Charlottesville, Va.
IT'S SUNDAY NIGHT AT the 74-year-old Paramount Theater in this central Virginia college town, and the place is getting crowded. It's so crowded, in fact, that my seat in the media section has been sold to a paying contributor. I am moved back two rows by a red-faced staffer. People have come from across the state and beyond to see bestselling authors John Grisham and Stephen King stump for Democratic senatorial hopeful James Webb, the Reagan Navy Secretary-turned-antiwar-Democrat whose prospects for election increase with every sorry turn for incumbent George Allen.
Most of the attendees paid $100; some paid several thousand dollars for an event which will end up netting the campaign a reported $125,000. In exchange, they get healthy doses of strident Bush bashing from the famed writers, some funny stories, two book previews and, perhaps, some hope that the antiwar war hero James Webb can succeed in the post-"macaca" environment.
A few hours earlier, as Webb christened a new Charlottesville office a few blocks down the pedestrian mall surrounded by a few hundred cheering supporters, the candidate pledged to "find a way to get our combat forces out of Iraq." Amid the crowd stood a man bearing a sign echoing Hugo Chavez at the U.N.: "Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky--a Must Read."
In retrospect, this evening likely turned out to be the last moment the Webb campaign was running from behind. Salon.com's "n"-word story--which would break during the event--had not yet entered the equation. The focus this night is Grisham and King, who detail their Democratic bona fides as they push their forthcoming books and voice their disdain for the Bush administration. Both authors are wearing combat boots, like Webb, in honor of Jimmy Webb, the candidate's Marine corporal son who is currently deployed in Ramadi.
"If they could ever get him home and stop this stupid war!" bursts Grisham about a minute into his drawly remarks. Grisham, needless to say, does not support the war. If that comes as a surprise, consider that the Mississippi native and self-described convert from Republicanism has given approximately $100,000 to various Democratic causes since 1999 according to Federal Election Commission filings, including $25,000 to Kerry Victory 2004 and another $25,000 to the DNC on the eve of that same election.
"Because they never saw the horrors of combat," says Grisham about Allen and Republicans, "these cowboys are quick to decide that war is good, and should be fought by the sons and daughters of others."
"Their second-biggest sin is to use war for political gain," he continues. "From the safety of their offices . . . ," the audience applauds, interrupting him, "from the safety of their offices they look back thirty years later, and slander and defame and malign the records of those who did go fight. Shame on them."
Then things lighten up a bit. Enough politics, Grisham says, and tells the story of his first meeting with Stephen King--"I had not read all of Stephen King's books, no one can physically read all of Stephen King's books"--before riffing on the Maine horror writer's request to go Mississippi redneck-watching.
King, according to Grisham: "You know, I would like to see some real rednecks, and good ole' boys, and some real bubbas,"--the crowd laughs. Grisham: "And I said, 'Well, I can accommodate that.'" And so they did, he says, from behind the wheel of a black Jaguar. "Stephen King saw some real rednecks in their natural habitats," says Grisham. Grisham spends the rest of his time discussing and reading from his forthcoming book, The Innocent Man, the story of Ronald Keith Williamson, an exonerated death-row inmate and ex-minor league ballplayer who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver nearly two years ago.
Soon it's time for Stephen King, who reveals that he, too, is a recovering Republican. His wife converted him. Democrats are happy about that: the FEC records nearly $225,000 in donations to the party.
"In my household, my wife bursts out in quills when someone says 'Bush,'" King says after some opening jokes. "And finally she sat me down one say and she said, 'Stephen, being a poor Republican is like being a convict on death row greasing the electric chair as a hobby. I converted, and I've been a Democrat ever since.'" King reads for the better part of half hour from his forthcoming Lisey's Story. He then says he's peeved by the Allen campaign's line about the "fiction writer" James Webb. "This drives me crazy, it makes me insane to hear that stuff!" he says.
He moves to politics:
"For years, I've been saying that what fiction is is the truth inside the lie, OK? And what I've seen from Washington in the last six years is the lie inside the truth! The skin of truth outside the lie of this administration is as thin as an M&M. So, it's time for a little test, fact or fiction. And let's see, I mean, I'm the fiction writer. So I'll make a statement, and let's see if you can tell the difference between what's fact and what's fiction."
"The Bush Social Security program, it's good for America's working class. Fact or fiction?"
Audience: "FICTION!"
"Thank you very much. Bush education, particularly the reading program, it's really working well?"
"FICTION!"
"So far, you got it. The Bush administration can be trusted with wiretaps just to listen for al Qaeda, not to American citizens. Fact or fiction?"
"FICTION!"
And so on, until: "There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq . . . "--"FICTION!"
As he closes, King says he is "very concerned about the direction this country has taken . . . I'm the horror guy, and when you look at the political situation, you look at Washington, that's my territory."
Will these messages resonate in a red state like Virginia? They resonated Sunday night among fiction lovers in the rally-going base, to be sure--people who aren't at all likely to be representative of the state at large. But it's quite possible that this question won't even matter. Not if Allen's campaign keeps spiraling the way it currently is. In that case, Webb may well be the last man standing.
Brendan Conway is an editorial writer at the Washington Times , a 2006 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow, and contributing editor of Doublethink.