Campaign Journalism Is Back, More Evil Than '04

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted April 10, 2007.

God help us, the 2008 presidential election is already here; they are already murdering huge forests in South America so that Jonathan Alter and Karen Tumulty can tell us what the latest Scripps/Howard poll says "voters believe the next president's haircut should look like." Hell is much too good for all of us ...

Mainly in an attempt to preserve my own tenuous grip on sanity, I made it through this past weekend without reading much coverage of the campaign. The election, after all, is nearly a full Martian year away, with a Super Bowl and two World Series still to play out in between -- which means that the "urgency" of breaking campaign news is now and will remain for at least a year an almost 100% media concoction.

Like Seinfeld, the presidential campaign is essentially a "show about nothing," a prolonged prime-time character-driven drama crafted around a series of fake conflicts that always get resolved by the end of the program, in this case November, 2008. Marcia and Greg make driving-test bet in segment one; Marcia imagines instructor in underwear in middle segments; Marcia and Greg's bet ends in a tie, family loves each other again. In the old days the presidential show's writers tended to use actual political issues (Georgie and Hube argue about Vietnam!) as the starting points for their dramatic conflicts -- a natural artistic strategy, given that the subject matter was a real election in a giant country teeming with ugly social and economic problems -- but in the last few cycles the networks seem to have figured out that you can shoot even a whole season of a presidential race without including any of the boring political shit.

Instead, you can cover the whole race using the time-tested Aaron Spelling method of creating TV dramas: you pack a rich and magical dream-landscape with a group of easily-recognizable psychological archetypes and spend a dozen episodes or so letting them smash into each other in bikinis and sports cars (if the show is set in California) or spurs and hoop-dresses (if it's a Western).

The campaign is the same deal. Instead of making a Malibu beach soap out of a prude, a slut, a 98-pound weakling and a leading man, you do a political drama with a hothead (McCain), an Eddie Haskell (Romney), an underdog (Obama) and a wicked witch (Hillary), all doing turns manning tractors and cow-milking chairs on a digitally-enhanced farm set that looks so much like Iowa, you'd swear it was the real thing. (For the second straight season, incidentally, Dennis Kucinich will play the Harry Bently-Dwayne Schneider-Kramer "nutty neighbor" character, getting a wolf whistle and three seconds of pre-recorded "enthusiastic applause" every time he walks through the apartment door. I've been on Dennis to wear a handyman costume next year to make his character really fly.)

I bring all of this up because I've started to see the first examples of what I call the "Sweet n' Blow" campaign article hit the front pages in recent weeks. The Sweet n' Blow, as the name suggests, is a no-calorie substitute for real journalism, a gossip column masquerading as political reportage. It's one of the key techniques for use in turning the election into a politics-free character drama. A true Sweet n' Blow piece makes it from the lede all the way to the last line without saying one fucking thing about what the candidate actually stands for. Instead, it will tell is a lot about the candidate's strategy for improving his "image," which incidentally had originally been created, at least in part, by the very reporter writing this new article.

In other words, in July X reporter says Y candidate "lacks the warmth and charm that voters respond to"; in August, that same X reporter says Y candidate is now "going on the charm offensive." During the same period, Z candidate maybe struggles to overcome a reputation for "flip-flops," and reporter X will spend those months detailing and ultimately arbitrating on the success of those efforts.

All of this bullshit obscures the fact that Democrats Y and Z are essentially the same candidate, backed by the same people and espousing the same positions. But it makes for good theater, and that's the important thing.

There was a classic example of this stuff this past weekend in the New York Times, in a piece by Adam Nagourney called "2 Years After Big Speech, A Lower Key for Obama." The Times, incidentally, is one of the chief producers of this brand of campaign journalism. In every presidential election, the paper manufactures its own story lines around fictional candidate struggles to conquer certain adjectives. They will show candidates fighting for the title of the most "nuanced," wriggling away from tags like "prickly," and racing to great final showdowns of adjectives in the general election -- "brainy" versus "folksy," "emotional" versus "plodding," and so on.

See more stories tagged with: election08, campaign journalism

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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