CRESCENT People: Tucker Eskew (Part 4)
TIME WITH SARAH PALIN
My last battle in firefighting and crisis communications, other than the corporate and cause work I’ve done over the last couple of years, started on the last day of August in 2008. I happened to be giving an interview on National Public Radio opposite a Democrat. I wasn’t making much sense to myself, let alone the rest of the nation, and I was asked about the list of people Senator McCain was supposedly considering. When they were getting ready for their West Coast feed of that show, the rumor of the Alaska governor had come out, and they wanted to retape the interview to include some mention of that. I’d read a story about her somewhere, but I knew I needed to study a little, so I spent and hour or two online. At the end of that process, I had some friends at the McCain campaign including the campaign manager and the communications director. I shot them a quick e-mail and said, “I haven’t seen a message coming out. I’m sure you’ve got one (It turns out I was wrong about that.), but it looks to me like ethics and energy and being an executive are things that you really ought to hang on to.”
They thought that was a great idea and asked me to give them a hand, to I thought in the back of my mind, “What’s a good way to help John McCain?” Certainly I was happy to have beaten him eight years earlier, but fair and square he won the primary, and I’m a loyal soldier and was willing to help.
I would say it was probably the closest look at sort of the rough side of this presidential pop culture that we live in. This completely unknown, figure thrust on to the world stage, not just the national stage, and the attempted evisceration and her foibles and mistakes, including our own, certainly as her campaign, and all of that together got to a place where the candidate’s parenting skills and even the parentage of one of her children being called in to question… Out there in the whackjob blogosphere was one thing. That’s where it started, but when I got a call from the Washington Post asking me to comment on that report that Trig was not her son, I knew we entered a new era. That was on my fourth day with the campaign.
She’s a genuine conservative and great speechmaker. She’s fascinating. She’s tough. We wanted, after a really rough ride, to have some fun, and I was among those encouraging her to accept the invitation from Lorne Michaels to go on “Saturday Night Live.” He assured us that they don’t bring people on to make fun of them. I could have said, “Oh, you do that before and after,” and I’d have been right.
They wanted her to be funny. They wanted her to have a good time. They wanted her to feel like it was something she was glad she’d done, and I can say that two years later, that all of that was true. She had a good time. We had a good time. They didn’t make fun of her. They let her make fun of herself, which America likes to see politicians to, and it was a pretty remarkable experience.
There are some things that didn’t get on-air, I should point out. The sketch that probably enlisted the most laughs, and humor is a subjective thing, was the sketch where she went on to the “Weekend Update” set and was ostensibly going to rap, and Amy Poehler did the rap instead. Of course she wasn’t going to do the rap. It was always packaged that way, and that was the last script that was delivered to us.
I had grown up, starting at about fourteen years of age, watching “Saturday Night Live.” It was just a part of growing up and our culture, so I was having fun. The day we got to the show, was after some really hard weeks on the campaign trail, and I peeled off to be with Governor Palin. The rest of the senior staff came later for the show. After I’d been there for about six hours working on the script, seeing the cast, walking around backstage, and watching rehearsals, one of my fellow campaign workers who’d just shown up came up to me and asked, “What’s with you?” I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “You’re smiling.”
They delivered the script for that sketch, and Seth Meyers said, “Look. We aren’t even going to read through it right now. I’ll just leave that with you, and we have a toned down version if you’d like to look at it.” “A toned down version?” Seth left. We knew they were tipping us off, and we read it closely and found one or two objectionable elements. I’m debating to myself whether or not to quote them, but I figure we’re grown-ups, and if I offend you, I beg your forgiveness. Remember, this is “Saturday Night Live” giving us this. So, there was a line in the original script that rhymed “filth” with “MILF,” and remember this rap was “supposed” to be done by Governor Palin.
Well, Lorne came to me a little later, and said, “It’s MILF. It’s not going to offend anyone in our audience.” As I’d already said earlier to Seth who is also the head writer, “It’s not your audience I’m thinking about. We’re not gonna do that.” There was a reference to John McCain being “hot for teacher” that we took out, too. You get the idea.
We had fun over there.
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE
You know, sometimes history can be written quickly, and sometimes the historians have nothing to do with it.
Three years ago, I was flying home from Washington to Greenville to see my parents, and as I do when I travel, I asked the cab driver, “How’s the local economy?” The cab driver started in with an accent as thick as the ones Christy Cox (senior advisor to former SC House Speaker and US Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins) grew up with. He had this New York accent, REALLY thick. He started talking about the economy and this and that, and he went through what was going on in the economy and said, “You know, I just moved here a year or two ago, but you know, the people around here, they talk about this guy who really made their live and their families and their livelihoods happen. I never met the man, but I sure would have liked to have known Carroll Campbell.” My hair stood up. This guy didn’t know me from Adam. He didn’t know where I’d come from or what I’d had the privilege to have been a part of, and yet the history had been written across his impressions. I’m fortunate to have been a part of that.
FINAL THOUGHTS
We need to overcome bad news with good things. Fundamentally, in many ways, it’s like SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When there’s bad news, we need to get a lot of the other stuff out there, so I hope South Carolina will keep looking for ways to tell the good stories.
There are a number of really great South Carolina economic development stories, but the state is not held in high regard as it deserves, but that’s our fault. If, as a communicator, I’m not getting the result I want, I have to keep working, keep doing, and keep telling the story. So we as a state have to keep working and telling our story.
