One of my favorite stories so far about the 2004 election season should be awful. It's all about the horse race, the much-decried who's-ahead-who's-behind strategy of covering politics. In fact, it's written by a pollster, not someone who writes professionally. It's riddled with poll numbers and inside-baseball-ish minutiae. It's got a clear editorial slant from one perspective in favor of one candidate. I don't think the author spoke to a single "everyday American" or included any significant discussion of the issues. But I'm about to argue that it should be a broad template, or at least an example, of how our political coverage should look.
The article is a post-mortem of Howard Dean's Iowa campaign, written by Dean's pollster Paul Maslin. And there are many aspects of it that journalists can't and shouldn't emulate. I'll acknowledge some of those right off the bat:
Few, if any, journalists could get this much access. Maslin writes with the insight and authority of someone who was truly on the inside. If any journalist had tried to get him to say the things he's said here three months ago, she probably would have been laughed out of the campaign headquarters.
This is all written after the fact. Suuuure, we can know all this now, but journalists have to write stories on deadline in the thick of the action. We honestly don't have the time or the scope to pull something like this together during an election.
The whole issue of the editorial slant. Articles sound perfectly clear and authoritative when one doesn't have to attribute anything and one can toss out opinions left and right.
It's all true. Yet all Maslin's doing is telling the tale of a team in a relay-race for a high-stakes prize, leaping hurdle after hurdle, trying not to drop the baton. And it's captivating. Even without the tone, the access, or the perspective, journalists can still borrow every storytelling technique Maslin uses to make his article a compelling read from beginning to end.
Maslin does an excellent job of keeping his eye on the ball (or to continue the metaphor -- the baton). He expertly traces a simple narrative arc -- the rise and fall of the campaign -- never losing sight of the fundamental driving conflict -- the Dean team's struggle to win Iowa. Take a look at these lead sentences from each section of the article; at the beginning of every section, he sets up the next hurdle:
- Polling in Iowa is both important and impossible...
- We were acutely conscious that any sustained flight of television advertising—we were considering running ads for two weeks—was going to take a big bite out of our cap...
- It would be hard to overstate the initial shock to our system when Wesley Clark entered the race...
- Joe Trippi was the principal force in pushing the campaign to unprecedented heights of grassroots activism and small-donor fundraising...
- Life as the front-runner was never comfortable for Howard Dean...
- All of us involved in the Dean campaign made mistakes, for sure. But to be fair, our candidate's erratic judgment, loose tongue, and overall stubbornness wore our spirits down...
- Dean was already scheduled to give a foreign-policy address in Los Angeles the Monday after Saddam's capture...
- Our poll that Sunday night, a week before the caucuses, showed the expected results: Dean had now fallen into a virtual three-way tie with Kerry and Gephardt, and Edwards was riding close on our heels...
Many of the stories of the Democratic campaign were like this one -- an article that hangs essentially on the fact that Dean had given a good sound byte. The Washington Post article identifies a real conflict (Dean struggles to win over voters in the South), but doesn't treat it like one. It focuses on the strategy, not the game. Imagine if every political story zeroed in on the point of conflict the way Maslin's does.
Maslin also structures his article like a pro. Overall, the story features nine vignettes, in loose chronological order, from Dean's first poll in Iowa to a few weeks after the last votes had been cast. Each vignette has a strong sense of internal structure as well -- count how many times Maslin signals where he's going to take the reader, with phrases such as "Two things have become clear ... The first is ... The second thing is ... etc."
Now take a look at Maslin's cast of characters. Maslin's Howard Dean incorporates most of the stereotypical flaws (and strengths) the press assigned to Dean over the course of the campaign -- he speaks without thinking, he's undisciplined, he's stubborn. Howard Kurtz says Maslin is "unusually stinging in criticizing (Dean)," but I'd argue that the portrait is ultimately sympathetic, because it's so dang real. Maslin never settles on any of these flaws; he weaves them all into a complex portrait of a person, fleshy and familiar. There's Joe Trippi -- brilliant, brooding, explosive, visionary ... Othello, without the whole racial thing. And then there's the whole campaign team, a composite of all these strong traits, often at odds with itself.
Maslin's got a full bag of literary tricks that he opens at all the right places -- everything from metaphor to foreshadowing. At one point, Maslin writes this:
We learned dangerous lessons from those ads: that we could work fast, with virtually no preparation; that it paid to be bold; and that we could spend money at a time that no sane campaign ever would or ever had.
Much later in the story, those ominous "dangerous lessons" make a brilliant return:
All the habits we had learned so early in this race—work fast, use Iraq, be aggressive—were coming back to haunt us.
Of course, being on the inside of the campaign, you're going to capture some great emotional dialogue. And I'm guessing Maslin's quotes are all (or mostly) reconstructed from memory, maybe some interviews. But Maslin doesn't just include fantastic quotes, he makes them work. To wit:
The day after that first night of polling, Dean reached me as I was driving south from Washington with my wife and two daughters to visit my son at the University of Virginia. In a typically incongruous campaign moment, as our car hurtled through scenes of glorious fall foliage, Dean asked me what we intended to do to turn Iowa around. I described to him the two messages we were testing. His response was immediate: "O-kaaaay. What about the war?"
I can hear Dean saying "O-kaaaay." That one word tells me more than any Dean sound byte I read in any headline over the last year.
Here's another example. Maslin's last vignette talks about the Perfect Stormers -- Dean's army of volunteers. Maslin has already hinted that these fresh-faced, inexperienced, overaggressive hordes are a metaphor for the campaign itself. But he hits that point home with one quote, from weeks after the Iowa loss, when one of the orange-hatted volunteers unwittingly walks by Dean's van:
I thought Dean might have the van stop so he could greet his supporter. But he just looked at him for a few seconds and then turned back to us and said, "They may have fucked up Iowa, but they sure changed America." We all laughed, particularly Dean himself, still happy from his day with Judy. But I immediately realized, as I think he did too, that he could just as easily have said "we" instead of "they."
That's not just a great quote. That's a great quote with a greater purpose.
Keep in mind when you read this article that Maslin's only writing from one perspective about one chapter in the history of one unsuccessful campaign. The battle for the presidency is a tournament of hundreds of relay races just as dramatic as this one, and every hurdle, every baton, every player is another story of its own.
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