Politics-a-palooza

You mention that in Russia you could take things less seriously because it wasn't your country. Were you surprised to find yourself affected by what you were covering on the campaign?

Being on the plane, it was just nuts to me. It seemed like absolute madness that the candidate gets up, mouths a lot of platitudes, and everybody just sits there and reports it, doesn't even think what's happening. As a citizen, I want people to be saying, "What the hell are we doing here?"

The biggest problem with the campaign was that it was so condescending. John Kerry is not a stupid guy. He's been in the Senate for 20 years, sitting on important committees. But then all he does is get up on stage and say, "John Kerry, reporting for duty." It's just condescending. This is a conscious choice on his part -- the ethos of the campaign is that you have to talk down to people, you have to appeal to the basest instincts of voters, their laziness -- their intellectual laziness. An important thing about the candidates is that they don't tell you anything: All they want to do is hit those dial survey words they know are going to impress voters. Change. Leadership. Strength. These are literally infantile concepts that they want to communicate to you.

The kind of journalism I do is supposed to be funny, but in kind of a horrifying way. I figured the presidential election would be a great subject. But I had never covered a story where I couldn't find a way to express how bad it was. In Russia, I would see these horrible, ridiculous things, and at some level I was actually amused by them. I was able to find them funny but also horrible. In America I didn't really find it amusing; it was just horrible.

Your piece in the New York Press about the impending death of Pope John Paul II -- and the predictable torrent of round-the-clock death-watch coverage in the media -- seems to have attracted a lot of attention. I even saw [NY Press editor] Jeff Koyen on MSNBC, battling it out with Catholic League honcho William Donohue, who called the paper home to "male and female perverts, ACDC, switch-hitting, pineapple, upside-down cake, fruity-tooty people."

The pope article was a one-off, a little tiny spoof that I wrote in a Vicodin haze. It was put on the cover of the paper, which made a big difference -- if it had just been my column, I don't think it would have been a big deal. What I thought was interesting was that Matt Drudge put up a link to it, and within an hour, every elected official in New York was saluting. The whole thing was absurd.

Obviously it was just a joke -- I talk in the piece about how my own head is going to be chopped off. If there was a point, it was like, the pope is a man, he dies and he rots like the rest of us. That's the joke.

Are you afraid that people are going to know you for the rest of your life as "the guy who mocked the pope dying"?

If that's what people are going to remember me for -- if that's the only thing that I produce between now and the end of my life -- then I deserve it. But I'm not worried about that.

Going back to the campaign, what was the atmosphere like inside the Democratic machine?

When you hang around a Democratic campaign office, you feel like you've walked into an episode of M*A*S*H or something, with an ensemble cast witticizing all the time. There were actually some funny people in the Kerry campaign, but most of the aides I talked to on all the campaigns were really, really interested in things that had nothing to do with what their candidate allegedly stood for. One guy would be rhapsodizing about how well his town halls went as opposed to somebody else's town halls. I mean, meaningless bullshit, like the plastic grass in Howard Dean's "Grassroots Express" plane. Somebody thought that up and they were really pleased with themselves about it. It's just like a big frat prank for these people running for president. I have to really give credit to the Bush people; for them it was really about the politics, the candidate, "values," all those things. Among the Democrats, it was like, are we going to get over? Are we doing enough to get over?

You got to spend some time with the Bush people -- what was that like?

Rolling Stone sent me to be a campaign operative for George Bush. I moved to Orlando, Fla., and I volunteered for the Bush campaign. In fact, I arrived in town early enough in the campaign that I ended up as a manager in one of the Orlando offices. I was a fairly important person in the Bush campaign in Florida, and I'm proud of this -- we did very well. The I-4 corridor [which includes the Tampa and Orlando metropolitan areas] really turned out for Bush, so I like to think I did my part to help him win. I definitely worked very hard.

What was your cover?

I was under a fake name; my story was that I was a New York City schoolteacher who had a girlfriend in Orlando, so I was down there for the summer. I told them all sorts of horror stories about how the New York City schools were overrun with perverts and faggots. Everybody loved that.

Did you notice a difference between Democrats and Republicans? A personal difference?

The Republicans were a lot nicer than I expected. A contrast between being with the Democrats and with the Republicans is that being around the Democrats was so much like high school -- you had to be cool all the time. In Orlando, you could just walk into a Bush office, and so long as you were committed to the president, it didn't matter if you were a total fucking loser, they'd love you for it.

Did you hear from the Orlando office after the article was published?

Oh yeah. I got plenty of calls. I didn't pick up the phone if I saw a call was from the Orlando area code, but I did get a lot of angry e-mail. My immediate boss at the campaign office called me up after Bush won the election and left a message that said something like, "Mr. Taibbi, the God that you do not believe in has blessed our president with victory." She kept leaving messages like that for a few days. They were mad. I don't think I'll be going back to Orlando anytime soon.

Next Page: The whole campaign could have happened in a movie studio

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