Debriefing Mike Murphy

On a pleasant Super Tuesday afternoon — one of 10 or 11 Super Tuesdays we seem to be having this March — I am standing in the bloated carcass of that much-maligned beast known as The Establishment. In the unmarked suite of a generic mid-Wilshire office building (The Establishment can’t be too careful, with all these populists sharpening pitchforks), I have come to Right to Rise, Jeb Bush’s $118 million super-PAC, to watch Mike Murphy and his crew pack it in.

If you’ve been reading your Conventional Wisdom Herald, you know that Murphy, one of the most storied and furiously quick-witted political consultants of the last three decades, has lately been cast as the Titanic skipper who steered Jeb’s nine-figure colossus smack into an iceberg. That donor loot helped buy Jeb all of four delegates before he dropped from the race, returning to a quiet life of low-energy contemplation. The Los Angeles Times called Right to Rise “one of the most expensive failures in American political history,” which is among the more charitable assessments. (If you ever find yourself in Mike Murphy’s position, never, ever look at Twitter.)

In his early career, profilers taking note of his long hair, leather jackets, and loud Hawaiian shirts made Murphy sound like a cross between the wild man of Borneo, Jimmy Buffett, and an unmade futon. These days, his hair is short, and there’s a little less of it to account for. He looks more like a shambling film professor, in smart-guy faculty glasses, Lacoste half-zip, and khakis — his loud rainbow-striped socks being the only sartorial tell that he might still, as a Republican elder once told a reporter, be “in need of adult supervision.”

Murphy bellows a greeting and introduces me around to his crew, who are packing and tying up loose ends, such as calculating pro-rata donor refunds for what’s left of the money (about $12 million). The office will be vacated by the following week. “This is Matt Labash,” he says to the troops. “He’s here to write my political obituary!”

There are strategy people, and finance people, and blonde people— striking women who all seem to be from Texas. There are the oppo guys, or as Murphy (who once facetiously tagged himself “the merchant of mud” and who in his wayward youth had “Go Neg” vanity plates) calls them, the Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare. “You should see their file on you,” he warns.

“A donkey?!!!” chimes in Paul Lindsay, Right to Rise’s communications director.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Murphy cross-examines.

Lindsay used to work for American Crossroads, the Karl Rove super-PAC that has also seen better days. When asked why super-PAC influence seems to be waning, Lindsay says, “Probably me. Whatever I touch.” Murphy adds, “It’s like that Bill Macy movie The Cooler [about a bringer-of-bad-luck guy casinos pay to jinx winning gamblers]. Lindsay just walks by, and the story goes bad.” (Murphy, an inveterate film buff, moved to Los Angeles a decade ago to dabble in screenwriting, partly to escape politics — “the lowest rung of show business.”)

As their communications guy, Lindsay, Murphy says, will stay on longer than the rest, in case urgent Politico queries still need to be fielded. Murphy then adopts the tone of a breathless Politico reporter: Is it true that when you folded up the office, there was copier toner on the ground? And that equals a California hazardous waste spill? We’re printing it!

Office décor is a reminder of a campaign lost. The “coffee bar” is a desk full of whiskey bottles, with everything on offer from populist Trumpian Fireball to finer Woodford Reserve. In keeping with the Irish-wake vibe, I go full-tilt elitist, helping myself to a 10-year-old Macallan that I take neat, not because I want to, but because the high-dollar super-PAC’s ghetto refrigerator doesn’t even have an icemaker.

There are pictures of Jeb, of course, beaming beatifically while surrounded by smiling multicultural children. The Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare has posted photos they’ve dug up of other candidates in compromising positions, such as Chris Christie inhaling ice cream while looking like he’s storing four bags of doughnuts under his shirt. Murphy has a special contempt for Christie these days, since Christie broke early for Donald Trump, becoming his Franz von Papen, the former Weimar chancellor who thought Hitler could be civilized once in office: “They made him ambassador to Turkey, next thing you know, he’s in Nuremberg.”

The primaries countdown clock is now permanently set to zero. And next to it hangs a large Donald Trump piñata that is fitted with real Marco Rubio ankle-boots, the metrosexual atrocities Rubio was caught wearing that look like something Deney Terrio would sport on an old episode of Dance Fever. In a box nearby are the severed heads of previous Trump piñatas. Right to Rise was pilloried by conservative media types for not going after Trump hard enough. But staffers have clearly been squaring accounts behind closed doors.

We take a seat in Murphy’s office, as he apologizes for the knockabout furniture, which he says has worked out great after they procured it from a crime scene and scraped the blood off. Even outside his window, the bell seems to be tolling. The building is in L.A.’s museum district, “which is where we belong now,” says Murphy, always faster than would-be hecklers, beating them to jokes at his own expense. Down in the street, rough-customer homeless guys wander by with armfuls of plastic bags. “Great wino fights on the corner there,” Murphy cracks. “There’s a guy with a devastating left who tends to dominate.”

In actuality, it’s the same corner where rapper Biggie Smalls was gunned down in his Suburban while stopped at a red light. One of the finance girls keeps a picture of Biggie in her office out of respect. Or maybe to illustrate how much worse things could be. Or maybe she’s just being mindful of what John McCain liked to say, back when Murphistopheles (as McCain called him) would ride shotgun with his quixotic presidential client in their 2000 Straight Talk Express days: “It’s always darkest before it goes completely black.”

Surveying his decommissioned troops, the 53-year-old general sighs with mock-wistfulness: “These people all used to have great careers in politics. .  .  . Now we’re going to Kinko’s to print off some résumés. We understand there’s a job fair at Quiznos.”

Murphy, of course, has no need to go to Quiznos, unless he’s just in the mood for a Spicy Monterey sandwich. He’s had a robust career as a pundit, formerly serving as a columnist for Time and a regular on Meet the Press. He figures he’ll eventually reenter the arena, while he awaits “a Weather Channel bidding war.”

The punditry leads to speeches, where he does his comic shtick. He counts comedians like Dennis Miller and Simpsons writer Dana Gould among his good friends, and has a “chunk sheet” listing his bits, just like a real working comic. Though unlike his showbiz friends, he’s working rooms like that of a Chicago payday loan association, where attendees were excited to have their first banquet, just like real bankers. Here, Murphy slides into a thick Chicago accent, imitating his host, “All right you f — s, shut up! We got a call to order!”

He also has tech investments to fall back on and real-estate holdings (from undeveloped bug-out property in Nova Scotia to rentals in the Hollywood Hills). On the showbiz side, he’s represented by CAA and keeps an office on the Paramount lot, where his coffee cups rattled as the 27-year-old high school kids from Glee had noisy dance-offs. He’s sold scripts to 20th Century Fox and HBO, none of which have been made, leaving his IMDb page essentially blank. Unless he’s the same Mike Murphy who played “Rico’s henchman” in a Mexican drug-cartel short, Hell on the Border. (He wishes, he says, but assures me he’s not.)

Then there’s the main chance. Murphy first cracked the political-consultant game back in 1982, cutting political ads from his dorm room and later dropping out of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, figuring he dodged a career “stamping visas in Istanbul.” Since then he’s sold one political consultancy and his share of another, and is partner in a third (Revolution), for which he mostly does corporate work. He generally prefers this to campaigns these days, since even though there’s accountability to corporate boards, “you don’t have to face 22 people who have no experience, telling you how to do your job from their safe Twitter perch in journalism.”

Murphy’s clients have won around two dozen Senate and gubernatorial races (everyone from John Engler to Mitt Romney to Christie Todd Whitman to Arnold Schwarzenegger). If you notice a theme, it’s that he often helps Republicans win in Democratic states. Likewise, he’s played a major role in assisting three losing presidential candidates (McCain, Lamar! Alexander, and Jeb!). If you again notice a theme, it’s that his presidential candidates sometimes seem more excited about their first names than the electorate does.

Like all hired guns in his trade, he’s taken his share of mercenary money just for the check. But Murphy says when it comes to presidentials, he thinks it matters more and is a sucker for long shots. “I have friends I believe in who want to run. I’m a romantic, so I keep falling for that pitch.” Jeb wasn’t exactly a long shot, I remind him. Like hell he wasn’t, says Murphy. It’s a hard slog, not being a Grievance Candidate this year. “He was the guy who was handing out policy papers when Trump was handing out broken bottles.”

Since a candidate is not permitted by law to discuss campaign specifics with his super-PAC once he declares, a law Murphy vows was strictly observed (“I’m too pretty to go to jail”), I ask him what he would’ve told Jeb during the campaign had he been allowed to. Over the years, Murphy has forged a reputation of telling his candidates the truth, no matter how bitter the medicine. (He once had to tell a congressional client that his toupee was unconvincing.) Though Murphy’s tongue is usually on a hair-trigger, he stops and ponders this question for a beat. He then says he would’ve told Jeb, “What the f — were we thinking?”

Even pre-campaign, however, when they were allowed to coordinate as Right to Rise was amassing its unprecedented war chest, well before Trump’s ascendancy, both knew that despite the media billing Bush the prohibitive favorite — a position they both detested — they were facing long odds. (The assumption was Ted Cruz would be occupying the anger-candidate slot that Trump has instead so ably filled.)

Murphy says Bush regarded this election as a necessary tussle between the politics of optimism and grievance. At a preseason dinner, Murphy gave Bush his best guess of their chances of winning — under 50 percent. “He grinned,” Murphy says, “and named an even lower number. I remember leaving the dinner with a mix of great pride in Jeb’s principled courage and with a sense of apprehension about the big headwinds we would face.” And though he’d also have told his friend, if he’d been allowed to speak to him, that he was proud of Jeb “for fighting his corner,” ultimately, Murphy admits, “there is no campaign trick or spending level or candidate whisperer that can prevent a party from committing political suicide if it wants to.”

Murphy hadn’t done a political race since former eBay chief Meg Whitman’s colossally expensive 2010 California gubernatorial loss to Jerry Brown (she spent $144 million of her own money). So he essentially came out of political retirement to help his old pal’s super-PAC, much as he’d guided Jeb’s gubernatorial victories in 1998 and 2002. Murphy’s been threatening to quit politics for good since at least the early aughts, hoping to find more reputable employment, “like opening a dog track — nicer class of people.”

All of this, of course, has led to what Mr. Trump might call some yuge paydays. Just how huge Murphy’s take was from running Right to Rise became a point of contention shortly after Jeb’s demise. A CNN.com report featured an anonymous bundler grumbling that Murphy was paid $14 million, a charge Murphy instantly called “absolute bullshit” on Twitter, saying compensation had deliberately been capped. He vowed his fees were in the mid-six figures, with Right to Rise’s treasurer backing him up.

The CNN.com story, which had hit the media wind tunnel, was eventually updated to include Murphy’s denials. The new version made it to the Drudge Report. To Murphy’s chagrin, and in keeping with the star-crossed nature of Jeb’s 2016 run, the amended piece on Drudge was overshadowed by breaking news: “New genitalia woe for Hitler — he had ‘micro-penis.’ ”

As Murphy lamented on Twitter, “Hard to get truth out on web when competing with Hitler’s micro-penis story .  .  . ”

Clueless nonmembers of the chattering classes might wonder why it’s a big deal what a political consultant got paid by a loaded political candidate who is hardly a rube and who’d done two prior runs with the same consultant. Or they might wonder why journalists seem so scandalized that outside millions couldn’t buy an election, when usually journalists pretend to be scandalized that they can. Or they might wonder, if Mike Murphy milked the Jeb campaign until it mooed, why Bush would send me an email, after the stories appeared, saying, “Mike is a great talent and a loyal friend. We both share a vision for the future of the conservative movement that is hopeful and optimistic.”

Unfortunately for Murphy, clueless nonmembers of the chattering classes don’t write headlines, like the one in the Washington Post, saying, “Jeb Bush’s Presidential Campaign Was a Success — for Its Consultants.”

I reached out to Murphy for this story while he was still in mid-tempest. You could tell his sunny demeanor had clouded a bit. As he put it in an email: “Sort of going to ground now since I cannot win with this horse-shit media stuff. .  .  . ‘Spent too much .  .  . spent too little on Trump .  .  . didn’t spend all Jeb’s Money to help Marco (that one being a Weekly Standard specialty). .  .  . Didn’t understand Jeb was establishment candidate’ (f — ing DUH). .  .  . But since this is the year of the Howling Moron, starting with the eels in my business and carrying through to 90 percent of the people in your corrupt business selling tickets to Trump’s Mussolini act .  .  . let’s at least kick the idea around.”

Once the idea was kicked, Murphy agreed to let me hang out during the Right to Rise shutdown and to gather his reflections on the Year of the Howling Moron, as he put it. He agreed to play Snidely Whiplash tying conventional wisdom to the tracks. To be as offensive as the spirit moves, since as Thomas Paine said, “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.” To go at some of the hoary establishment/antiestablishment clichés that journalists wear like floaties in their sea of uncertainty. At least until a few election returns come in, when they can explain what was going to happen all along while donning X-ray hindsight-goggles.

Murphy laid down only one precondition: “That you put in this piece that The Weekly Standard has become a Rubio-Love Spank Mag — and Kristol can’t cut it!”

Fine.

When I catch up with Murphy in L.A., we have a series of conversations: at his office, at his house, at his favorite old-school haunts like Greenblatt’s Deli and a Koreatown bar, at the Chinese dive “that has dust on the curtains from the Nixon administration,” and in his car, the make of which he semi-jokingly puts off the record. Not because it’s a Bentley or anything. But because it’s foreign-made, says the sheepish Motor City native. “I’m a Detroit guy, I feel bad about it.”

Except for the occasional Twitter outburst or solitary quote sprinkled here or there, the usually loquacious Murphy (it is considered journalistic malpractice to approach him without your tape recorder already running) had largely gone mute during his Right to Rise hitch. He even seemed intent on deflecting attention from himself. When Real Clear Politics profiled him at the campaign’s launch, he declined to be interviewed, saying only, “My story is very boring. Mostly about hair loss.”

When I tell him I was wondering if he was feeling okay after repeatedly reading “Murphy declined comment,” he admits, “Yeah, it almost broke my jaw saying it.”

Though we’ve never been close, it was good to see my establishmentarian acquaintance again. The word gets his Irish up. “I’m not an establishmentarian,” he barks. “You think I really want the guys in polyester suits in Springfield, Virginia, running the f — ing country? .  .  . I’m an iconoclast, but I am an elitist — with incredibly popular taste.”

No sense in giving the country over to total amateurs, as we now seem poised to do, Murphy implies. After all, when you need someone to fix your plumbing, you call a plumber — not a reality-show star whose only real accomplishment is “teaching Gary Busey to work the snow-cone machine [on Celebrity Apprentice].” If we need someone to fix the country, perhaps we should subject these applicants to at least the same expertise standards we apply to the Roto-Rooter man.

Despite the roster of blue-chip establishment Republicans he’s helped elect, it’s hard for me to think of Murphy as pure establishment, whatever that shape-shifting word has come to mean. The first time I met him was exactly 20 years ago. His Lamar! campaign had cratered, and he’d recently left the Bob Dole campaign, which he’d briefly joined before departing over creative differences with the suits. Unaffiliated at the moment, he and his then-partner Don Sipple had decided to hold an “It’s Over” election watch party — in the very same Jefferson Hotel suite where rival consultant and onetime Bill Clinton consigliere Dick Morris had been caught romancing a call-girl friend. Morris allegedly sang “Popeye the Sailor Man” while prancing around in his underwear, and barked like a dog on all fours. As we watched Bob Dole circle the drain that night, the room still smelled of lust and humiliation.

Seven years later, I found myself in the middle of another Murphy caper, this time as he was helping make Arnold Schwarzenegger the unlikely governor of California in a recall election. As women came out of the woodwork at nearly every campaign stop, alleging Arnold had groped them, Murphistopheles was skillfully distracting the short-attention-span media. And not just with the beer cooler they kept on the press bus. At a stop at the Orange County Fairgrounds, Arnold intoned in his thick Arnold-accent, “Let me show you what we are going to do to de cahhh tax when we get to Sacramento.” Arnold then pointed to a decrepit Oldsmobile in a nearby empty lot, with “Car Tax” inscribed on it. A crane right next to the car crushed it with a wrecking ball. Murphy wasn’t totally satisfied with the stunt — he’d wanted to blow the car up. But after consulting with Arnold’s pyro people, he decided not to risk setting voters on fire.

Times change. Nowadays, of course, Republican candidates and voters seem to want to set just about everything on fire. Including their own hair and establishment-totems like Murphy. Especially after CNN wrongly stated that he made $14 million. “It puts me in the box of ‘No, I’m not a pig-f‌—‌er.’ Which is very irritating,” Murphy says. “But I get it. We lost. So I get pissed on for a while.”

Still, like Jeb himself, Murphy has zero interest in changing who he is, or apologizing for raising gobs of money to try to put over an “establishment” candidate, one whom he still salutes for not pandering to fevered mouth-breathers who fault Jeb for not speaking the lingua franca of this election (which is now so debased, it has recently sunk to the level of dick jokes). Bush was incapable, Murphy says, of coming up with lines about “electrifying the border” or “cutting the index finger off of every Muslim-American so they can never reach a trigger. He would never do that. If Trump turns out to be the answer, I’m incredibly proud that Jeb Bush did not want to be any part of the vile question.”

The campaign, he admits, was rocked by Trump’s “low-energy” label, which stuck and hurt Bush. It’s kind of rich, suggests Murphy, since Jeb was a famous workaholic as governor. “If Trump kept up Jeb’s schedule for one day, he’d be in the hospital.” Trump’s low-energy charge, Murphy says, was “code for ‘Jeb’s not furious at anybody.’ He doesn’t open a rally with ‘I want everybody to write down the name of any Mexican they know and put it in a bin because they are going to pay.’ It was all a code word for ‘civilized.’ Jeb was the anti-Trump in a Trump year. But being the anti-Trump is a huge badge of f — ing honor. I think you get that tattooed on your forehead: ‘I’m the anti-Trump.’ People will be congratulating him on that the rest of his life.”

Trump, if you haven’t gathered, irritates Murphy. And no matter how much Trump surges, Murphy’s in no danger of “learning German” and pulling a Chris “von Papen” Christie: “I’d rather cut my arm off than vote for that jerk.” But what especially irks him are critics (“the bumper sticker glue” crowd he calls them, as in outsiders who second-guess your campaign right down to the kind of glue used on the bumper stickers) acting as though it were Right to Rise’s duty to take out Trump.

Not only was Jeb taking swings at Trump last fall, back when the likes of Cruz and Rubio were gingerly padding around him, seemingly auditioning to be coat-check boys at one of Trump’s tremendous, amazing properties. But according to Right to Rise’s numbers, the super-PAC spent nearly 15 percent of their TV advertising on anti-Trump ads.

Yes, they went after others, including and especially Rubio, just as hard if not harder, spending 33.4 percent of their TV advertising on “other candidate contrast ads.” But, Murphy reasons, even if they had successfully taken down Trump, Jeb wasn’t about to get Trump’s voters anyway. In essence, Murphy would have been using hard-won donor money to clear the field for competitors who stood a much better chance of picking off Jeb’s voters (Rubio), as well as Trump’s (Cruz).

Not to mention, nobody has figured out the secret sauce for taking down Trump. Several deep-pocketed PACs have thus far not managed to. Even Trump seems unable to stop Trump, though it sometimes feels as though he’s trying harder than anyone. It’s not your everyday candidate who can, in the space of two weeks, still sit atop the polls after picking up endorsements from both Louis Farrakhan and David Duke, after retweeting a Mussolini quote, after dismissing with the wave of a hand a charge that his campaign manager assaulted a young woman reporter, and after offering to pay the legal fees of a supporter caught on-camera sucker-punching a protester (whom the supporter later suggested might need to be “killed”).

It especially enrages Murphy that the Beltway crowd has been so protective of Rubio, “having a breakdown as their precious helicopter-mom dreams are evaporating.” Yes, Right to Rise smacked the silly out of Rubio repeatedly. Murphy’s personal favorite was a web ad that reworked Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” as “These Boots Are Made for Flipping,” featuring a Marco character in his trademark lady-boots, dancing fast, as the ad hits him on everything from immigration flip-flops to his absentee Senate record.

Murphy adds that he donated money himself to Rubio’s Senate campaign and likes him personally. But for president? “Marco’s just not ready.” Even if his Last Establishment Man Standing strategy failed for Jeb, Murphy stresses it wasn’t his job to help elect Rubio over Trump. “We’re not the RNC. We’re not the party cop,” Murphy thunders. “If our donors wanted to help Marco Rubio, they’d have given to him instead of us.”

Many in Jeb World viewed it as a betrayal that Rubio, Bush’s former protégé whom they regarded as a young man in a hurry, jumped in. “Our problem was too many regular Republicans ran,” says Murphy. “And Marco ran, which was a problem, because we spent a lot of energy fighting Marco, and Marco spent a lot of energy fighting us. When the better thing to do would have been to unite our army and go fight Trump and Cruz. But that wasn’t the situation we found ourselves in. These Marco guys always say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you spend a hundred million dollars attacking Trump and helping us?’ And I was like, ‘Why did you not? How about you don’t f — ing run?’ .  .  . Loyalty is not a small thing. I’m an old Irish pol. No loyalty is owed, if no loyalty was given.”

As for Cruz, Murphy does not TrusTed and has no plans to fall in line with the man shaping up to be the Establishment’s hold-your-nose-and-kiss-your-sister Trump alternative: “I think he’s cynical, totally cynical. .  .  . I don’t think he could win a general election, so he’ll be wiped out. It’s a choice between Trump, who is terrible for the country, and Cruz, who is terrible for the party. He’s too smart for his act .  .  . and he’s probably pissed that a bigger con man showed up.”

Murphy does speak well of John Kasich, his choice of the leftovers. “I like Kasich a lot. He’s the only grown-up running.” He wishes Kasich well, as he labors to stay above the Friars Club roast, to be substantive and constructively positive, to offer people hope. But Kasich, Murphy adds, has an impossibly tall order this year: “He’s trying to start an opera club at a tractor pull.”

To put some reverse-English on matters, I talk to an old friend and profile subject, Mr. Dirty Tricks himself, Roger Stone. Stone, in some ways, is Murphy’s antipode this cycle. A longtime Trump adviser, consultant, and henchman, Stone loudly and flamboyantly severed formal ties with Trump last August, but the two remain in regular contact.

When I suggest to Stone that he and Murphy are in some ways Establishment vs. Antiestablishment evil twins, he bristles: “That’s almost insulting. I’m far more effective than he is. Though he makes more money than I do. The fees Murphy takes out of this stuff? The guy should be wearing a mask.”

Though Stone has labored as a conservative consultant/bomb-thrower for decades, he’s never worked against Murphy, though they both came out of the same milieu. “I like Murphy. He’s very mischievous. Very funny. He has no problem puncturing the conventional wisdom. He has that Irish twinkle in his eye,” Stone says generously, as he unsheaths his shiv. “But like everybody in this business, he completely miscalculated this cycle. I’m not willing to say paid advertising doesn’t work, but it doesn’t seem to work vis-à-vis Trump.”

Stone says that though Murphy is a decade-and-a-half younger, “he’s more of a dinosaur than I am. I’ve moved on to new media, he’s still stuck on network television.” I point out that’s easy for Stone to say, since Trump gets wall-to-wall free media each night, while Stone is doing hits on professional conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones’s show. “Do you have any idea how many people see me on Alex Jones?” Stone laughs. “Millions. You can call him anything you want. I don’t care. It works. Media success in the new media.”

Trump mastered it years ago, Stone says, figuring out how to circumvent all the old channels. He gets more bang out of a tweet than the rest of the candidates get out of a paid ad or press conference. “The rules we’ve always lived by are out the window. This moment couldn’t have happened three years ago. But whether Trump is a one-off, it’s here now.” Watch, Stone says, how Trump jiu-jitsues every attack, be it super-PAC ads or journalistic scrutiny. People’s “bullshit quota is completely exhausted, they’re just not buying anything the old media is telling them.”

And for other candidates to squawk about Trump’s free media? Tough, Stone says. “They cover Trump because Trump is interesting. They didn’t cover Jeb not because he didn’t have standing, but because he was boring. Jeb was a brand name. He could’ve gotten covered if he had anything to say, which, of course, he didn’t. And he was wise to drop, because had he not, Trump was going to start talking about why those 9/11 hijackers were training in Florida, and Jeb did nothing about it. .  .  . The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring, as Dick Nixon would say. And Murphy allowed Jeb to be exceedingly boring.”

One afternoon, Murphy and I and some of the Right to Rise crew tuck in at Greenblatt’s, the local deli and institution that has been around since Sunset Boulevard was still a dirt road, serving the likes of everyone from Bing Crosby to Bela Lugosi to Joe DiMaggio. As Murphy washes down a pastrami Reuben with a Diet Snapple, we discuss The Anger that has seized the electorate this cycle.

I point out that I’m as down for a good populist brawl as anyone, without going so far as to support an orange-hued reality-show star with wraparound hair who uses the word “amazing” way too often. I’d like secure borders, more tightly controlled immigration, and would love to see manufacturing jobs come back as much as the next guy. But what about our own culpability in the nation’s decline? The technologies we so ravenously consume as our jobs get automated or algorithmed out of existence. We pretend as though character doesn’t count, then wonder why we get so many characters. We buy cut-rate Chinese goods at Walmart, or better still, on Amazon Prime, so we don’t have to put down the Doritos bag and budge from our easy-chair rage-stations as our passions get serially inflamed by Sean Hannity telling us how great we are and how hard we have it. Our consumption of everything seems to be increasing — of carbs, meth, anger-stoking shoutfests — even as our producers seem to be disappearing. Maybe we have unimpressive politicians because they’re our representatives, and we’ve become grossly unimpressive ourselves.

Giving Murphy the Cliff’s Notes version of that windy speechlet, I’m essentially setting him up, as often happens in our dialogue. I do so waiting for his contrarian anti-antiestablishment salvos, as when I fish for a take on one of the clown-show Republican debates, and he emails, “Buy gold, fast.” But this time, he goes pretty earnest. For him, anyway.

He says a lot of the anger is springing from people’s fears and hard realities — the middle class not getting a raise in a decade. Generally pessimistic older white voters see the demographic shifts and don’t like it. The media are incessantly “sticking red-hot thermometers in lukewarm water and saying, ‘Wow, that water’s pretty hot!’ ” He then adds, in what you don’t expect the capo of a $118 million super-PAC who spends his days begging hedge-fund managers for dough to say: “There is the Wall Street stuff — rich guys who win either way. When things go south, they get bailed out. When things go right, they get billions. There’s legit anger at that. And there should be. Income inequality stuff is real.”

The weird thing, Murphy says, is even the rich guys he speaks to know it. One of them, a Right to Rise donor, gave Murphy a hop from New York back to L.A. on his brand new Gulfstream. Murphy calls it a “G-a-lot,” as in, “it was bigger than a G-V.” Upon deplaning, “the hedge-fund zillionaire pulls me aside, and says, ‘I paid $55 million for this, and the government gave me most of it in tax breaks. I don’t know if people ask for things from Jeb. But here’s what I want: Tell him to get rid of that shit.’ Because even the guys in that world feel crappy about it. It was an interesting moment.”

Still, Murphy adds, the problem with our current antiestablishment climate isn’t that people aren’t correctly identifying problems. It’s that the problem-solvers they’re turning to are bigger snake-oil hustlers than the ones they’re turning away from. Whether it’s the middle class being hollowed out or fiscal irresponsibility, “The pain is legit. But Trump is a stupid vote. Because Trump won’t solve any of those things, he’ll make them all worse. You’re voting against your pain. You’re voting to create more. You’re going for a kind of witch doctor of politics who is promising things based on magic.”

Let’s think through Trump, Murphy says. “He doesn’t understand the presidency. You don’t call up the head of Mexico and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to build a fabulous wall with first-class gold toilets and you’re gonna pay for it.’ You don’t call up the head of the Ford Motor Company and say, ‘You can only manufacture things in the U.S. or I’m going to unilaterally impose tariffs.’ He has no understanding of presidential powers. He has no understanding of Congress. It’s like putting a chimp in the driver’s seat of a tractor. He’s not going to plow the field. He’s going to drive the tractor into the lake. So the stakes are high. And having problems is not a license to vote stupid. People need the tractor to plow the damn field, now.”

Murphy suspects that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, the country is “idiot-proof” enough that Hillary (who he adds “I’m not a fan of”) would beat Trump. The head-to-head numbers have consistently suggested such, which is why he’s long called Trump a “zombie frontrunner.” But when asked what unintended consequences he sees if Trump is elected president, he says that political consultants who handle overseas elections in sketchy places with corrupt politicians, as he himself has done on occasion, have a joke. “We like to say law, order, freedom — pick one, amigo.”

More seriously, Murphy suggests, “We turn into Paraguay. Which is probably an insult to Paraguay. Trump suing the attorney general because he tried to turn off the air-conditioning in the Rayburn building. It’ll turn into a bad reality show. And all the crap you see in foreign countries where the parliament members are suing each other and everything turns into a big legitimacy fight. .  .  . We lose everything. The brand will be destroyed.

“Then the problem becomes how are we the world’s reserve currency anymore? We get away with a lot of shit because people think we have a stable system. But if your banker comes in one day wearing a diaper, speaking gibberish, you’re going to pull your money out of that checking account. So that has a huge potential impact on our ability to protect our economic strength. We borrow a lot of f — ing money. Because people think the number one safest instrument in the world is the U.S. Treasury bond. And if we start making reality-show clowns in charge? Run on the American bank. You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He’ll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China.”

On Super Tuesday night (the first installment), the Right to Rise crew packs HMS Bounty, a neighborhood bar on Wilshire Boulevard, to watch election returns, as civilian bystanders now instead of participants. It’s one of Murphy’s favorite old-school dinosaur haunts, dark-wood-paneled and nautical-themed, with Patsy Cline and Dean Martin and Louis Prima on the jukebox. They filmed an episode of Mad Men here, and it feels like nothing would need to be changed to make it a period set.

The bar sits across from what used to be the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was shot. And a couple of Murphy’s young crew mention that they’re later heading out for Tex-Mex at El Coyote, which happens to be where Sharon Tate ate her last meal before getting slaughtered by the Manson Family. I mention to Murphy that between these and the Biggie Smalls assassination site, right outside his office window, death seems to be stalking these establishmentarians. “We call this ‘The Voyage of the Damned Party,’ ” he cracks, as a waitress trips over my reporting bag, nearly becoming yet another casualty.

As we knock back drinks, passing shared plates of fried everything, we watch the returns come in. It’s Trump’s night yet again, as he bags seven more states. Cruz nabs three. Rubio, already doing the dead man’s float, only pulls lonely 17-delegate Minnesota. “Please clap,” sneers David Johnson (DJ), still nursing a Rubio grudge, as he lifts his old boss’s desperate quip from the campaign trail, when Jeb hit an applause line and there was none to be heard. DJ describes himself as a “senior adviser to Mike Murphy — I tell him he’s a handsome man.” DJ is a Jeb loyalist and old Florida hand who is one of Murphy’s favorites. Murphy says DJ will never be famous, “but he makes the army run.” With DJ’s long memory and grudge-holding capabilities, Murphy adds, “He could’ve been the mayor of Cleveland in 1931.”

Murphy himself isn’t much of a drinker anymore, but when he orders a Blue Moon, DJ looks as though Murphy had just tried on a pair of lady-boots. “Marco beer,” DJ grimaces. “Lots of foam.”

With just half a Marco beer in him, Murphy starts waxing philosophic. The game isn’t as much fun as it used to be. Everything is so postmodern and meta that “nothing means anything, because everything is what the scam is. I’ve always wanted to run a campaign where the bumper sticker is ‘We don’t have a bumper sticker.’ The press would eat it up.” It’s all process and horse race — who cares what anyone stands for — so long as you’re up and not down. So many simpleton reporters — whose depth of knowledge extends to whatever they read in the Real Clear Politics polls average that morning. Fly-by-night pollsters feeding the media, which is creating news so that they can report on it. A never-ending, sausage-making, feedback loop. Plus, Right to Rise got dumped-on every single day. And to top it all off, Murphy’s mom died right in the middle of the cycle. Keeled over from a cerebral hemorrhage after leaving the beauty parlor. He was notified while in New York, as rich guys were straightening him out on bumper sticker glue. The docs said she had 48 hours, and he got back home to Michigan in time for a semi-conscious hand-squeeze from the woman who brought him into this world, before she slipped away. Even for a happy warrior like him, the year was a bit of a grind.

Murphy watches Trump get that much closer to walking off with his party, and maybe even his country if nobody takes Trump out at an open convention. He refuses to use the words “brokered convention,” since “there really aren’t many brokers anymore besides Mark Levin.” Murphy’s certainly up for one, as he is sick of our sanitized infomercial conventions anyway. Being a student of political history, he pines for the days when there were no primaries. “You’d just pack a quart of liquor, a revolver, and go to the convention.”

I suggest to Murphy that many of these things he’s decrying have been the tricks of his trade. He’s like a magician denouncing the false-bottomed top hat. “I don’t mind technique,” he says. “I can be shameless. I have a long career at this. But when everything is a short con, then there’s never another short con. Because you need trust, and you’ve destroyed it.”

He tells me that when he was still a young buck, his mother had a friend who was married to a Leo Burnett ad man — “you know, Don Draper, basically.” Murphy showed him an early ad he’d cut, a clever but unnecessarily negative one. “And he said, ‘It’s funny,’ ” Murphy recalls. “But then he added, ‘Let me tell you, as an ad guy, I work for McDonald’s. And every day, we hate Burger King. We hate those sonsofbitches. And we’d love to run an ad that says: Here’s Burger King, it’s full of worms. But then Burger King would run: McDonald’s hamburgers will give you cancer. And at the end of it, we’ve destroyed hamburgers. We would f — the category.’ ”

Republican party politics and cancer worm-burgers— not so different, says Murphy. “I don’t mind a good fight on an issue. I like that stuff. I don’t mind negative ads. But when the fighting is over meaningless stuff, like ‘you’re-low-energy-because-you-use-big-words-and-don’t-hate-anybody-and-I-wear-a-red-hat-that-says-Make-America-Great-Again-because-I-played-a-business-guy-on-TV’? We cheapen the category to the point where we’re getting an outcome that is actually a bit dangerous.”

The next morning, at his well-appointed but unostentatious Hancock Park home, Murphy’s less melancholy. He shows me his study-full of curios, his Soviet propaganda pieces and old vaudeville playbills, a telephone from the Nixon White House and Bob Hope’s library chair (picked up at an estate sale) and the banjo that he’s teaching himself to play. He shows me his 2-year-old daughter and his lovely wife Tiffany Daniel, a fellow Preston Sturges fanatic who was a producer in the business but who says that she’s “now in the business of toddlers.” The longtime bachelor married her in 2011, his reward, he suggests, for a lifetime of being “very picky.”

Murphy seems to have a happy life away from politics, which might explain why he disappears for years at a time in between high-profile races. He’s a man of varied and many enthusiasms: from gyroplanes to photography to blues piano to taking two-week voyages on no-frills transpacific container ships where he rises with the sun and bangs out scripts on deck, then puts his laptop down and watches ice volcanoes go by.

When friends send notes checking up on him, making sure he’s okay after all the recent sour press, he thanks them for their concern, but tells them he’s quite all right. “My revenge is living well,” he says. Next, “I want to go get on a freighter and go through the Panama Canal. All I’ve ever wanted in my life is freedom and access. I like being backstage and watching the weird, human drama of all of these strange personalities that politics attracts.”

We get to talking about some of these strange birds. And the “E” word comes up again — this mythic Establishment whose slats everyone keeps kicking in. Murphy would like to know which establishment we’re talking about. There are so many, often with competing interests. He starts ticking them off: The Beltway, conservative media establishment who were mostly for Rubio. The Republican finance establishment of New York/Dallas who were mostly for Jeb. The Christian conservative establishment, largely pulling for Cruz and Ben Carson. The cable-news business establishment who are, whatever they insist, for Trump, since Trump equals ratings. Then there’s the K Street establishment — they’re for whoever wins.

But just as notable, he points out, is the antiestablishment establishment. The professional stokers of anger and discontent, those who settle, as a way of life, on unsettledness. “Like, Antiestablishment Inc.,” Murphy says. “You can find them at 123 Establishment Lane, Des Moines, Iowa. Often, they’re involved with the postage meter or credit card machine somewhere for small-dollar donations.” He cites the old Eric Hoffer maxim: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Take, for instance, he says, the Tea Party — “a racket, though it’s supposed to be a nonracket,” full of faux four-star generals who say, “ ’You’ve got to pay me because .  .  . I represent the Nebraska sub-Army 14 of the Tea Party,’ and there’d be like four or five guys arguing over who’s in charge of it.” It reminds Murphy of when he used to do referendum campaigns in Dade County. “There’d always be these charming old Cubans who’d come in and say, ‘Colonel Escobar is willing to endorse on his radio show, but he requires certain considerations. One million dollars.’ ”

“And we’d be like, ‘Thirty-five hundred dollars cash and lunch today.’ ”

“ ’We agree!’ ”

Murphy concedes there are lots of voters who “subscribe to a loose set of principles that D.C.’s broken. They’re tired of the establishment. Tired of people in the racket.” But there’s a racket of people sending them letters asking for money. “The poor old lady sends her $25 to defeat Nancy Pelosi, and $22 of it goes to ‘fundraising costs.’ ”

All these rackets create a grievance industry. “And you can’t have grievance politics,” cautions Murphy, “without endless whining. I think if you got the Founding Fathers or the first hundred guys killed at Anzio Beach, brought them back to life, and said, ‘What do you think of all this?’ [they’d say], ‘What a bunch of whiners. Have you ever had 400 Germans comin’ at ya? Put on a red hat and say Make America Great Again? What have you done, pal?’ ”

But ever the happy warrior, Murphy tries to take a sanguine view. “If we have real, creative destruction here with Trump, and we have Armageddon or worse, out of the ruins will come new successes. New movements. And eventually, new rackets.”

“And I’ll be in on them,” Murphy says with a half-smile. “I admit it, I’m a racketeer.”

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.