Some of you might be wondering what happened to John McCain over the last decade. Well I can tell you, the campaign unfolding before your eyes has been a combination of expertise, hard work, and a bit of luck. We are very good at what we do, and we turned John McCain a long time ago. It took some doing, and there have been some twists and bumps in the road, but it all seems to be working out. I'll admit, we've had a good deal of luck as well, unlike 2004. Follow along and I’ll tell you the story after the fold.
Our moment came about after the 2000 campaign, as you might have guessed. We all know what a nasty piece of campaign work the Bush/Rove team put on McCain in South Carolina. Back then, the Straight Talk Express had some legitimacy. Don’t get me wrong, John McCain is still an egotistical maniac with some serious psychological imbalances, but in 2000 we were able to recruit him to our goal under the banner of revenge. I spoke with him personally then, and his rage was almost uncontainable. I managed to lay a few possibilities for the years ahead before him. All of them involved the demise of Bush. He agreed to go along, and we established trust with him. Our goal was the promotion of a Democratic agenda, and if possible the serious curtailing of the capability of the Republican Party. Ariana Huffington almost blew our cover last spring when she revealed how John and Cindy voted in 2000. Anyway, I digress. In 2000 we approached the "Maverick" and set before him a pattern of possible events that could lead to a comeuppance for the Bush family. It involved his continued participation in politics; you might find this hard to believe, but he really wanted to retire. We have been in constant contact since. Here are some of the highlights.
Few people realize that in my line of work, it’s really all about probabilities. You have a set of variables and they are constantly shifting. You have to evaluate, project and then adapt to try to give yourself as many options as possible. I always laugh at Conspiracy Theorists, they really have no clue how fluid reality can be. No one sits on high in a position of power and directs events as they wish. There are just too many variables. In any case, at first we just sat back and maintained contact with McCain because we did not know exactly how to proceed. After 9/11 we sat down and had some serious discussions and strategy sessions about the possible outcomes. We decided that in the fall of 2001 there just was too much for us to take any definite course. By the summer of 2002 we had developed a viable course of action. We instructed McCain that the best strategy for him was to maintain viability as a Republican leader, and so we directed him to go along with Bush. It was difficult for McCain, because on the one hand he really hated Bush, but on the other hand we explained to him that the best thing to do was to give Bush enough rope to hang himself. It was difficult, but ultimately we decided that if McCain took a principled stand against the run-up to war in Iraq it would simply cause the Republican Party to drive him into retirement. With re-election coming up in 2004, McCain wanted to retire, but we convinced him to go on. Eventually we prevailed on him, and he decided to go whole hog for supporting the Bush line. When Bush actually started the war in Iraq we had to work very hard to keep McCain in line. His public support for Bush during this time seriously exacerbated his personality disorder. He had a real hard time managing the public statements and the private feelings. I can’t tell you how many rants I personally listened to as the war dragged on. He just hated it all. But man, did he stick to the party line in public or what?. This leads us to 2004.
We managed to resurrect John Kerry’s campaign from the dead in January of 2004. No one thought it could be done, but I lead the assault myself. A few key operatives in Iowa made it all possible. Here’s the thing, a few key people can send a crowd in a certain direction if they are inclined to go there. It's like hypnotism; any hypnotist will tell you that they can’t get someone to do something they are not already inclined to do. But the power of suggestion in the right place... You see the source of our funding as a group has always been Teresa Heinz Kerry. You would be amazed at both how much money she has, and the ability she has in hiding its' dispensation. You know of course she is foreign-born, so naturally we were more inclined to her sensibilities. (Incidentally, she and Ariana H. are like peas in a pod. I’ve worked closely with them both. Together they can do it all, the brains and the cash.) In 2004, as Kerry was putting away the nomination we made our first miscalculation. We really thought that we could win without pulling the John McCain as VP "ace in the hole." I fought in many meetings because I wanted truly to hedge my bets. On the one hand I thought that if Kerry could not win without McCain then I was not about to use my best double agent ever to save him. On the other hand I was developing a much larger strategy that might in fact put the end of the Republican Party itself in the realm of possibility. I fought with Teresa directly on this, because she really wanted the White House and she was relentless in grabbing anything that would make that more probable.
After the Kerry loss, I took a few months off. I had an epiphany. I no longer wanted to work on the Democratic nomination process. I wanted to take the their side out from within. When I came back I decided that I was going to go for it all. I wanted McCain to run for President. Through his candidacy we would assault the foundations of the Republican Party and turn it against itself. Again, it took much convincing. McCain was not at first open to it. The Senate is an easy gig, running for President is a killer. Once McCain accepted I laid out the strategy: 1. Be more bellicose than Bush 2. Make Peace with the Religious Right 3. Work on some laws in the Senate that you will subsequently campaign against. We've all seen the appearances on Meet the Press and other news shows he made supporting the war. We've all seen the Bush Hug photo. I lined up a million stunts like these. Then there was the brilliant appearance at Falwell's Liberty University and reconciliation with the Religious Right. Of course we all remember McCain/Feingold, and the brilliant attempts at Immigration Reform that got John in trouble with Lou Dobbs. Fortunately over the next few years the public mood started to turn and the "McCain Image" became the perfect candidate to represent the schizophrenic nature of the Republican party.
In the fall of 2006, we received our first true gift, although I did not figure out the extent of our luck until the next Spring. While the nation focused its' attention on the results of the midterm elections I focused on the smokin' hot 42 year old who just was elected governor of Alaska. I saw one picture and I knew something was out of whack up there. I immediately sent two of my top operatives to Alaska to be there at inauguration, and to find out everything they could about this woman. When the information started to come in I could not believe our luck. Not only was this woman a total political neophyte with an average intellect, she was a bona fide bible-banging, abortion-clinic-blocking, speaking-in-tongues fanatic--JACKPOT!! All of these other Republican Party leaders have never really been Fundies, and that includes the Cynic-in-Chief--W. This ball of Fundamentalist Fire, however, was the real deal. My operatives found it all. The wacky church, the witch-doctor, the feud with the brother-in-law. Sarah Palin was just a rootin' tootin' little firebrand of Right-Wing, Bombs for Jesus, self-righteous fanaticism with no ability to rationally approach anything. Unbelieveable. People think that Sarah Palin was not vetted. She was vetted all right. We had her pegged "Chapter and Verse" by the end of the summer of '07. The only thing we needed to do now was to get our man on the top of the ticket, and that "My Friends" would happen in New Hampshire.
We knew we were going to lose Iowa, so we did not put much into it. In December of '07, I was very confident in our chances. I had not seen a more pathetic slate of Republican candidates in my life. A cross-dressing New York Mayor, a Mormon, a walking corpse/actor, a former governor whose claim to fame was the same as Jared from Subway, an anti-war Libertarian (don't get me wrong I like Ron Paul, but an anti-war candidate in the Republican Party? Get Real.) The New Hampshire primary proved equivalent to Kerry's Iowa in '04. Americans sure do love a comeback. The next month was easy and we pretty much locked things up. From that point forward we had a great deal of time to kill, and so we put our major strategies in place. Really we just continued what we had been doing--make erratic statements, change positions, play craps, appear cranky and out of it, and rely on Joe Lieberman, one of the most unpopular men in national politics. Essentially our campaign stategy was to go all over the map politically, appear out of touch, get close to W again, and all the time keep saying "Maverick." We really laid the foundation for the Fall, by June; all the craziness was in place.
Next, we faced the challenge of putting Palin in place. Many people think that Karl Rove is a genius. He's more lucky than anything else. You see there are many occasions when the stars align a certain outcome results. People, who are generally predisposed to believe that everthing happens as the reslt of premeditated intent, credited everything to Rove's "brilliance". Essentially what happened with Rove is he got lucky, and everyone thought he was political genius, most importantly Rove himself. When you arrive at a point where start to believe your own bullshit, you're headed for a fall. This really happened in 2006, but people assumed it was a fluke, because, "Rove's a genius, don't cha' know?" Anyway, I have an operative in Rove's inner circle and he put the Palin suggestion before him so gracefully that everyone, including Rove himself believes to this day that it was all Rove's idea. I realize at first it looked to many that the pick was brilliant, but we knew how it would turn out for this election. But there's more. Sarah Palin in the months and years after the election will open a permanent rift in the Republican governing/election winning coalition.
Ask yourself, "Who are the people who adore Palin?" Answer: Low information Christian fundamentalists and redneck men who think being "Hot n Sassy" are as good a reasons as any to hold public office. Conservative intellectuals and powerful elites like Palin if she helps win, but if her "drag on the ticket" contributes to a loss, they will universally flame her in the postmortems after November 4th. Just how do you think all those Fundies are going to react to that? They will abandon the Republican Party for good. If they had any real acumen they would have left a long time ago; none of the Republican leadership ever gave a damn about abortion or gay marriage; they represent the "Haves and the Have Mores" END OF STORY. This election will expose once and for all the Rancid Populism that has kept Republicans in power for decades. Palin is going to open up the belly of the Rebuplican Party and it won't be pretty.
I know that prior to this piece of writing you have been wondering if McCain could have run a worse campaign. Now you know, it was bad by design and executed quite well, I must admit. John McCain is our man. He has done what we directed him to do, so don't be so hard on the old guy. We have had a great deal of luck too, don't think I don't know it. I could not have asked for the economic bubble to burst at a better time. We knew the Credit Markets were out of whack, but they have been for at least two years. We did not cause the crash, by the way. Great events like that operate on their own schedule, I operate on the fringes and occasionally am able to push things in one direction or another. After this success, however, I think I will retire. I'm never going to have a guy like McCain again, and I'll never have an opportunity to shift things so dramatically again. Best to retire on top of your game.
Enjoy November.
Enjoy the demise of the Republican Party as we know it.
Peace and Grace.