New York Times investigative reporter Chris Drew has covered Barack Obama’s candidacy, including pieces on his fundraising practices, voting record in the Illinois State Senate, and time in Chicago.

1. Most of the campaign coverage we see is on-the-bus stuff. What’s the value of doing off-the-trail coverage?

Some of the most valuable stuff comes from what’s off the trail because on the trail the campaigns are trying to stage everything they can. The stump speeches are the same. You’re trying to fight through covering the pageantry, but if you want to know where the candidate really stands on things what his or her background is, what they’ve really done on issues in the past, who they’re getting their money from, who’s got influence with them, any questions about their character, you’ve got to do your own digging.

I’ve been covering Obama for a year, and I’ve never met the man, never spoken to him. That’s a tactical decision on the part of the campaign. I’ve done seven or eight front page stories on Obama, and they’ve never put him on the phone to answer any questions.

It’s fairly standard for these campaigns to shield the principal, as they call him, because anything the candidate says can be used against him, and they try to run interference by having other people answer those questions, so their words can’t be used against him later.

But, it surprised me early on in March 2007, when he was still the longer shot upstart that we couldn’t even get him on the phone to respond.

2. Talk about using the investigative approach to cover a candidate.

You’re looking at where the candidate came from and who has been around him, and what that tells you about his essence. That’s often more revealing than what they’re saying. Often the public positions are carefully worked out by their advisors as to what will appeal to the most people, and sometimes they’re at odds with what they’ve done in the past.

With Obama, we started looking at his financial disclosure records. When he got a lot of money from his book deal, one of the things he invested in was a $100,000 in a few odd little stocks that it turned out had been bought after he consulted with a big campaign contributor who was a hedge fund manager who had invested in those stocks. It was surprising b/c the rest of his investments were more conservative.

And he said he supposed to have set up a blind trust, but he did it afterward. This raised a lot of initial questions, because he’s a very careful guy, he’s a lawyer, and yet.

He’s had a longtime relationship with Tony Rezko, who was recently convicted of some influence peddling that didn’t involve Obama, but there’s the question of why he was hanging out with him for 17 years.

Maybe the biggest thing is that he’s portrayed himself as a different kind of politician and a lot of people believe that he represents a different kind of politics and so it was pretty interesting when we took a look at how he navigated the rough and tumble world of Chicago politics.

He’s always coming up with fairly nuanced positions and in the Illinois senate he was trying to compromise, and it was an interesting look at what he would be like as president. He might not be as liberal as he appears, as partisan as people can be and he might be somebody who is trying to work out deals with both sides.

3. How does this relate to the narratives that the campaign is putting forward and also that the media is constructing.

Every campaign is trying to come up with a narrative to represent the candidate and we’re trying to examine the story they’re telling and trying to find what the meaning of the differences is.

One of the things that is just the recognition that he’s raised extraordinary amounts of money in conventional ways, not just on the Internet, which is all the more amazing for a guy who portrays himself as a new kind of politician.

The common theme of all these stories is looking at where he is like other politicians and coming to the conclusion that while he is very charismatic and very smart, he’s also a very deft politician and that’s how he got where he is. It’s funny, but for all politicians it would be a fairly obvious thing to say, but for him, it’s actually significant.

4. Do you think that the media’s construct of Obama is affected by the stories you’ve done?

By peeling back the layers, and story by story, certain adjustments gradually get made in the sense of who he is, and over time that filters into everyday coverage.

One example is when Obama opted out of public financing. He’d always backed public financing, and he said that if the Republican candidate did it, he would do it. But he’s raising such incredible sums of money, and for the first time the Democrats can really out-raise the Repub. That’s a good example where he can put aside some of the ideals that he’s espoused and be very pragmatic. And I noticed that there were a lot of newspaper editorials that were criticizing him for that, and that’s an example of where it’s starting to filter in, this sense of his pragmaticism.

5. A lot of your bylines are shared. How does that work?

This is such a high profile fascinating race, and it’s competitive in terms of coverage. If you have a couple of people, you can cover the ground twice as fast, it’s easy to get beat on these stories if you’re not moving quickly.

We try to divide up the reporting in ways that make sense, and depending on who is freer, they might take the lead writing on it, it varies.

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