David Foster Wallace dead at 46

Posted by Andrew Tobolowsky on 09.15.2008

Wallace's political prescience

I thought this would be a good time to link to an article written a little more than eight years ago by David Foster Wallace, who died last Friday. It is an extremely positive article about John McCain from the 2000 campaign trail, and it's absolutely brilliant. It catches the campaign at a crucial moment not just for that election but for this one as well. After a little while of abiding by a handshake agreement to not go negative, the George W. Bush campaign has just come out with its very first attack ad. The McCain campaign huddles to determine how to respond. David Foster Wallace was there.

David Foster Wallace was a wonderful author, and a brilliant man. Officially even, in 1997 Wallace received the Macarthur "Genius" Grant for his writing. His novel Infinite Jest made it on Time's 2006 list of the top 100 novels ever written in the English language.

But Wallace was also a journalist of great renown, Rolling Stone and others.Nobody could do it like him.

In 2000, Wallace, as a journalist for RS, spent seven days on the Straight Talk Express with John McCain at the very moment Karl Rove and George W. Bush began to go after them.

It goes in depth into how John McCain's suffering for America gave him the moral authority to make the promises he was making, and how zealously he guarded that authority. Back when he WAS a reformer, when he WAS on a quixotic quest to change Washington.then. And that's not the only way it accesses another time:

"Since You're Reading "Rolling Stone," the chances are you're an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There's hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up ? assuming you give a shit about data"

Remember when people 18-35 couldn't care less about politics?

"One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he's a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in Student Government and Band, whereas McCain was a Varsity wrestler and a hellraiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates. At 63, he's funny, and smart, and he'll make fun of himself and his wife and his staff and other pols and the Trail, and he'll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don't ever mind because it's the sort of shit that makes you feel like here's this very cool, important guy who's noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit"

Remember when John McCain, then only 63 and unscarred by his brush with George W. Bush and the Republican High Command spoke man to man to any reporter who wanted a piece of him?

Wallace finds himself surprised one day to be confronted with an unusually acerbic press release from what had been till then an overwhelmingly positive McCain campaign. He recounts how campaign strategist Mike Murphy comes by to give some context on the strident press release, and discuss its necessity. Bush had released negative ads in South Carolina, and McCain was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Either he compromise his image as a politician of positivity, or he compromise the image of his tough, take-no-crap persona.

"Murphy then tells the hemispheric scrum that the Press Release and new ad reflect the McCain2000 campaign's decision, after much agonizing, to respond to what he says is G.W. Bush's welching on the two candidates' public handshake-agreement in January to run a bilaterally positive campaign... For the past five days, mostly in New York and SC, the Shrub (Bush) has apparently been running ads that characterize McCain's policy proposals in what Murphy terms a "willfully distorting" way."

A long, long time ago, huh?

The (response) ad in question says only this: "His (Bush's) ad twists the truth like Clinton. We're all pretty tired of that."

We all know what happened after that.

Although, to me, it makes it no less disappointing it is hard reading this not to appreciate, after what Karl Rove and George Bush did to him, why McCain's campaign has done with that moral authority just what it has done.

It's a long piece and kind of screwball, just like everything he ever wrote but it's brilliant and, from the pen of a man who not a political hack but deeply interested in the phenomenon which is America and the American people, it gets to the heart of the phenomenon far better than most of us here who are just too close, these days.

What it does is get to the heart of why so many of us are legitimately sick thinking about this John McCain, who he used to be, and who he could have been. But what it does most of all is remind us that it never had to be this way, and that if it is, we are very largely to blame.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18420304/the_weasel_twelve_monkeys_and_the_shrub


"There's another thing John McCain always says. He makes sure he concludes every speech and THM with it, so the buses' press hear it about too times this week. He always pauses a second for effect and then says: "I'm going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don't agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth."

Remember that? A long, long time ago indeed. It's not that we need to ask ourselves what happened to John McCain, because that part we know. Politics happened to him. George Bush and Karl Rove happened to him. But there was a John McCain once worth believing in, and he was everything Obama wants to be and everything he himself is. A candidate we really needed. And something killed him. Because he's not there any more.

"But then in the Spartanburg Q&A... a totally demographically average thirty-something middle-class soccer mom in rust-colored slacks and big round glasses gets picked...It turns out her name is Donna Duren, of right here in Spartanburg SC, and she says she has a 14-year-old son named Chris, in whom Mr. and Mrs. Duren have been trying to inculcate family values and respect for authority and a non-cynical idealism about America and its duly elected leaders. They want him to find heroes he can believe in, she says... Mrs. Duren says that Chris — clearly a sensitive kid — was "made very very upset" by the Lewinsky scandal and all the R-rated revelations and the appalling behavior of Clinton and Starr and Tripp and pretty much everybody on all sides during the impeachment thing, and Chris had a lot of very upsetting and uncomfortable questions that Mr. and Mrs. D. struggled to answer, and that basically it was a really hard time but they got through it. And then last year, at more or less a trough in terms of idealism and respect for elected authority, she says, Chris discovered John McCain and McCain2000.com, and got interested in the campaign, and his parents apparently read him some G-rated parts of Faith of My Fathers, and the upshot is that young Chris finally found a public hero he could believe in: John S. McCain III....

" It's impossible to know what McCain's face is doing during this story because the monitors are taking CNN's feed, and Randy of CNN's lens is staying hard and steady on Donna Duren, who appears so iconically prototypical and so thoroughly exudes the special quiet dignity of an average American who knows she's average and just wants a decent, non-cynical life for herself and her family that she can say things like "family values" and "hero" without anybody rolling their eyes. But then last night, Mrs. D. says, as they were all watching non-violent TV in the family room, the phone suddenly rang upstairs, and Chris went up and got it, and Mrs. D. says a little while later he came back down into the family room crying and just terribly upset and told them the phone call had been a man who started talking to him about the 2000 campaign and then asked Chris if he knew that John McCain was a liar and a cheater and that anybody who'd vote for John McCain was either stupid or un-American or both. That caller had been a push-poller for Bush2000, Mrs. Duren says, knuckles on her mike-hand white and voice almost breaking, and she says she just wanted Senator McCain to know about it, about what happened to Chris, and wants to know whether anything can be done to keep people like this from calling innocent young kids and plunging them into disillusionment and confusion about whether they're stupid for trying to have heroes they believe in.

CNN's Randy finally pans to McCain and you can see McCain's facial expression, which is pained and pale and actually looks more distraught even than Mrs. Duren's face had looked. And what McCain does, after looking silently at the floor a second, is — apologize. He doesn't lash out at Bush or at push-polling or appear to try to capitalize politically in any way. He looks sad and compassionate and regretful and says that the only reason he got into this race in the first place was to try to help inspire young Americans to feel better about devoting themselves to something, and that a story like what Mrs. Duren took the trouble to come down here to the THM this morning and tell him is just about the worst thing he could hear, and that if it's OK with Mrs. D. he'd like to call her son and apologize personally on the phone and maybe tell Chris that yes there are some bad people out there but that it's never a mistake to believe in something, that politics is still worthwhile as a Process to get involved in, and he really does look upset, McCain does, and almost as what seems like an afterthought he says that one thing Donna Duren and other concerned parents and citizens can do is call the Bush campaign and tell them to stop this push-polling, that Governor Bush is a good man with a family of his own and it's difficult to believe he'd ever endorse his campaign doing things like this if he knew about it...."


But there's no way to say John McCain doesn't know about it, this time. And it does break your heart.