Politics-a-palooza

What did you do on election night?

I was in Mexico, stoned.

Did you watch on television?

I did. But I was surprised at how depressed I was. I was sure Bush was going to win, and I really hate Kerry. But when Kerry lost, I was a little bit bummed out. As were you, I'm sure.

After Kerry lost, I had this feeling of great shame -- I thought, I can't believe I bought into this, I should have known better than to put any hope in this guy.

I couldn't believe that they picked Kerry. When I was in Florida volunteering for Bush, this came up quite a bit. Everybody there was so glad Kerry was the nominee. They all said the same thing: Thank God it wasn't Howard Dean. They felt Dean would have turned out the kids. It was clear even people who were going to vote for Kerry weren't enthusiastic about him. I traveled with Dean, and I could see, from a horse race perspective, his electoral weaknesses. But this guy was turning out crowds of 10,000 people in the summer of 2003. If you went to a Kerry rally late in the primaries -- after he was already the nominee, basically -- you'd be lucky to find 300 or 400 people.

In New Hampshire, I saw Kerry, many times, just go up to anybody who had on an Army outfit and start talking about Vietnam -- he had such a hard-on for his Vietnam past that he was always looking for any pretext to bring it up. So I started showing up at campaign events with POW-MIA shirts on, stuff like that, hoping that I would fall into his line of fire long enough for him to pull that stunt with me. I did it four or five times, but he never talked to me.

I did see him go up to another guy -- I had my POW-MIA costume on, but there was another guy in a hunting outfit, all orange, big orange hat, vest, everything. Kerry went up to that guy and said, "Were you in the service?" "No," the guy replied, "I'm a fucking hunter."

What did you discover out traveling with the candidates? Did the reality of the campaign match your expectations?

I thought I was going to really see America -- travel around the country, meet different kinds of voters, and really get a sense of what people are thinking. But in fact, the campaign is so totally isolated that you never actually talk to anyone who isn't on the plane, or attending a campaign event -- people who've been recruited by the campaign to be in the audience. So you can travel with a candidate for weeks at a time and never encounter anyone who isn't connected to the campaign in some way. The whole thing could easily be done in a movie studio.

If you look at the campaign, it's not an interaction between the candidate and the voters. The media is selling the campaign to its audience. It's a top-down process. The only time the public even appears is through poll numbers. It really is a giant commercial, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out what it was a commercial for.

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