Chasing Kerry

I had spent nearly a month on the campaign trail with John Kerry when I decided to break out my viking costume. I bring a viking costume with me everywhere I go. You just never know when you might have a need in this area. I used to use a gorilla suit, but over time I found it was generally too hot to wear on the job, particularly indoors. Every event in the world can be broken down into one of two types: those in which it is appropriate to go dressed in a viking costume, and those in which it is not. (Inappropriate: memorial service for slain Salvadoran nuns. Appropriate: fishing retreat for the John Birch Society.) By Super Tuesday, I was convinced that the campaign trail was a viking-appropriate venue.

Wearing a viking costume certainly seemed to enliven my otherwise routine man-on-the-street interviews, like this one, at Tougaloo College, in Jackson, Mississippi:

ME [in viking costume]: Are you more concerned this election season with electability or likability?

TOUGLOO STUDENT [bursting out laughing]: Get out of here with that!

The other journalists following Kerry, sure that I was goofing on them, kept asking me all day why I was dressed in a viking costume. What could I say? It's not my job to imbue the campaign with seriousness. If it's theirs, that's their problem.

Besides, I didn't care anymore. In the weeks since the Wisconsin primary, I had learned that the campaign trail is no place for a normal human being concerned with maintaining his sanity. It is like being trapped in a monstrous, three-dimensional voice-mail world designed by Satan. At each stop, the candidate makes an appearance, and it is the same thing over and over again:

"To hear my position on trade, press 1.

"To observe me in a vigorous public display of my athletic prowess, press 2.

"To hear me unconvincingly assert my place in a tradition dating back to Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, press 3."

At each new stop, every journalist on the candidate's plane is frantically pressing "0," trying to get a human being on the phone, but all they get is the same recording: "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you. To hear these menu options again, press 1. . . ."

For campaign reporters in the modern media age of round-the-clock content, the mind-numbing repetition presents a grim logistical problem. Their job is to continually Feed the Beast, providing their employers with fresh meat every few hours. The task is so demanding that, with a few exceptions, the campaign press corps struck me as more tragic than villainous. David Halbfinger of the New York Times, the most maligned journalist on Kerry's plane, looked like a man who knew that thirty years down the road he would still be two hours from deadline. Once, while we were boarding at the airport in Buffalo, he knelt on the tarmac right in front of the plane, pulled out his computer and started typing. He couldn't even wait the thirty seconds to get into the plane.

Desperate to Feed the Beast, journalists following the campaign end up chasing after every rotten, festering scrap thrown their way. The day after legendary Internet swine Matt Drudge put out a rumor about Kerry having a mistress somewhere in Africa, reporters on the plane pounced on the sordid and unsubstantiated tale, weaving Kerry's denials into their stories. I tried to ask Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times why she mentioned the rumor in her piece.

"Excuse me, Sheryl?" I said. "Can I ask you a question for my story?"

"No," she said.

"But you haven't even heard my question yet," I said.

"Look," she said. "What I have to say, I say in my story. I don't want to be a figure in this."

"But," I protested, "you are a figure in this."

"Well, guess what?" she snapped. "When I interview someone, I give them a choice about whether or not they want to be in the story."

Right. Unless you happen to be a presidential candidate's alleged mistress in Kenya.

There is a strong social element to working on the campaign trail. Sooner or later you notice that all around you, people are enjoying one another's company. You want to have that proverbial beer with the proverbial guys after work to celebrate the end of a hard day of digesting and re-reporting the same speech you have heard 5,000 times. So you think, "Hey, maybe I should just cover the same bullshit everyone else is covering."

Once you do that, a whole world suddenly opens up to you. There are campaign press handlers around all the time to help you with questions that you already know the answers to, and voters around at every event ready to tell you why they a) support or b) do not support the candidate.

So I started doing routine interviews after campaign events, sans viking costume. Suddenly, all the other reporters were my buddy, at least to my face. Even the staffers, who had previously eyed me warily, responded with enthusiasm once I began asking the right kinds of questions -- as in the case of the night of the Wisconsin primary:

ME: Are you pleased with the results?

KERRY AIDE: You know, when a Patriots fan can come into Packer territory and win by a touchdown, that's pretty good!

After years on the campaign trail, many reporters can no longer tell the difference between this kind of stuff and something meaningful. At one point, I was seated next to David Hume Kennerly, Newsweek's ace photographer. Before long, he turned on his laptop and began showing me hundreds of photos he took on a recent trip to Central Asia with Donald Rumsfeld, whom he considers an old buddy. Kennerly described each photo individually, opening them with a tap on his mouse pad.

"This one's really great," he would say. "I like the way he's looking out the window of the helicopter. There's, like, this weird concern on his face."

When we landed in Atlanta, the campaign staff entered "2" on the voice-mail menu and produced a football for the candidate to throw around. Kerry does the sports-on-the-tarmac thing a lot. It looks great on television, but in person the effect is surreal. The entire press crew will be standing at the ass end of the plane, when suddenly Kerry's gleaming, toothy figure appears out of nowhere and starts performing a photogenic ballet. The cameramen drop everything and run full-speed to encircle him. If he has to run to one side to catch the ball, the entire closed loop of journalists travels with him. From a distance this looks almost biological, like viral cells attacking a drifting mitochondrion.

I had nothing else to do -- what is there to do in that situation? -- so I decided to get in on it. I signaled to Kerry and ran a pattern across the concrete. The candidate turned and gracefully hit me right on the hands. The cameras followed, then moved on as I threw the ball to a staffer.

Back on the plane, I wrote in my notebook: "Throws tight spiral."

When people read campaign coverage, they should be aware that man-on-the-street interviews almost never take place on the actual street. They take place at the campaign events, which are attended only by people who care enough to come see the candidate. Their responses invariably fall into one of three categories: yea ("I like his straightforwardness"), nay ("You didn't feel like he was knowledgeable") or undecided ("I'm waffling between him and Edwards"). You never see answers like "I think they all suck" or "I'm not voting, and I hope they all die in a fire." The reason is simple: People inclined to say things like that live far beyond the geographical boundaries of campaign events. In order to find them, you need to use every minute of your allotted time in each city just to get to where they are.

Take New Orleans, where Kerry's speech was held on the river downtown, near the French Quarter. To get out of the area, I had to walk through five blocks of tourist shops full of plastic voodoo-skeleton souvenirs and aprons bearing messages such as new orleans: don't fuck with the chef! Then the shops melted away into bars and daiquiri stands, and then into warehouses -- and finally, just past a French cemetery, right behind a Winn-Dixie, I came to a stark dirt lot full of low-rise brick buildings. This used to be Storyville, the birthplace of jazz. Now it's the Iberville housing projects, one of the roughest parts of New Orleans.

Going door-to-door, it took a while before I found anyone who actually plans on voting in the election. The approval rating of politicians in places like this hovers somewhere between Stalin and athlete's foot. I finally found Lethia Guchard, a sixty-year-old resident of the projects.

"I don't like to use the word hate -- hate is a bad word," she told me. "But sometimes that's how I feel about politicians. I don't believe a word they say. A stray dog deserves better than what we've got. Look at what we have to live with. There used to be a bleach factory right behind here. A lot of folks in this neighborhood got real sick. There'd be sludge from the factory running into the street, and the kids would have to walk through it to get to school. We tried to get them to do something, but every time I went to City Hall, they'd just send out a different person to tell me they were busy. Now they're going to close this place up and we're all going to be moved somewhere else."

"Excuse me," I said, looking at my watch. "I hate to interrupt, but I've got to go."

"What?" Guchard said.

"Look, this is all very interesting," I said, "but I'm working, you understand? And I've got to get back right away. I might miss John Kerry playing Frisbee."

She stared in shock. "Playing what?"

"Actually, he prefers football," I said. "And he's pretty good at it. You should see it, he throws a really nice ball."

She nodded. "Oh," she said. "OK. Well, nice talking to you."

That's the problem with the endless campaign coverage that America receives: For every one picture of a disinterested voter, you get a thousand heroic pictures of the candidate in front of energized crowds. Rather than looking at the whole country, the press corps focuses exclusively on a rigorously stage-managed soap opera of the democratic process, where all of America looks clean and hopeful. It's a never-ending advertisement for the health and functionality of the system, even though half the country considers the system neither healthy nor functional.

All that really matters is that campaign reporters are kept on a steady diet of the he-said-she-said routine that passes for politics: You, sir, are soft on defense and won't spend enough on intelligence! No, sir, it is you, sir, who is soft on defense and won't pay enough for body armor! Once the day's exchange of shots is safely recorded, everyone checks in to a five-star hotel and tries to sleep off the sea-scallop fajitas and blackberry creme brulee they ate in the press filing center. America is doing just fine!

If large numbers of Americans are turned off by politics, it's in no small part because they are sick of consuming that singular process the campaign represents: a bunch of rich people talking to one another in front of the help. It's the worst show on television. And it's going to be on nonstop for the next seven months.

(April 7, 2004)