Pissing in America’s Stream of Consciousness – Day One

By Chris Faraone on Sat, Jan 5, 2008 12:59 am

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These presidential candidates are aggravating me with their public displays of exhaustion. They should try getting irresponsibly cocked and hammered, sleeping for two hours and waking up before the crack to steer through New Hampshire’s paralyzing cold.

I woke up twice on Friday. The first alarm rang at four-in-the-morning back in Boston, where I kissed my girl good-bye and hit the highway with my comrades. Two hours and a blunted cruise across the border later, I was re-awakened by a gang of carpenters rallying for John Edwards at an old mill in Manchester.

John Edwards loves mills. Anyone who followed his failed presidential bid in ’04 surely agonized over his proclivity to advertise his hayseed roots. And while he’s since evolved from a wannabe poor boy to a promising working class leader, he still can’t give up the mill jive. This place was old and splintery, with claustrophobic ceilings and a few leaky pipes that I bet campaign workers rigged for effect.

The populism jig is working for Edwards, who seems to be the only candidate pushing for solidarity amongst steel workers and street workers, bums and nuns, chimps and pimps. His severe anti-corporate rhetoric has effectively repelled everyone who looks like him, and attracted a slew of broke godless bastards.

Before I got to admire Edwards’ reinvigorated everyman image at his Granite State launch rally, I had to wait 30 minutes for the cat to show. It’s like, just when I’m about to forget that this dude’s the prettiest mofo since Zack Morris, he pulls some fashionably late stunt. On most occasions, I would have enjoyed the complimentary juice and muffins and ignored his tardiness, but this time I had to sit through an unbearable half-hour of some last-ditch hype man embarrassing himself with a dangerously uninspired call-and-response number (“I love Edwards – yes I do, I love Edwards – so should you”).

Despite Edwards’ surge in popularity following his silver medal grab in Iowa, his operatives were smart enough to keep his primary weekend debut intimate. For those of you who have only witnessed these podium antics on television, it’s important to understand the calculated behind-the-scenes production. If campaign workers are expecting 500 people, they manufacture pandemonium by corralling off a space suitable for 300 heads.

As the cool kid on campus, Barack Obama needs no smoke, mills or mirrors. In addition to being a cocaine-addled rock star on the stump, homeboy romped his opponents in Iowa, which I suppose justified launching his weekend tear with a rally in an airplane hangar.

If I was more awake after Obama’s jump-off, it’s because I was smacked by a 500-ton metaphor at his event. Next to the stage – in the part of the venue that you won’t see on CNN – was an expired Pan Am 727. The message, whether intentional or not, was Crystal Pepsi clear: the economy is bent, and Barack Obama can change that.

Should the next president deliver the sort of economic stimulation that Edwards and Obama are promising, there won’t be enough abandoned plants, factories and mills for candidates to stump at come 2012. So it’s actually a good thing that neither of them will be able to reverse the deficit, combat corporate greed and get people working.

Reality never stops zealous lefties, who every four years find an honest but frighteningly naïve candidate to excite them. Obama’s turnout was especially impressive; in addition to all fifteen of New Hampshire’s black residents showing up, his morning rally attracted teenagers, seniors, and enough MILFs to kick start a porn site.

The great thing about this leg of the race is that even righteous analysts stop complaining about candidates’ reluctance to extrapolate on issues. The primary season is about buzzwords, cheap shots, panache and zingers, and Obama has a quiver stuffed with pre-packaged arrows for the cameras. Even I was moved enough to curse the “tyranny of foreign oil” as I dropped a quarter-tank of gas driving to my hotel in Manchester.

As my colleagues cracked beers and pounded keys in the room, I grew unsettled with the partisan course we’d taken. I had a fever, and the only cure was ideologically sexy conservatism.

The Mike Huckabee fiesta was a quick forty minutes away at New England College, which students probably describe as a small college located somewhere between Manchester and nowhere. Though the event was billed as a “Reason for Giving” salute to local charities, the hot attraction was undoubtedly Chuck Norris, a well-known political columnist who I’m told earned his stripes acting in obscure karate flicks.

Huckabee might be an opportunist evangelical, but the dude pumps up the jam. Unlike Edwards and Obama, whose pre-entrance entertainment was limited to Jock Jams blaring over makeshift sound systems, Huckabee nailed the entertainment angle. Before the candidate surfaced, a local band played classic rock songs that are really liberal blasts about social inequity but that primitive conservatives love anyway because they don’t really understand the lyrics.

When he finished playing bass with the invited band, Huckabee introduced Chuck Norris, who, despite fear of encountering his fatal fists of fury, I’m compelled to report has a wife who inspires boners. While the Norris endorsement started out as – or at least I’m hoping started out as – a joke, it has become an integral component in Huckabee’s campaign.

Before witnessing the gaggle of college-age supporters cheering for Chuck, I was under the impression that Huckabee was ready to shake the novelty, but didn’t have the balls to tell America’s favorite bearded ass beater to get lost. Now I realize that the “Huck and Chuck” tag team is here to stay, and that people aren’t kidding when they chant, “Chuck Norris for secretary of defense.”

On a more important note that trumps everything else I saw throughout my first day on the trail, I met a guy named Vermin Supreme who is also running for president. If you’re still undecided, I suggest that you seriously consider him. In addition to experience – he’s run in every election since 1988 – he showed winning potential in ’04 by clocking 146 votes in the DC primary. In contrast to his opponents, Supreme is tackling serious issues including mandatory tooth brushing, zombie preparedness and time travel research. Sorry for the detour, but it’s just refreshing to see at least one prospective commander-in-chief with realistic goals.

Vermin