(Photo by me in Kiawah Island, Feb. 17)
You didn’t need to be in South Carolina to know that Nikki Haley was losing. But it helped. Every Haley event was the same; a crowd gathered in some outdoor space, her “beast” campaign bus rolling in to the sound of Van Halen’s “Right Now,” a few speeches by her surrogates, and a 20-25 minute speech by the candidate herself.
Nothing was flopping. Nothing was clicking. Like any stump speech, Haley’s hardly changed from stop to stop; the change would come if Donald Trump had just uttered something crazy, worth responding to, with a good chance of TV picking up her response. When Trump made fun of her National Guard major husband, deployed in Africa (“Where is he?”), she started her remarks with some spousal outrage. When that story faded, she stopped leading with that, occasionally bringing it up at the end. Anyone who covered Haley for a few days would hear her favorite lines and could, like a schoolboy in Latin class, repeat them.
“The world is on fire. Literally. You’ve got a war in Europe. You’ve got a war in the Middle East. You’ve got China on the march.”
“We all know 75-year olds who can run circles around us.” (dramatic pause) “And then we know Joe Biden.”
“On a good day, Trump is margin of error with Joe Biden. I’m in all those same polls. I bet Biden by up to 17 points!”
This was not going to change the trajectory of the Republican primary. Like most reporters in the state, I found four types of Haley voters: Longtime superfans, Republicans picking her as the strategic, electable choice, independents who legitimately wanted her to be president, and Democrats who would support her as a thumbtack under Donald Trump’s tires. Not enough to stop him, but enough to irritate him.
I had a little time off on the trip, a free Sunday morning when Haley was heading to a pre-taped Fox News debate. Perfect time to catch up with my friends Mike and Laurel, who graduated from college two years ahead of me, got married shortly thereafter, and had five kids — all daughters. (My friends Phil and Beckie had five sons on the same schedule. They have never met.) I parked at a new development in Fort Mill, S.C., perhaps a minute before they did, backing into a space on a street designed to look like Sherwood Anderson’s dreams. They walked into a seafood restaurant a few steps ahead of me, the girls with slates to draw on and thick fantasy books to read. Like every millennial over 40, we talked about real estate and the death of literacy. We also ate chicken-and-egg biscuits, as is the custom.
Another late update, due to flights, and zero downtime. The gist:
The Best Thing I Read. Listened to, this time. Twelve years ago, I flipped NPR on during a long drive and heard Frank Langella promote two things: “Robot and Frank,” an independent film in which a dementia-afflicted ex-con is given a robot to keep him company, and “Dropped Names,” his acting memoir. I saw the movie later that year but didn’t realize how much I’d enjoy the book. What a format! Nearly nothing about the private Langella, apart from some mentions of the apartments and homes he moved into and the kids he had while living in them. Instead, he writes vignettes of celebrities he worked with, almost all of them dead by the time he published; Bunny Mellon, the exception, comes off like a saint and died two years later. There are too many great stories to share, but they veer from the pathetic to the sublime. Hearing Langella describe George C. Scott, who he considered a genius, walk off stage after losing his lines was heartbreaking. Hearing him recount how Oliver Reed forced another actor to strip so he could compare manhoods before their nude scene cheered me right up. (Reed walked off, too, once he realized that he would be outclassed on film, forever.)
Books read
John Wyndham, “The Day of the Triffids”
Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky”
Frank Langella, “Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them”
Books purchased
Philip K. Dick, “Clans Of The Alphane Moon”
John Varley, “Millennium”
The Best Thing I Saw: Nothing, but my wife and I planned a date night for “Madame Web” the following week, and that will give me something to write about.
The Best Thing I Heard: “Riot in Lagos,” rediscovered when I decided to go through the entire Sakamoto archive because I’d enjoyed “The Sheltering Sky” so much.
I’m heading to California at the end of the week, and will have the time and space for a real journal entry. Thanks for sticking with me through the doldrums.
"Right now" is always a solid choice but it's a miss to get to use a van Halen song as an intro and not choose "ain't talking about love" for the opening riff. There's always something poetic about the last days of a failed political campaign though i guess in the case of haley if trump ends up winning and going full dictator we'll be looking at his political opposition with the same lens as Weimar. 5 daughters on one end and 5 sons on the other? That's nuts.
I'll always remember Langella as the bajoran coup leader on the season 2 premiere of ds9. A guy who at that point i mostly saw character acting in police procedurals, who genuinely seemed to enjoy doing palace intrigue on a Sci-fi show. The robot film sounds like a good concept piece.
Cali sounds like fun. Hope you have a good one