Up, Simba! by David Foster Wallace

Author:David Foster Wallace
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: LIT000000
ISBN: 9780446931410
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2000-09-15T10:00:00+00:00

This document is unusual not only because McCain2000’s Press Releases are normally studies in bland irrelevance—“McCAIN TO CONTINUE CAMPAIGNING IN MICHIGAN TODAY”; “McCAIN HAS TWO HELPINGS OF POTATO SALAD AT SOUTH CAROLINA VFW PICNIC”—but because no less a personage than Mike Murphy has indeed now just come down to Spin this abrupt change of tone in the campaign’s rhetoric. Murphy, who is only 37 but seems older, is the McCain campaign’s Senior Strategist, a professional political consultant who’s already had eighteen winning Senate and gubernatorial campaigns and is as previously mentioned a constant and acerbic presence in McCain’s press salon aboard the Express. He’s a short, bottom-heavy man, pale in a kind of yeasty way, with baby-fine red hair on a large head and sleepy turtle eyes behind the same type of intentionally nerdy hornrims that a lot of musicians and college kids now wear. He has short thick limbs and blunt exremities and is always seen either slumped low in a chair or leaning on something. Oxymoron or no, what Mike Murphy really looks like is a giant dwarf. Among political pros, he has the reputation of being (1) smart and funny as hell and (2) a real attack-dog, working for clients like Oliver North, New Jersey’s Christine Todd Whitman, and Michigan’s own John Engler in campaigns that were absolute operas of nastiness, and known for turning out what the NY Times delicately called “some of the most rough-edged commercials in the business.” He’s leaning back against the F&F Room’s wall in that way where you have your hands behind your lower back and sort of bounce forward and back on the hands, wearing exactly what he’ll wear all week—viz. yellow twill trousers and brown Clark Wallabies and an ancient and very cool-looking leather jacket—and surrounded in a 180º arc by the Twelve Monkeys, all of whom have steno notebooks or tiny professional tape recorders out and keep clearing their throats and pushing their glasses up with excitement.

Murphy says he’s “just swung by” to provide the press corps with “some context” on the strident Press Release and to give the corps advance notice that the McCain campaign is also preparing a special “response ad” which will start airing in South Carolina tomorrow. Murphy uses the words “response” or “response ad” nine times in two minutes, and when one of the Twelve Monkeys interrupts to ask whether it’d be fair to characterize this new ad as Negative, Murphy gives him a long styptic look and spells “r-e-s-p-o-n-s-e” out very slowly. Where he’s leaning and bouncing against is the part of the wall between the F&F door and the little round table still piled with uneaten sandwiches (to which the hour has not been kind), and the Twelve Monkeys and some field producers and lesser pencils form a perfect half-scrum around him, with various press joining the back or peeling away to go out and Cell-Waltz these new developments in to HQ.

Mike Murphy tells the hemispheric scrum that the Press Release

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.