OTTUMWA, Iowa — In a fit of closing activity, John Edwards is on a statewide thirty-six-hour bus tour. And what bus tour would be complete without a press bus trailing behind?
About two dozen reporters, mostly young (Slate’s Chris Beam just turned twenty-three; Robert Willet, a photographer for Edwards’s home state Raleigh News & Observer is an outlier at forty-eight) get shuttled from event to event on a chartered coach. At the front of the bus, a pile of snacks–goldfish crackers, apple sauce singles, mini-muffins–are piled on top of cases of caffeinated soft drinks and bottled water. There was some coffee when we pulled out of a steelworkers union hall last night, but nearly twelve hours later, it’s long gone.
So far the biggest concern on the bus has been power–the kind that fuel laptops, cell phones, and cameras. The photographers sitting in the front of the bus have jury-rigged an inverter to the bus cigarette lighter, a mess of white and brown wires. While there are some complaints about the adequacy of that set-up, it’s better than the system in the back, which doesn’t exist. The back of the bus has bloggers, TV producers, and The New York Times nervously staring at their battery meters as they strain to write, or upload their work over cellular modems.
Things are better for the next few minutes, until we pull out of here, which at the moment is Ottumwa. I’m kneeling by a desk in a row of six open laptops in Edwards’s Ottumwa office. Raelyn Johnson, a twenty-seven-year old embedded producer from ABC, turns her camera on us: “How does it feel to have power?” she asks.
“We exist again.” replies a colleague.
“This is what it’s like in the other America. There are two Americas. One with power, one without power,” jokes a blogger for a national magazine, riffing off the Edwards campaign line. “I love a good two Americas joke!” says Johnson, before turning off her camera. On to Fairfield!
Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.