<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n\n\nThe night before I began my career as a presidential campaign reporter, in September 2007, I finished Theodore White's The Making of the President, the classic account of the 1960 race, which opened up a new era of campaign reporting. That book began with a note of thanks: \"First, to the politicians of America\u2014men whom I have found over the long years the pleasantest, shrewdest and generally the most honorable of companions.\u2026 Second, I must thank my comrades in the press\u2014whose reporting at every level of American politics purifies, protects and refreshes our system from year to year.\"\n\nRight. It's been a long forty-eight years, Mr. White.\n\nBefore I start reminiscing, I want to make clear that there are some great and responsible journalists covering politics in America. It's a hard job, for all sorts of reasons, some of which I'll lay out here. It's often physically exhausting and also mind-numbingly dull much of the time. More importantly, if you're traveling with a campaign day in and day out, it's difficult to get any critical distance on what you're seeing, and the price you pay as a reporter for writing stuff that doesn't echo the campaign's message is excommunication from your sources, which doesn't sit well with your editors back at the home office.\n\nFortunately for me, I was on a somewhat unusual assignment, a long-term, supersecret project for Newsweek magazine. The agreement Newsweek had made with each of the campaigns was that in addition to the reporters covering them day to day, there would be another bunch whose material would be kept confidential and published in a special issue of the magazine, as well as in a book, that would come out after the election. So my job was\n\nbasically: Ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners on the expense account, get sources drunk and singing, then report back the behind-the-scenes story. I was supposed to follow whoever the front-runner was for the nomination, starting in the primaries and going right on through the general election. Back then, every pundit and hack on the trail (myself included) was drinking from the same Fountain of Conventional Wisdom (CW), and we'd all agreed that John McCain was finished, Fred Thompson didn't really want it, maybe Mitt Romney had a chance, but that the real candidate to watch was Rudy Giuliani. So Rudy was my man.\n\nOn one of my first days, I watched Rudy deliver his stump speech in Peterborough, New Hampshire. As you might imagine, it was a little focused on the \"terrorist war against us.\" His solution was to \"go on the offense\"\u2014meaning more aggressive torture techniques, recklessly increasing the size of our military forces, fighting an unending war in Iraq, and possibly bombing the shit out of Iran. \"If someone wants to kill your family,\" he was fond of saying, \"you can't negotiate with them. What do you negotiate? Who they are going to kill first?\"\n\nI listened to variations of this speech so many times over the next three months that I picked up one of Rudy's verbal ticks. A friend from The New York Times stopped me in midconversation once and said, \"Did you hear what you just said? That's what Rudy says all the time: \u2018The reality is\u2026' \"\n\nThe reality is: I quickly realized Rudy was a maniac. I had a recurring fantasy in which I took him out during a press conference (it was nonlethal, just something that put him out of commission for a year or so), saving America from the horror of a President Giuliani. If that sounds like I had some trouble being \"objective,\" I did. Objectivity is a fallacy. In campaign reporting more than any other kind of press coverage, reporters aren't just covering a story, they're a part of it\u2014influencing outcomes, setting expectations, framing candidates\u2014and despite what they tell themselves, it's impossible to both be a part of the action and report on it objectively. In some cases, you genuinely like the candidate you're covering and you root for him, because over the long haul you come to see him as a human being. For a long time, this was John McCain's ace in the hole with the press, whom he referred to as \"my base.\" Reporters rode along with him, and he joked with them, and that went a long way toward shaping the tone of their coverage. (Last January a group of reporters asked McCain's staff to make McCain campaign press T-shirts for them.) And because your success is linked to the candidate's, you want to be with a winner, because that's the story that makes the paper or the magazine or gets you on TV.\n\nIn my case, it was easy to despise Rudy. I'd spent two years covering the war in Iraq. I had a brother who was currently deployed there as an infantry platoon leader, and I had Iraqi friends who were now living as refugees. To listen to a man so casually invoke violence and warfare\u2014a man who'd never set foot in Iraq or in any war zone\u2014was troubling indeed. I wasn't alone in the press corps. I don't think I spoke to another journalist who ever said one good thing about the man. What did we say? We made fun of his divorces and his wives, that he'd married a second cousin, that he surrounded himself with corrupt cronies, that he had a piss-poor relationship with his children, etc. We talked about his megalomania and his cynical exploitation of September 11.\u00A0\n\nStill, I ate meals with staffers and campaign managers. I tried to say things that would make me appear sympathetic to Rudy while not technically lying. (\"Wow, he sure seems popular.\" \"I was in New York on 9/11, and I have to be honest with you, I was glad Rudy was in charge.\") I tried to stay out of any discussion about issues and to just repeat the mantra to myself: I am here to observe and record, observe and record.\n\nThe dance with staffers is a perilous one. You're probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you \"build trust,\" which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you're supposed to fuck them over; and they'll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this uff__ piece now; we'll give you something good later. No, don't write it this way, write it that way. We'll give you something good later.\n\nat the end of December, with Giuliani sitting out Iowa and the bottom falling out of his poll numbers in New Hampshire, I joined up with Mike Huckabee's campaign in Des Moines. When Huckabee won the caucus on January 3, it turned out to be the second-biggest story of the evening after Barack Obama's victory over Hillary. The two stories shared something in common: Almost everyone in the media whose job was to make predictions had gotten it dead wrong.\n\nHuck was traveling like a winner now\u2014police escort to the airport, 727 with all first-class seats to take him to Manchester and the New Hampshire primary. As the plane took off, Huckabee rolled an orange down the aisle, back to the forty or so reporters in the traveling press. (Orange rolling has a long tradition on campaign planes. Depending on the imagination and the blood-alcohol level back in the press section, all sorts of other objects get sent up the aisle\u2014windup toys, tennis balls, ice cubes, maybe a little dignity.)\n\nChip Saltsman, Huckabee's campaign manager, slouched down next to a reporter from Time and began to get nicely buzzed off some small bottles of Maker's Mark that had been smuggled onto the Baptist's plane. I had newsmagazine envy thinking I should have thought of the booze and gotten Chip drunk so he'd give me all the great stuff I was sure that bastard from Time was getting. Up in the front of the plane, grizzled campaign operative Ed Rollins sat with the actor Chuck Norris and his wife, Gena. We all agreed that Chuck was responsible for our being here. Huckabee had put Norris in an ad with him two months earlier. It featured Chuck and Huck reciting facts about Chuck Norris: \"My plan to secure the border? Two words: Chuck Norris.\" \"When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he isn't lifting himself up\u2014he's pushing the Earth down.\" There were a gazillion YouTube hits, and the ads brought Huckabee his first sustained round of national press coverage.\u00A0\n\nOn the plane, Huckabee was ecstatic. He gave an impromptu press conference in the aisle, telling us all he'd recently given a speech in the same ballroom where four years earlier Howard Dean had unleashed his scream. \"What would your scream sound like?\" a top political reporter for CNN asked. \"Could you do it for us?\" Huckabee didn't take the bait, but it gives some sense of how the press felt about the man. We thought he was a joke, from his views on evolution to gun control to homeschooling. But we cut him some slack because he was entertaining, and he played up being a yokel because he knew it worked with us.\n\nWe landed in Manchester late at night. Huckabee's people had lost the luggage, so we spent a half hour waiting on the tarmac in the cold, freezing our asses off and watching Judy Woodruff from PBS throw a fit while Huck's staff got their shit together.\n\nThrough a series of flukes, I somehow ended up at the same hotel as Huckabee while most of the other reporters were scattered across town. Over the next few days, I took up my post in the lobby of the Homewood Suites, figuring I might get a glimpse of Huckabee in an \"unguarded moment,\" just in case he ended up being the nominee or vice president. Maybe I'd catch him swearing, or bringing in a hooker, or breaking out in spontaneous prayer. Maybe he'd learn my name and I could be one of those reporters whom the candidate addresses on a first-name basis. \"Mikey, you have a question for me?\" There's a not-so-subtle hierarchy among reporters, and petty jealousies and ass-kissing competitions and displays of inflated self-importance break out all the time. (On the flight from Des Moines, I'd gone to the front of the plane and struck up a conversation with Huck's ad guy, thinking I might get something useful, but also maybe he'd introduce me to Huck's daughter, Sarah, and I wouldn't feel like the only loser on the plane who wasn't on a first-name basis with her. But she ended up talking to the Time guy, too.)\n\nOn Sunday, two days before the primary and a few hours before a Fox News debate, I sat down in the lobby to interview Saltsman and Rollins, when Chuck Norris and Gena approached. Gena was younger than Chuck and pretty hot. From a little distance, Chuck Norris looked exactly like Chuck Norris should, like a guy who could choke your ass out, quick. Up close, though, you could see he had a hearing aid. And his red hair and goatee were dyed. I did a quick check on IMDB as I sat there. Chuck Norris was 67 years old. It couldn't be so.\n\n\"Your staff hasn't gotten the Mucinex for my wife,\" he said to Saltsman. \"Gena's head still hurts, and all she wants is Mucinex, and we haven't got it.\"\n\n\"When did you ask for it?\" Saltsman said.\n\n\"Three days ago. We asked for it three days ago. Gena's been sick, and she hasn't gotten her Mucinex.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Chuck. Next time, whatever you need, just come right to me.\"\n\n\"Next time we'll have to bring our own guy along to take care of us,\" Chuck said.\n\n\"We'll get it for you right away, Chuck,\" Saltsman said, dispatching a low-level staff boy to Walgreens.\n\n\"We'll have to bring our own guy next time,\" Chuck said again.\n\nChuck and Gena made their exit, and Rollins started telling me how he'd threatened Mitt Romney that morning in the green room before a Fox News appearance. He'd been threatening Romney a lot lately. He'd told The Washington Post that he'd wanted to knock Romney's teeth out, a remark that made the Drudge Report. Now Rollins told me he walked up to Romney, shook his hand, and said, \" \u2018Nice teeth, governor.' His aides were in the fetal position,\" Rollins went on. \"They didn't know what the fuck to do. No one had ever talked to him like that. They were like, Oh shit, how the fuck do we keep Rollins away from the governor?\" His goal, he said, was to get inside Romney's head and \"psyche him out.\"\n\nJust then Huckabee came down into the lobby, dressed in a skintight yellow jogging suit. He started chatting with Chip and Ed. Chip suggested he take a state police escort with him on his run. Now that he was a winner, he needed the security.\n\n\"How far are you going to jog, Governor?\" I asked.\n\n\"Five K,\" he said, and then he told me he always liked to jog before a debate, to relax.\n\nI could see the overly dramatic paragraph already taking shape in my head: \"Mike Huckabee slipped on his yellow running suit, black water bottle attached to his hip, and went out onto the cold streets of Manchester to clear his head before his debate. It was his usual routine. The once overweight former governor of Arkansas now relied on the discipline of the marathon runner to get him through his toughest political contests.\u2026\"\n\nover the next two days, I drove around to a few other campaign stops for Huckabee, but the story on the Republican side was now clearly shifting to McCain. I didn't jump at the chance to cover him. I'd met him and thought he was affable, and I imagine he was at one time as honorable as everyone says. But his views on war and foreign policy, the way he fetishized the idea of sacrifice, unnerved me a little. He seemed to have gone just a little crazy, Captain Ahab\u2013style. One aspect of McCain that did intrigue me was his purported womanizing, which came up a lot among reporters. Get a group of political journalists (and campaign operatives and staffers, too, as long as it's not their candidate) around a dinner table, or at a bar after a few drinks, or looking to dispel the boredom in hushed conversations on a plane or bus, and the sex life of the candidate, any candidate, will eventually come up. The rumor of the moment was a story that was spiked by the Times, supposedly saying that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist (the story eventually ran, but it was flimsy and an embarrassment to the paper), but there were plenty of other tales being passed around.\n\nThere was no small amount of hypocrisy when it came to journalists discussing the sex lives of the people they cover, since fidelity wasn't exactly a prized virtue among reporters on the campaign trail. For my part, I watched a lot of porn. A colleague told me the first thing he did after checking in to a hotel was to check out their porn selection. I followed his example. I'd become an expert on the various hotel chains and what they offered. The best was clearly the Hyatt Regency; the Homewood Suites had the usual selection of XX features. On my last night in Manchester, after the primaries were over and the campaigns had moved on, I selected one called Nasty Older Sluts or something like that for $11.95. (Note to Newsweek accounting department: I never expensed the porn.)\n\nIt occurred to me, as I sat there watching an interracial couple banging, that jacking off in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting. You watch two performers. You kind of like it when one of them gets humiliated. You know they're professionals, so you don't feel much sympathy for them. You wish you could participate, but instead you watch with a hidden envy and feel vaguely ashamed for watching. You think you could probably do as good a job or better. You sometimes get a glimpse, intentionally or not, of society's hidden desires and fears. You watch the porn week after week, the scenes almost always the same, none of them too memorable. The best ones get sent around the Internet.\n\nin the weeks after New Hampshire, I went down to Florida to watch Giuliani lose for good. I received a press release saying academy award\u2013winning actor jon voight endorses mayor giuliani, which seemed as good a death knell as any. Voight joined the mayor on the campaign trail. Most of Rudy's senior staff were hiding from the press, so Voight filled the void with an impromptu press conference. He explained how being cast in Midnight Cowboy was similar to Rudy's decision-making ability on 9/11. It didn't make sense then, either. After running out of campaign questions\u2014and since nobody cared what Jon Voight thought\u2014a reporter from The New York Observer asked him about his daughter, Angelina Jolie. This was an answer worth listening to. He couldn't confirm the rumor that she was pregnant, but he did \"wish her the best in life.\" Then a Fox News embed posted a blog item featuring clips of a movie he did called Karate Dog.\n\nTempers got short. After one stop, we came back on the plane to find Rawlings baseballs, all signed by Rudy. A reporter for NBC wrote a blog post about it, entitled \"A Going-Away Gift from Rudy?\" Rudy's campaign advisers went ballistic\u2014they saw what they were doing as a nice gesture, a nod to our shared experience, and to have it reported that he was quitting infuriated them. \"He fucked us,\" the campaign manager said to me. \"Put that in your fucking book.\"\n\nI'd been promised behind-the-scenes access the next day. I would finally get to ride on Rudy's bus, not the press bus. But that morning, when I went to get on Rudy's bus, his deputy press spokesperson (who would later become Sarah Palin's spokesperson) stopped me at the door. I explained I'd been promised access. She said she hadn't been told that, but she'd go check. She went inside the bus; the door closed; the bus drove away. I was left standing in the parking lot.\n\nRudy had raised nearly $60 million, spent all of it, and received only one delegate, running what was one of the most catastrophic campaigns in history. Despite my feelings toward him\u2014the country had dodged a real bullet there\u2014I sympathized with his staffers. He gave his farewell address in Orlando. Backstage, two of his close aides cried. He gave them both a hug, patting one on the shoulder and saying, \"Good, good,\" an endearing expression he'd used throughout the year. It was depressing. I found myself thinking,\n\nMaybe he's not such a bad guy after all.\u2026\n\nI got a new assignment before Super Tuesday. I would be covering Hillary now, switching to the Democrats. At this point, despite Obama's wins in South Carolina and Iowa, the CW still said Hillary would be the nominee. So I got Hillary.\n\ni should have known it would come to this: standing in a public restroom with twenty or so other journalists, watching Eva Longoria, the star of Desperate Housewives, on closed-circuit TV as she moderates a town-hall event in Austin, Texas. It was March 3, a day before the Texas and Ohio primaries, and Hillary's advance staff had set us up in a men's bathroom. There were four urinals and one blue stall. A bunch of reporters struggled to find space for their laptops on long folding tables, and there was a kind of stunned amusement among the traveling press. A guy from the Chicago Tribune typed away in front of a urinal; a CNN cameraman captured video. The campaign sent out a press release: \"For the record, these accommodations should in no way be taken as a commentary on the quality of our media coverage.\" But it was well established among reporters that Hillary's staffers were much bigger assholes than those of any other campaign\u2014limiting access, screaming at reporters about the tone of their coverage, trying to shame us into submission. In my first interaction with the campaign, a staffer said, \"Oh, you're from Newsweek? Are you going to write bad stuff about us, too?\" Their attitude was that no matter what they did, the press was going to screw them, so they'd better screw us right back.\n\nI thought it might be better jumping over to the Democrats; at least I wasn't appalled by their basic ideas. But Hillary Clinton's campaign was killing me. I could feel my soul die a little more with each cigarette break I took, each prepackaged meal I stuffed into my face. I couldn't stop eating when I was with her, and there was always food available. On most days, we took three to five flights, and each flight, no matter how short, had a catered meal. The campaigns charge reporters for all travel (the cost runs from $1,000 to $3,000 per day, per reporter), and catering is included in that price. Then there is food served at each event\u2014pizza, sandwiches, celery, carrots, broccoli, bowl upon bowl of ranch dip, baskets of candy and chips. In part I felt obligated to eat every fucking thing in front of me, since it costs enough. But there was also a feeling that you were in a Gulag on wheels. Everyone traveling with the campaigns is completely dependent on them for food and transportation and shelter\u2014not to mention any little interview crumb they toss our way, any remotely intriguing piece of information. Political reporting is founded on very dysfunctional relationships. You need them and they need you, but on some level they hate and distrust you (and on some level you, too, hate and distrust them), and in my experience a lot of that gets sublimated into food. Eat, hoard, scrounge, because you never know if they'll give you anything more.\n\nDespite the attitude of her staff, Hillary herself seemed okay. She was more charming and funny and human than I expected her to be. I had the chance to stand next to her on the plane once while she chewed carrots, a few bits falling out of her mouth. She drank a glass of red wine and joked about how she'd like some good Mexican food in Texas but hoped it would be authentic and fresh. \"You can't eat Mexican food out of a box,\" she said. It reminded me of hanging out at a friend's house in high school and chatting with a sort of cool mom. And yet I was also never unaware of her stature. For years I'd watched her get pummeled, and do some pummeling herself, and now she was expected to be the next president. You got a little buzz from witnessing history being made when you were around her.\n\nBut the goodwill I felt disappeared in Youngstown, Ohio. We were in a high school gym, and Hillary was being introduced by Tom Buenbarger, who heads up the International Machinists Union. Bused-in union members cheered and chanted. Buffenbarger started out by taking a swipe at Obama's white supporters. \"I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing trust-fund babies crowding in to hear him speak!\" he said.\n\nI thought, Huh, I guess that means me.\n\nBuffenbarger launched into a rant in which he compared Obama to Muhammad Ali, the best-known black American convert to Islam after Malcolm X. \"But brothers and sisters,\" he said, \"I've seen Ali in action. He could rope-a-dope with Foreman inside the ring. He could go toe-to-toe with Liston inside the ring. He could get his jaw broken by Norton and keep ghting inside the ring. But Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali.\" The cunning racism of the attack actually made my heart start to beat fast and my ears start to ring. For the first time on the campaign trail, I felt completely outraged. I kept thinking, \"Am I misreading this?\" But there was no way, if you were in that room, to think it was anything other than what it was.\n\nThings got worse after that. The attempt to smear Obama as a Muslim ratcheted up. A picture of him in Somali garb was leaked to the Drudge Report; soon after, a Clinton surrogate went on TV to say that Obama shouldn't be ashamed to be seen in \"his native clothing.\" Finally, they even dropped the pretense of a cover when Clinton claimed in a speech that all the hardworking white Americans would vote for her. The campaign degenerated into a series of furious conference calls between Obama's and Hillary's advisers. I wanted out. I wanted Obama to win enough delegates to end this thing. But Hillary didn't lose, and even though the math was clear for everyone to understand, she kept on going. So I kept e-mailing and phoning and cornering her staff, trying to find out what was happening, what she was thinking. But I didn't care anymore if I got an interview. I didn't want to pretend that I thought she should win. I didn't want to pretend that I was enjoying being \"a part of history.\"\n\nI did hear two things in those final weeks, though, that are worth telling now. I was talking to a staffer about Bill Clinton and the impact he'd had on the campaign. \"Do you think we should have sent him to Africa?\" the staffer asked. \"In February, should we have sent him to Africa? We were talking about that.\"\n\n\"He would have gone?\" I asked.\n\n\"No way. I don't think anyone ever brought it up to him, but still\u2026\"\n\nThe other thing I learned is that Bill Clinton's favorite card game was no longer hearts. It was now Oh Hell, a game where everyone looks out for his own interests but, as the rules state, \"there are times when players will find it in their interests to help each other.\" Clinton played for money. The buy-in was usually around $50, and the winner could take $400. Staffers swore by his photographic memory and ability to work out the odds in his head. But whenever he faced defeat, they said\u2014when his back was against the wall\u2014he'd try to cut a deal. \"Clinton doesn't like to get screwed,\" a staffer who played with him told me. \"He'd rather work out a bargain. He doesn't like it when he gets screwed.\"\n\nOh Hell.\n\nThe game summed up the frustration felt by Bill and Hillary, which had become palpable. Why the hell do the media hate us? Why the hell does Obama get a pass? Why the hell did we lose in Iowa? Why the hell aren't we winning?\n\nAnd for me, the question was, Why the hell am I covering this?\n\nIt was the night of the Indiana primary, May 6, when the campaign finally realized it was finished. Yes, they had won Indiana, but not by enough. We were on the plane back to D.C., and a Clinton spokesperson, Jay Carson, came back to spin us. I didn't know Jay, but I'd heard that Leonardo DiCaprio was going to play him in a movie about his experience on the '04 Howard Dean campaign, and that seemed like a pretty cool thing to have being said about you.\n\nOn takeoff, Jay surfed down the aisle on a tray. People started to get good and drunk. I ate a Butterfinger. Jay started talking to the press, and then a guy from ABC said, \"Russert called the race for Obama.\"\n\nI couldn't hear what Jay replied, but his face betrayed surprise, just for moment.\n\nBy the time we landed at Dulles, there was a sense of incredible relief among the press corps. We'd all have to think about who we were covering next, but for now we were free; we just had to figure out when the concession speech would be. And then\u2026the hardest-working, most in-denial woman in politics scheduled an event in West Virginia the next morning. That meant a 6 a.m. baggage call. It was 3 a.m. \"Are you fucking kidding?\" reporters started asking. \"She's not quitting yet?\" I went home.\n\nNot long after, I was asked if I wanted to go to McCain. Maybe I should have done it. It was only a few more months. I'd be in the final throes right now, right in the lap of history. I would have been there for Sarah Palin and the crazy-ass convention in St. Paul; I would have had a front-row seat for all the deriding of the media. And I would have come to truly hate his campaign staff and their smug belief, based, unfortunately, on an accurate reading of the past, that they can lie to our faces and we'll swallow it.\n\nI remembered this line from Bob Novak's autobiography, The Prince of Darkness: \"With apparently little time left, I awaited my thirtieth birthday\u2026with the grim recognition I was only a hack.\" Well, whatever you think of him, he went on to become one of the most influential political journalists of his time. Me? How would I escape hackdom? I could continue to gather the material I was supposed to gather, and I could try to write about what I'd seen in some way that felt honest, but it would likely be cut or certainly diluted. In the end, it wouldn't be the story I wanted to tell. I'd been at it for nearly a year, and maybe the best I had to offer were a few stories about Bill Clinton and Chuck Norris. But I think that told me all I needed to know about covering a presidential race. To borrow from Teddy White, what I was a part of had nothing to do with purifying and protecting.\n\nSo I dropped out, too.\n\n\n\nMichael hastings is the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/michael-hastings-newsweek-presidential-campaign>