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!”