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Archive for the 'Mike Murphy' Category

Brief Interviews with Mike Murphy

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in John McCain, Journalism, Literature, Mike Murphy, Weekly Standard, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

For no reasons other than my own demonstrated affinity for the works of David Foster Wallace and recent fixation with the alleged pseudonymous works of Mike Murphy, I would like to present an excerpt of a limited panel strip drawn in 2005 by webcomic artist Mike Russell1.

The following is based on one brief passage from “Up, Simba!”, Wallace’s not-so-brief 2000 Rolling Stone article about his time aboard the Straight Talk Express with the “anti-candidate” and the traveling press corps, recently republished as a short book with the dreadful title “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”2:

Mike Murphy and John McCain star in an unauthorized comic strip based on David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba!”

  1. Oh, all right. As long as I’m talking about Wallace, you’ll have to excuse the use of footnotes. Anyway, I asked Russell if I could use this, and he pointed out that because he drew it on spec using copyrighted material, he couldn’t actually make any money off it, so I was free to “go nuts” with it. However, he did want the point made clear that he is “totally unaffiliated” with Wallace or any publishers of the text wherefrom he derived the above-printed comic excerpt. And I’m happy to do so.

  2. Thing is, most of Wallace’s titles are far better than his editors’. For a (very long (and very funny)) comic essay about a week on board a luxury cruise, which of the following sounds like a better title: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”? Yet the latter is what Harper’s called it, and the former is what Wallace was able to call it once he published the full-length version (approx. 100 pages) in his eponymous (the essay, not his name) first collection of nonfiction.

  3. I don’t actually have a third item, and there’s no corresponding third footnote above, I just thought w/r/t footnotes, three would be a nice round number.

Richelieu in Repose

Published by William Beutler on July 7, 2008 in Blogging Officials, Brick-and-mortar consultants, John McCain, Mike Murphy, New York Times, Weekly Standard, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

In today’s New York Times, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol asks:

So Where’s Murphy?

That is to say, why has former McCain strategist Mike Murphy not yet joined John McCain’s presidential campaign? Because Kristol is talking about it, it seems like everyone else is talking about it, but nobody is talking about where Murphy has been recently.

Or where he may very well have been. That would be the Weekly Standard’s blog, where a pseudonymous contributor named Richelieu is thought to be Murphy by several writers in a position to know (or at least fairly suspect) that this is so.

This makes it all the weirder for Dean Barnett, also of the Weekly Standard, to write today at the very same blog:

In the New York Times today, Bill Kristol speculates that Mike Murphy may be about to ride in on his white steed to save the McCain campaign from itself. Maybe he’s right.

Looking through the archives, it turns out that Richelieu has not contributed a post since late June. After several months (since October 2007) of frequent posting, Richelieu’s output slowed to a crawl in mid-May and had nearly ceased altogether by early June.

Mid-May was also about the time where Obama’s nomination finally appeared to be inevitable, and early June was when Sen. Clinton finally dropped out. So did Murphy hang up his pen name just in time to be available to offer his services to McCain? It looks like we just may find out.

Update: Apparently not? Mike Murphy has signed a deal with NBC.

Richelieu is to Mike Murphy as…

Published by William Beutler on December 1, 2007 in John McCain, Mickey Kaus, Mike Murphy, Mitt Romney, Weekly Standard, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Did Mickey Kaus just out the Weekly Standard’s pseudonymous Campaign Standard blogger Richelieu as GOP consultant Mike Murphy? Given Mickey’s usual tongue-in-cheek phrasing, this is as close to an accusation as he’ll get without (disclosable) proof1:

**–I think this argument was made by Weekly Standard’s Richelieu. Or maybe it was consultant Mike Murphy. I get them confused sometimes! … 7:09 P.M.

Richelieu wrote the Campaign Standard’s latest post at 12:14 p.m. on Friday; there’s no response yet from him nor any contributor to the blog. (Bill Kristol, Richard Starr and others write for it, but Matthew Continetti is listed as the editor and his caricature is featured at the top. Nice work.)

To be fair, I haven’t read enough Richelieu to recognize one of his arguments, though I’m aware he’s been hitting Huckabee lately. And I haven’t paid enough attention to Mike Murphy’s “Meet the Press” comments, other than those about Fred Thompson2.

But Kaus wouldn’t be the first to make the insinuation. On September 27 a Ramesh Ponnuru post at The Corner said, and I quote in its entirety:

The Standard has a new campaign blog. My guess is that “Richelieu” is Mike Murphy.

Why would Murphy want to conceal his involvement, if indeed he is Richelieu? Possibly because he was a top strategist for McCain in 2000, was more recently a consultant to Mitt Romney, and wants to avoid having to comment on them publicly. But Murphy has been on “Meet” twice this year in a recurring panel featuring Bob Shrum, James Carville and Mary Matalin. Maybe it’s different, appearing on a talk show and writing blog entries. It’s no different ethically, but a nom de plume would allow him to write more frankly. On the other hand, he wrote a column for The Hotline from 2003-04 called “Backseat Driving” under his own name. On the other other hand, none of his former clients were running for president then.

To reiterate before hitting “Publish,” I’m not saying Murphy is Richelieu. If he’s not, that could be pretty interesting, too. Keep an eye on the Campaign Standard.

P.S. Of possible relevance: Murphy was, briefly, a producer on CNBC’s briefly-appearing “Dennis Miller” talk show which, I might add, I always thought was underrated. Left-wing FAIR, kind of a forerunner to Media Matters, hit Murphy at the time for producing the show while serving as a consultant to Gov. Schwarzenegger. Also possibly relevant: Kaus sometimes appeared as a guest on the show’s “Varsity” roundtable.

1 Unless maybe it’s John Edwards.

2 Non-”Standard” standard disclosure.