift off of it for the rest of their careers. I remember an interaction I had with them when the General was doing his first Iowa events, and it was clear just how dull they were. I say this because they were smiling at his speech, which is completely incomprehensible to anyone else who has listened to these speaking events.

The Lott campaign may have the team most representative of the Republican base. A bunch of young adult white boys in their nice suits, country club Republicans in the living flesh, just waiting to get into the halls of power to line their own pockets. These people were willing to join George Bush four years ago, but that turned out to be an embarrassing swing and a miss, so they’ve decided to put their own star player out. The country club Republicans who aren’t already fighting for Lott or one of the other frontrunners probably ended up with Joe Scarborough; you can tell because those people suck ass. The Lott people are cocky, abrasive, and often in over their own head, but they know how to have basic human interactions. The Scarborough people are all of that, plus they’re just annoying. It’s like they know their guy has zero chance of winning, and are just trying to have fun while they still have a job.

With all of this in mind, walking down the streets of Des Moines, I decided to speak to the one candidate I hadn’t had meaningful time with yet on the campaign trail: Ron Paul. I haven’t had the time to really interact with the Paul team because, like most people, I didn’t care much about them until recently. In a field with international heroes, generals, Senate majority leaders, among other things, what’s a random congressman? Even as I walked into their shoddy base of operations, those kinds of doubts lingered in my mind. The party was hawkish to a fault; even their most mindful candidates were calling for Gore to ramp up operations in Afghanistan, and the frontrunner was virtually calling for a holy war against Iraq and Iran. How a libertarian isolationist planned on finding a base seemed impossible in my eyes.

Their team was a lot younger than I had been expecting, but it wasn’t completely surprising given much of his base spends their entire day on internet forums talking about their idol. It was the most rundown of the major campaign offices I had been to, although I haven’t seen inside the Lugar and Keyes offices lately. Despite this, they seemed far more jovial than those guys from the McCain office who had been put on suicide watch. I met with one of Paul’s Iowa campaign staff, Jesse Benton: real young guy, chubby face with a big nose. He praised Paul as the only voice of reason with the primary, and the only one who could beat Gore in the general election.

“People don’t want to expand the war, that’s what Giuliani doesn’t seem to get,” he told me. “We have an entire generation of people who are being turned off by both parties, because they’re all saying they need to go to war. There’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans in their eyes, and if we could change that, we’d be able to change politics permanently.” I nodded, although thought the logic seemed flimsy at best. Did he really think we could leave Afghanistan now? Before we even caught Bin Laden? I had to respect the idealism if nothing else. Although I haven’t covered them yet, I’ve noticed the Paul campaign is almost exclusively focusing on foreign policy, mostly because their economic policy is unelectable, so I asked about it.

“Have you covered a single candidate focused on social issues? Economic policy?” I shook my head after thinking about it; this really was a foreign policy election. “I would make the argument, when you really look at it, Ron Paul is the only candidate talking candidly about economic issues,” he claimed, making hand motions as he praised his boss feverishly. He was only cut short as someone walked into the room: Ron Paul himself. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my gorilla costume, although I’m sure he would have taken it far better than Rudy Giuliani had, but I did have plenty of questions for the candidate, ranging from “Why are you still in this race?” to “Do you pay this guy to be your friend?” with a slight hand motion towards Benton. I politely asked for some one-on-one time with the candidate, who was starved for media attention, and was quickly guided towards Paul’s office.

On the way there, I thought to myself about just how much nicer these people were than the other campaign teams. Maybe I just find the bloodthirsty patriotism of Giuliani, McCain, Lott and McChrystal offputting, but the air quality is far better in this building than any of theirs. Either way, I was finally getting some mouth action with a candidate, my first since an interview with Lott I had while hungover at an airport near Cedar Rapids. I started by asking him about his economic policy, which he seemed surprisingly calm about answering.

PAUL: I think that some of that would be overblown if I’m the nominee, at least in terms of what the effect would be. What I’m advocating for is a platform that would represent a positive shift in how this economy works on behalf of the American people.
TAIBBI: Some people would, I assume, be worried about the privatization of Social Security, It’s the third rail, you know? Electoral poison and whatnot. Don’t you think it’d be better to just not run on it at all?
PAUL: I wouldn’t be honest with myself, or the American people. I’m not going to lie, I’m not. I want to get the hell out of Afghanistan, I want to prevent the inevitable financial collapse that Gore is leading us towards, I just want to be frank with the American people. I just want peace, and I believe I’m the person who can deliver on these… things.
TAIBBI: Do you think you could actually get these things done?
PAUL: I’ve been around for a while, in Congress, so I’m not stupid, I know how it works, but that doesn’t mean I can’t dream big, right?
TAIBBI: No. I guess not. If there’s a Republican Congress… maybe some of that stuff… but getting out of Afghanistan? What about Osama?
PAUL: If it costs this much money, this many American lives just to hunt down one man, then maybe we aren’t doing it right. I don’t think we are. We need to be working with our allies, and other governments in the area, to track him down and put an end to his life, doing this all ourselves is the reason why nothing good is coming from it. Gore’s policy here is bad, but you know whose is really awful?
TAIBBI: Hm?
PAUL: Giuliani. I mean, have you seen what people have been saying about him… you know… with that one song that’s popular…
TAIBBI: “Seven Nation Army?”
PAUL: Yes! Even his own people know that he’s a warmonger, they’re playing that song at his events, his rallies, and the internet was doing it first. They were doing it to mock him, though, because he’s going to start seven wars with seven nations within the next four years. I mean, if your own people know enough to lean into the fact, you have to be doing something wrong, right? Right? I respect Mayor Giuliani for his service to the American people, but he’s clearly not respectful to the presidency, which marks a strong difference between us.

I left the Paul campaign headquarters with an uneasy feeling in my stomach; there was something there, or, more accurately, there was nothing. In my heart, I knew that these people had zero chance at winning the Republican nomination, or the presidency, but that ‘nothing’ felt like it could become ‘something.’ For the last few months I’ve had to hear people say that McCain, Keyes, Lugar, Scarborough, and McChrystal were all the ‘next big candidate,’ a dark horse who could upset both the Republican primary and beat Al Gore in the election. For all of them, I never understood why, they were all fundamentally gunning for the same goals, they’re all just different types of the same guy. With Ron Paul, I almost see what they mean.

I almost, almost, believe what he’s saying. In politics, that’s proof of a dying campaign, but I can’t help but respect his effort. That type of idealism, different to the kind that Rudy Giuliani has been trying to force into his campaign speeches over the last year, feels real. I don’t know if 2004 is the year of Ron Paul; in fact, I know it isn’t, but I have this stirring feeling that it will come eventually. If this year ends up being as boring as I expect, and Gore cruises to reelection, am I meeting the man to beat in 2008? I had no clue, but the thoughts kept circulating around my mind.

It all just makes me wish I brought the gorilla costume, or something else, because I’m sure it would have worked great against Ron Paul.

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