Covering election campaigns is like a big game of Twister, where keeping your balance leaves little time to see who is spinning the arrow. Right hand on a Chelsea Clinton college-student Q&A, left foot on an Obama suburban town hall meeting, the script seems written before you get your XLR cable into the mult-box. But every so often something off-message breaks through. Just hours before the polls opened in Pennsylvania, Bill Clinton spoke into my tape recorder, and I got a taste of what it’s like when hungry reporters come to feed.
Monday
The day before the Pennsylvania primary I’m preparing my routine news spots for WHYY, the NPR member station in Philadelphia. On this same Monday, Bill Clinton started his cross-state trek at a high school in Greensburg, then on to Arnold, and a rally in Pittsburgh. At about 4:15 that afternoon, he was talking to me on a cell phone, in one of a series of back to back, one-on-one interviews arranged by the campaign before he headed to the Cambria County Historical Society in Ebensburg. A chirpy PR man from the campaign had called about 3:00 in the afternoon to set it up, in plenty of time for drive time.
I have three questions. The third refers to Clinton’s Jessie Jackson comment during the South Carolina primary, comparing Obama’s victory to Jackson’s in 1984 and 1988. Does he regret it and would he do it again? I ask.
“No,” he says, “I think they played the race card on me…”. Then he continues, for three and a half minutes as I watch the time code on my recorder. He says he has an office in Harlem, he helped out 1.4 million mostly black people with AIDS drugs, he appointed the most African American judges than any other president. “You have to go pretty far to call me a racist,” he says. Whoa.
And then, when he apparently thought he was off-mike, speaking to a companion, the kicker—“I don’t think I should have to take anymore shit for this, do you?”
I put a bite on the air for afternoon drive, but knew it would get smothered by heaps of voter vox and last minute campaign stops. So I went to work getting it up on the Web, hedging on whether or not to leave in the “shit.” A producer friend in New York says “no way.”My nephew in D.C. says “absolutely.” I call my editor at home. Put it in, she says.
Tuesday
The next morning I sleep in. At 10:30 I go online to check my email, and it’s bursting with questions and comments about my story. Fox News wants a headshot. Inside Edition wants an interview. WHYY’s Web guy calls to say the You Tube clip has 50,000 hits. Our election blog had more views in an hour than it has had in the previous seven weeks. The story is on Politico, The Page, ABC’s The Note, MSNBC’s First Read, someone heard it mentioned on Good Morning America. Fox News has it online as their lead story.
When I get to WHYY, where Inside Edition wants to film me at work, I’m rushed into the green room for a session with a make-up artist before I go on television. She goes to work with brushes, powders, sprays, and sponges. She grimaces and says “what to do about these eyebrows?” No time for that, says the producer and I’m rushed out to do the interview.
“Susan, take us back to yesterday, what were you thinking when he was answering your question?” They’re working him like a dog, I say. He’s frustrated, he’s angry. He’s wondering what happened to his street cred. He’s got black friends too, you know.
Back at my desk, I hear a clip of Bill Clinton in Pittsburgh, denying that he made the comments to me. Wagging his finger in the reporter’s face, he challenges the reporter to listen to my question and the entire answer. Soon enough, I’m hearing my question and answer being played on CNN and MSNBC. Andrea Mitchell is talking about it.
I call the Clinton campaign. How could he deny this, its on tape, I ask. And then we go down a rabbit hole. Clinton didn’t deny it, says an aide, and he blames the reporter, NBC’s Mike Memoli, for asking the wrong question about my interview. The aide says Memoli confused Clinton by asking him if he thinks Obama played the race card in Pennsylvania. Huh?
Memoli gets a finger-wagging, and the national media jumps on that. It’s the lead story on many major political Web sites—including The Huffington Post, Drudge, The Wall Street Journal. Everyone wants to talk about, is president Clinton losing his magic? Hillary refuses to answer for her husband. Obama misses a chance to strike back—I don’t know what he’s talking about, he says to reporters at a diner north of Philadelphia, while continuing to eat waffles.
And the hits keep coming, 23,000 on our site by the end of the day. The YouTube clip has more than 275,000 hits, and it’s the number one most viewed clip for politics that day. Reporters and voters are hungry for a little glimpse of gold, an off-script moment of truth, even though race in American politics is the undertow many would like to ignore.
One man who’s laughing his way through the episode is Rush Limbaugh, who calls me an “Infobabe.”
Wednesday
When I open The New York Times Wednesday morning, there’s an article in the national section with the headline “More Finger Wagging From a Miffed Bill Clinton.” Maureen Dowd talks about it in her column. Iranian television has the headline “Clinton Blames Reporters for Remarks.” The New York Post reads “Cussin’ Bubba Goes Bill-istic at ‘Race Card.” The Philadelphia Daily News writes a piece about how I found myself in the middle of a media “imbroglio.”
But just as quickly as it began, it ended. No more emails in my inbox from either camp, the phone stops ringing. I’m back to stories on the city budget, troubled social service agencies, and student loan short falls.
The game has moved on to Indiana and North Carolina. The circus has left town.
Susan Phillips reports on city politics for WHYY, the NPR member station in Philadelphia.