campaign desk

The Edwards Slog

Little sleep, little news
January 8, 2008

Somewhere in New Hampshire, a couple dozen or so journalists are suffering the consequences of another all-nighter on the John Edwards press bus.

If it’s anything like the one the campaign ran in Iowa, just six days ago, the journalists are tired. They are sick of the food—just snacks, really—and desperate for a moment to sit at a table, plug in the laptop, and file a story.

I know this because I joined the traveling press corps for a good chunk of Edwards’ thirty-six-hour “Marathon for the Middle Class” across Iowa. It was to be a feat of great endurance, where Edwards would show how hard he was willing to work, not just to convince every last Iowan, but by extension, as Our Next President.

And I wanted to be there, to tell the story of what it’s like to track a presidential contender through the dead of night, from the Mississippi to the Missouri.

My presence was not appreciated.

Once my angle was known, the candidate’s press staff exchanged a round of nervous Blackberry messages. For most part, they decided to let me be, but insisted that everything they said in person or over the bus’s P.A.—anodyne greetings, trip information, idle jokes—be strictly off the record, as the rest of the press corps had previously agreed. At the end of the trip, the bus’s top staffer refused to give me his last name.

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Many of the journalists weren’t much more sympathetic. One called me a “spider.” Twice. In heated discussions, they argued that I’d unfairly dropped in without advance notice, that I wasn’t giving them a chance to avoid being “part of the story,” that they didn’t meet the Supreme Court’s definition of public figures, and that they didn’t like seeing their names in print. (“Except at the top of your story?” I asked one.)

We worked out an uneasy compromise, which I’ll honor. I could use atmospheric quotes so long as I was vague about their precise source—I could only attach a name or outlet if cleared on an individual basis.

When I later crossed paths with Mitt Romney’s press corps, and told them that I’d be writing a slice of life story about them, no one seemed worried. Romney, of course, has long been viewed as a major national contender, and these journalists were all firmly mid-career. Granted, I didn’t follow them for over twenty-seven hours, but for whatever reason, they didn’t consider a twenty-four-year-old reporter from CJR—or the attendant possibility that my article would be linked from Gawker or Romenesko—much of a threat.

While Edwards was a major Iowa contender, his bus was not the same sort of plum assignment. And while I didn’t do a complete canvas, the average age of reporters aboard from Newsweek, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, The Stranger (a Seattle alt-weekly), CBS, and the New York Daily News was about twenty-seven. These were young folks, out to make their name without screwing up in the spotlight.

In any case, they didn’t have much to worry about. For the most part, they were scarily diligent, trundling off the bus in the dead of night to watch and record Edwards’ every word.

That was exactly what the campaign wanted. Everyone on the bus recognized that this was a gimmick. While local TV turned out for several bookend events, at the middle stops—scheduled for midnight, 2:15, and 5:15 in the morning—the national retinue was the only game in town (that would be Atlantic, Centerville, and Ottumwa, respectively.)

“It’s not for them,” said one writer, remarking on the crowds. “It’s for us.”

The candidate made no “news” throughout the trip, and at these small, late-night (or early-morning) events, his speeches were brief enough that they could have been TV spots—a bus member clocked one at under three minutes. “It’s so short as to almost be meaningless,” said one newspaper reporter. Someone joked that the presentations were so rote that the corps could make up cards and play stump speech bingo.

If something noteworthy had happened, it would have been difficult to get the word out. The bus—a standard, if not luxurious coach—had no power plugs for its print or video journalists. And the schedule didn’t allow for standstill filing time.

“You’ve got to do something about this,” one newspaper reporter complained to the staff, early in the night. “No one’s going to write about this if you don’t get us some power.”

Eventually the campaign rounded up a few power strips, and shuttled them from event to event, where they were plugged into outlets on supporters’ kitchen counters and in the backs of campaign offices. But in the dead of night, the motorcade came and went from each stop in about fifteen minutes, allowing little time to juice up. There was a risk that the whole bus could go dark.

“I might as well not be on this bus, if my laptop doesn’t work,” said Tricia Miller, who works for both NBC and The National Journal. “If there’s a bus full of reporters and they do an event and nobody writes about it, did the event happen?”

Television reporters like Miller had it the worst. Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC (but not CNN) had reporters—known as “campaign embeds”—on the bus. Not only did their computer batteries drain faster than those of print reporters while capturing and editing tape, they needed them to last through the long uploads of data heavy video files. And their cameras needed power, too.

“I’m the eyes and ears for CBS on the ground,” said Aaron Lewis. “That’s why they give me the camera. They don’t expect me to be a professional cameraman. But I’m here to shoot whatever goes down.”

But a broadcast network only has twenty-two minutes of news to program each night. Lewis, Miller, and the other embeds were only likely to upload a minute of footage a day. Even that could take hours, considering file size and wireless modem speeds. And if Edwards was going to make the evening news, odds are that they’d use some file footage, or footage shot by one of the full crews who had better equipment, and who sometimes dropped by for single events.

Despite the power trouble, the bus was a step up from the campaign’s earlier arrangement, when reporters were hauled in vans with close quarters, poor shocks, and no bathroom.

Either way, the reporters described life on the road as “being in the bubble.” There’s not a lot of information coming in, and while a few undecided voters turn up at events, it’s far more likely you’ll meet hard-core campaign supporters and volunteers.

That was the case when, well after our scheduled arrival of 10 p.m., we were dropped off at Edwards’s Council Bluffs office. It was very cold. A local CBS technician sat inside a running transmission truck, watching David Letterman. Jo Piazza, a feature writer for the New York Daily News, stood outside the office’s back door, and lit up a Camel with a match. She was wearing a cream-colored coat with a fur-lined hood. Two newsmagazine employees shivered outside on what the candidate would call an “incredibly freezing night.”

“So, do you want to go talk to some ordinary supporters,” asked one.

“I guess. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” the other replied. “But I already did that today.”

I chuckled, and wrote down the quotes.

“You can’t use that,” said one.

“Why not?” I replied.

“It’ll look really bad.”

“Well, it’s clear you guys are joking, right? Or half-joking?”

“Well, right.”

That ended the conversation. The cluster broke up. Moments later I heard a woman telling one of those newsweekly reporters that she’d never been to New York.

He smiled, and replied: “You should really come visit, after having all these New Yorkers coming out to see you.”

We were easy to pick out. It wasn’t just the notebooks and voice recorders, but our accents, our style of dress, and, for the most part, our youth. When the events were in private homes, some reporters would take a moment to thank the host for putting up with us.

Most of the house events were packed like a clown car, and the press didn’t have much room to move. When the candidate was out of view, reporters thrust their recorders through doorjambs in an effort to record what they could not see. “We should almost be pooling this,” fumed a wire service reporter, after he’d circled the outside of an Atlantic, Iowa, farmhouse to see if he could get a better view of the action through a window.

“Almost? We should be!” replied another journalist.

Outside, reporters noticed that Edwards’ custom coach, with its conspicuous signage—“America Belongs To Us” in red block letters—is missing. Edwards’ spokesman, Mark Kornblau, is in the cold, hopping from foot to foot. He explains that some sort of “electrical problem” has forced the senator, his family, and the senior staff off their custom coach and onto a backup.

Seema Metha, an L.A. Times reporter, passes this information back to her editors. Soon, rewrite put up a short, snarky blog item. (“Oops!” it read. “Oh, the awful symbolism.”)

It was linked from the Drudge Report, and come morning, word on the bus was that Metha had had been cursed out by the press staff.

After a morning stop, Edwards himself boarded the press bus bearing a tray of hot coffee. Jay Newton-Small of Time pressured him into an impromptu press conference. Josie Hearn, a reporter for The Politico, later wrote that the press (herself included) couldn’t “think of a single substantive question to ask.”

Edwards closed that huddle by promising to hold another “avail” after the next event. True to his word, after a living room rally in Mt. Pleasant, Edwards met the press along a shoveled sidewalk for a few minutes of questions. Spokesman Kornblau stood in the house’s driveway, taping his own copy.

Someone asks a follow-up to that day’s front page New York Times story by Michael Gordon, highlighting the senator’s call to quickly withdraw all American soldiers—even military advisers—from Iraq. It was the only substantive question I heard on the trip. (The bus hadn’t been impressed with the story; Gordon had joined up for a day to get the interview, and as best they could tell, it was old news; there’d been no change in position to justify front-page treatment.)

Everyone seemed to be tiring of the routine, especially since Edwards wasn’t saying much. Elizabeth Edwards made some news when she accused the Obama campaign of running a misleading, anti-Edwards ad, but all the press really had was a lot of color and many new, boiled-down, versions of the candidate’s stump speech.

The tour was scheduled to end around 10 p.m., when Edwards would swoop back into Des Moines to join John Mellencamp at a rally. (“Guess Who Else Was Born in A Small Town?” asked an e-mailed press release.)

In a Cedar Rapids Marriott, five journalists from the bus skipped the speech and waited in the hotel bar for a car back to Des Moines. They would miss a coffee-shop event in Grinnell. Edwards’ bus rolled up before the press, and he’d started without them.

“We got here late, we’re all the way in the back. It’s not worth elbowing up and risking injury. And I’m tired. And I’ve already shot fourteen of these,” fumed Lewis, the CBS embed. When the event ended, he turned to kid the ABC and Fox embeds. “Get the news in that? I have you so scooped, and you don’t even know it!”

When we got to the Mellencamp event, the unshowered, unshaven, sleep-deprived journalists stood on roped-off risers to the side of the room. We’d been led in the disabled entrance.

Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.