I wrote a draft of this just after Independence Day and decided not to post it. It seemed far fetched and potentially offensive to lots of people.
Less than a month later, with John McCain pimping his wife at Sturgis and making himself the butt of Paris Hilton's jokes, it's proving more true and offensive every day.
John McCain has become tiresome. We're three months out from election day and the bloom is definitely off the Mavvie One.
Far from being a straight-talkin', revolutionary-moderate, different kind of maverick Republican, he is proving, rapidly, by the media's clock, to be kind of a regular American guy.
And not in a good way.
It's funny, really. McCain should own bush's dual base of the wealthy and the Bud and barbecue set. His biography is everything Bush's wasn't and pretended to be.
Texas Air National Guard? Dude, the fucking North Vietnamese beat on this guy. He was the real version of Tom Cruise in that movie. Ranch? You've only got one ranch? Wild youth? Old Crash did Marie the Flame of Florida.
The McCain campaign figured he could count on both the white and blue collars, under-$50K and the upper percentiles. Kind of a rough and tumble kid, kind of a party dog and a ladies man as a young man, famous military man. Morphed into world-wise elder statesman with a foot in both parties but wedded to neither.
Now, just a month into the general, McCain's duality turns out to be the worst of both worlds. In fact, now that the country is getting to know him, they're finding he represents the one class of universally hated Americans: Rich White Trash.
In a campaign season obsessed with who is or isn't an "elite" (pronounced "ay-leet" by nearly every right-wing radio host; who knew they were such francophiles?), the real elite, lovingly called "my base" by McCain mentor George W, has weighed the Maverick and found him wanting. Kathy and Rick Hilton, solid backers who'd maxed out to the campaign, all but demanded their money back after seeing it spent on the "Celeb" ad.
And it's not just the slight to their daughter, who appears quite capable of defending herself. Kathy Hilton's complaint about the ad was that it was "frivolous" and "a complete waste" of time, attention and contributors' dough.
There is as yet no word on the reaction of the gilded set to Sen. and Mrs. McC's promised turn at the Sturgis Rally Miss Buffalo Chip wet t and thong contest, but it's safe to assume the Right People are less enamored than ever with His Maverickiness.
It's all getting to be too much. The stories of temper, the silly celebrity jealousy--from a man who never met a camera he didn't love. And all that unpleasantness in the past--the divorce, all the screwups from his Navy years covered up by Admiral Dad, the drinking and whoring. I'm afraid that McCain just isn't Our Kind of People, Muffy.
He's. . . he's trash.
Okay, so start scratching some names off the fundraiser lists. Fine, the Committee can make up the diff. Trash is really a great angle, senator. Those tony folk may be able to kick in more than Joe Sixpack, but there's more votes in showing people your common touch. The regular guy stuff.
The McHandlers might have had a point with this one. There really is electoral gold to be had by convincing Joe Sixpack (it's Twelvepack, really, Six was my dad) that you're One of the Regular Guys. "He mighta run wild some and broke a rule or two, but he's good people."
Sadly for John Sidney McCain III, son and grandson of the Admirals McCain, graduate of Episcopal and the Academy, wedded to blonde heiress Cindy Hensley, the citizens immortalized in Willie Nelson's running gag on Saturday Night Live were just plain white trash.
The senator carries one adjective too many.
No matter how he rolls his shirtsleeves or what kind of rub he has on his ribs, Americans know John McCain isn't like them. His wife complains that they just can't get around without their private plane. He serves up those ribs at one of their eight lovely homes. Jeez, the dude wears Ferragamo. Who do you know that can afford O.J. loafers?
John McCain, in short is rich. Richer than you'll ever be or could ever hope to be. He is the son of privilege and married into, shall we say, extreme privilege.
That crowd of cheering, throttle-revving bikers McCain offered up his wife to was really two groups. One, genuine motorbikers who get around in sunshine and rain on two wheels, have a few too many and don't mind it at all if their Cindy takes a turn on the Miss Buffalo Chip stage, and the other, weekender executives who buy their Harleys and ship 'em right to the leatherworker for their custom bags, then garage and trailer them right up to Rapid City before taking their triumphant ride into the Hills.
It should come as no surprise that the former group harbors a little ill will toward the dress-up bikers. People who bust their bodies making sawdust and bent nails, reviving your old furnace, pushing your food down the road in big, steel boxes, don't really love it so much when men who could buy and sell them before breakfast put on the flannel and pick up the chain saw for a lark with Muffy.
The roustabouts who bounce down our pockmarked roads in pathetic old pickups sporting "Oilfield Trash and Proud of It" stickers don't want to see the head office dude in their post-work den, proudly hooking their scuffless steeltoes under the bar rail with "the guys."
They know, by instinct if not instruction, just what the word "dude" means: a phony, wannabe cowboy up from the city for the weekend, a man who loves the workingman's drag but whose fingernails have not housed honest dirt since he was a boy, if then.
And, my friends, John McCain is a dude. It's time to call him on it.
He and his team have done the heavy lifting for us in the last week, accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of alienating the Republican candidate from the monied classes. Now, I propose we mount a campaign to brand our maverick with the one word he can't afford to wear and still win what's left of Republican voters: rich.
If we can, at this opportune moment, remind McCain's last base that he's not of them and has little love for them, he's good and sunk.
Because there's nothing trash hates more than nouveau trashe. They're really not Our Kind of People, Charlene.
My apologies to any whom I've offended here. I'm a product of a few different classes and feel pretty comfortable talking about them. If I have crossed a line, I ask your forgiveness.