Beasts on the Bus

By Matt Taibbi, AlterNet. Posted April 15, 2005.

Editor's Note: This is an edited excerpt of Matt Taibbi's new book, "Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season" (The New Press).

The traveling press pool is a high-class cage.

It takes a while to see it, but once you do, it's hard to miss how completely U the Important National Pundit is sealed off from the outside world. On a typical day you awake in your hotel and very early in the morning—six or six-thirty is a typical hour—have to bring your bags down to one of the campaign "sherpas" or "shepherds," who arranges for its delivery to the plane. After that there is usually a half-hour or so in the hotel lobby. Then it is a bus to the airport, a security sweep on the tarmac, a flight to somewhere or other, then another single-file trip to the bus, which takes you straight to the event.

I didn't notice this at first, but very often, when the press bus arrives, there is another handler waiting right at the bus door. When you step off the bus he is literally pointing in the direction of the press filing center, normally a concrete room somewhere deep in the ass of whatever building the event is being held in. In case you miss that, there are always big paper arrows on the ground pointing you in the right direction, with signs that say things like "PRESS FILE." At one stop in New Orleans, these arrows were plastered for a stretch leading a full 200 yards between the outdoor area where Kerry's speech was being held and the Cajun restaurant the campaign had converted into a filing center.

"Yeah, it's funny," said Evan Richman, the affable photographer for the Boston Globe. "When you first get on the trail, you think: why are they treating me like an idiot? But then, after about a month, you're like—okay, this way, huh?" He mimicked lowering his head and following the signs.

At the event you do have free roam of the place. You can stay in the special walled-off press area, or you can mingle with the "public," that is, the people who came to the event. The idea that this somehow represents contact with the outside world, however, is a little problematic. After all, these are all people who came to see the candidate. They have that in common. And the setting is, of course, completely artificial. Everything is scrupulously clean and shiny and ready for television. Behind the candidate there is usually a platform where a statistically representative sample of the human racial gene pool is standing in a cheerfully supportive pose. The people.

After the event you go back to the file room, and file. From there it is the same routine as before: bus, plane, bus, event, bus, plane, bus. At the end of the day, often very late in the evening, you arrive at a ridiculously expensive hotel where a big fluffy bed with no fewer than five down pillows is begging you to plop down and collapse. There is never quite enough time to get a full night's rest. Ordering your wake-up call, you begin the next day on exactly the same schedule.

The isolation is so total that during some stretches the journalists, like prisoners, actually have to search out little cracks in the system just to smuggle in cigarettes. Among the staffers on the Kerry campaign, the preferred method is to send the baggage sherpa, a cheerful, sleep-deprived soul named Pat Shearns, to make runs during the events. Poor Pat often sleeps less than two hours a night. He hopes to have a few days off before November.

From inside this hermetically sealed universe, the cream of the national political press corps somehow has to come up with oceans of insightful material. Photographers take 500 pictures a day. Most reporters have to file at least once a day, sometimes twice; the wire service people often have to do more than that. At each stop, the Beast is waiting in that filing room to be fed. But with the gathering of material needing to take place literally at the speed of existence, how is this possible? Where can the information come from?

Answer: they have to feed it to you.

New Orleans

The spread at the filing center in New Orleans was about par for the course: massive in scale, with a local flavor, so you know where you are. There was boiled crawfish, crawfish étouffée, red beans and rice with sausage, ratatouille, braised catfish, bread pudding, and rolls with parsley butter. Praline cookies. Fresh-brewed iced tea. The speech that day was to contain an escalation of anti-Bush rhetoric, something about the president's foreign policy being really reckless and irresponsible.

Matt Taibbi lives in New York. He covers politics for Rolling Stone and the New York Press.

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