Downunderwhere?

Greetings from McDougal campaign headquarters! The campaign is really kicking into high gear. Let me tell you! You may have noticed that they've given me my own screen name here on the Friends of McDougal weblog so that I can keep all of McDougal's fans updated on the campaign.

Last weekend we staged McDougal's first official campaign rally. Planning an event like this caused a great deal of anxiety among the staff here. McDougal still doesn't do well with crowds, which can make a campaign rally a difficult thing. If, in the middle of an impassioned speech, McDougal freaked out and ate, had intercourse with, or otherwise mutilated an American citizen, well, his candidacy would be over with right there. For this reason, it was decided that his first campaign appearance should be held somewhere outside the U.S. This is, of course, an unconventional tactic, but it makes sense. It plays to McDougal's strength in foreign policy issues and allows us to downplay his weaknesses in domestic policy, most notably drug law reform. This should be one of his hot-button topics, but so far we have been unable to refine his view on the subject to a talking point more eloquent than "Goddamn it , I need pills!"

The selection of a suitable country for his appearance was the subject of intense debate among the staff. The debate was broken down into two camps. One held the view that we should select a country in which English is the primary language, as foreign languages confuse McDougal. The other group was of the opinion that if the audience couldn't understand a single thing McDougal said, this would actually be to our advantage. In the end, it was decided that we would select a nation of English speakers, but one that was as far away from the United States as possible, the logic being that the distance would act as a buffer between and unpleasantness on McDougal's part and the American media. And so, we loaded up the campaign staff and McDougal's people, then set off for Australia.

I spent most of the long flight assuring McDougal that Australia was not the same place that Hitler was born and after seven consecutive viewings of Crocodile Dundee II McDougal was actually starting to look forward to his campaign rally. He even dictated a short speech to Anne Marie, his Red Cross volunteer. The speech was actually pretty good. I only had to do a few rewrites to remove a handful of unintentional racial slurs and one very intentional death threat.

When we arrived in Sidney and began to set up, McDougal wandered off on his own and made several calls on his cell phone. Soon several large barbecue grills, which I hadn't ordered, arrived. Two refridgerator trucks showed up shortly after. McDougal had gotten it into his head that the best way to generate goodwill with the Australians was with a kangaroo barbecue. I tired, to no avail, to convince him that we would probably be better off serving regular meats like beef, chicken and fish. He ignored me completely, instead growing angry at someone on the other end of his cell phone because they would not send a truckload of koala meat to the rally.

The rally was not the success I had imagined, but it was not a complete fiasco either, which is, I suppose, the best I should have expected. McDougal ate fourteen whole kangaroos, but none of the guests would touch the barbecue. I tired a little bit, just to be polite, but found the meat to be a little gamey for my taste. None of the members of Australia's Parliament who we invited decided to attend, which was a little disappointing. However, the banners, fireworks and loud music (McDougal has selected "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash as his campaign theme) attracted a sizeable crowd. McDougal's speech was the highlight of the evening. He is a skillful and impassioned orator and he held the crowd in the palm of his hand until he abandoned his notes, first talking about rising gas prices (really more of a domestic issue) then went on a ten minute rant about the dangers of squirrels (at one point he told the assembled crowd "they live in the walls" in a conspiratorial whisper) but he brought it all back home in the end, finally thanking the people of Australia for being a valuable ally in the War on Terror, to a ripple of polite applause. Usually McDougal's speeches end with coughing and shifting uncomfortably, so that's a marked improvement.