Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Consider also the deadline factor, which is normally complicated by the logistics factor. Dashing from one flag-bedecked campaign event to another, from the next Best Western to the next Hampton Inn, from Denny’s to the International House of Pancakes, with a sugar hit at Krispy Kreme doughnuts on the way, all one can hope to deliver by the end is the most rudimentary wrap of the day. A splash of colour, a sprinkling of soundbites and a piece to camera delivered at maximum volume over the strains of Fleetwood Mac.

  To flick through my diary from that year is to revisit the madcap ‘If it’s Tuesday, it must be Peoria’ whirl of the trail. Take the week leading up to Super Tuesday, when primaries were contested on the two great seaboards, in New York and California. It started with a pre-dawn, cross-country flight out of Washington that got us into Los Angeles in time for a lunchtime interview with the talkback-radio host Michael Reagan, Ronald’s first, adopted son.

  Then we drove up the freeway to Bakersfield, where McCain was about to address an open-air rally. Ideally, we would have made it back to Los Angeles in time for a speech by Bill Bradley on the campus of UCLA, but my producer could not for the life of her remember where she had parked our rental car, and we spent more than an hour trudging from one McMansion-lined cul-de-sac to the next trying to hunt it down. Too late, we headed back to the glass-sheafed rotundas of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA, where I bumped into another journalist on the trail and indulged in a rare bout of hurried, unchivalrous passion known affectionately by its practitioners as ‘campaign sex’.

  Early the next morning, we filmed at Santa Monica beach, partly so that I could write the feeble script-line, ‘This is California, where the road to the White House is lined with palm trees and rollerbladers.’ (In South Carolina, it had been palmettos and barbecue joints.) Then we took in Beverly Hills to harvest some more footage, before descending upon a southern Californian mega-church to interview members of the Christian Coalition. That night, Gore and Bradley locked antlers in their umpteenth televised debate, and then we headed to LAX to catch the red-eye to New York.

  Around noon, Gore did something at a high school in New York – I cannot remember quite what – while Bradley’s image-makers arranged for him to flip some hot dogs in the famed Gray’s Papaya in Manhattan, something of a Big Apple electoral ritual. That evening, there was time for a quick supper in Midtown with my old friend the ‘complete pilchard’ correspondent from Jerusalem, before Bush faced McCain in yet another debate.

  The following morning, we interviewed former mayor of New York Ed Koch and former governor of New York Mario Cuomo, and then headed to what is billed in my diary as a ‘Brooklyn black event’, which shows the extent to which candidates and reporters slice and dice the electorate into neat little blocs, or, in this instance, a very large significant one.

  To nod to Bradley’s sporting past, we filmed courtside at Madison Square Garden, the home of the New York Knicks, his old baseball outfit, and then headed to an open-air rally in a park in Greenwich Village, where the former senator was introduced by the actor Harvey Keitel, who had far more to say about himself than the candidate.

  You get the idea. The week was not yet a hundred hours old, and we had already racked up more than 6000 frequent-flyer miles, filmed in half a dozen or so iconic venues, covered two debates, been welcomed into the presence of Democratic and Republican royalty, drunk gallons of dodgy coffee, endured the interminable ramblings of a Reservoir Dog, lost and found a rental car and enjoyed a fairly lively nightlife. So disorientating was the campaign that it felt like that party game where a hapless victim is blindfolded, spun around at high velocity and then set loose: not very grown up and occasionally vomit-inducing but hugely entertaining all the same.

  This hints at another factor to bear in mind in assessing the performance of the press: that many journalists were either drunk or hung-over. Covering a campaign was like embarking on a great Kerouacian adventure, a land-based booze-cruise that moved from one great battleground state to another, and from one dingy bar to the next. A few nights after the New Hampshire primary, a colleague and I somehow found ourselves at a sorority house at Dartmouth College playing ‘pong’ with a group of sorority sisters – a drinking game where a ping-pong table was dotted with half-filled cups of beer and liquor that had to be chugged down in one mouthful if the ball landed inside. On the eve of the Democratic convention, a few of us were invited to the Playboy Mansion, where the Hef was hosting a fund-raiser. Citing tiredness from a week covering wildfires in Idaho, I decided to have a quiet dinner with friends, a lapse that demonstrates the extent to which chronic fatigue can impair one’s judgement.

  Here, of course, there is a glaring paradox, for it was this same group of travelling inebriates that passed judgement on the probity of the candidates under our professional gaze. Post-Clinton, virtue was especially important, and in 2000 the main candidates were keen to talk about character, values and their own personal narratives, if only to distance themselves from the incumbent.

  For the closing riffs of his stump speeches, George W. Bush would pretend, rather presumptuously, to take the presidential oath of office. ‘When I put my hand on the Bible,’ he repeated ad nauseam, ‘I will swear not only to uphold the law of our land, I will swear to uphold the honour and integrity of the office to which I have been elected.’ Then, he would add with a vainglorious flourish, ‘So help me God.’

  Honour and integrity were also the leitmotifs of McCain’s campaign. The irony here was that both were pushing character at a time when Bill Clinton’s soaring approval ratings, and the lack of public outrage over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, suggested that American voters did not much care any more. Candidates who had been adulterous, smoked pot in their student years, sniffed cocaine, dodged the draft or gone through the express lane of their local supermarket with seven items in their baskets rather than the maximum six were now viable.

  Here, scandal-hungry journalists were either slow to catch on or just could not help themselves. Consider the brief flap in New Hampshire that year over our hapless pancake-flipper Gary Bauer, who had to defend himself against the charge that he had been alone in the same room as a young blonde campaign aide. When reporters could not prove any impropriety, they latched on instead to a new category of misdemeanour, the fabulously Orwellian ‘appearance of impropriety’.

  On the Richter scale of political scandals, it should hardly have registered at all, but the US media tended to adopt a different criterion: where there was the faintest whiff of smoke, there surely must be fire.

  Certainly, it was a quantum leap from campaigns of old, where reporters happily turned a blind eye. Why, in 1960 Ben Bradlee, the then Newsweek Washington bureau chief, and Jack Kennedy idled away a few hours as they awaited the results of the West Virginia primary by watching a porn flick a few blocks from the White House.

  Perhaps the most serious failure of campaign reportage, especially in the era of continuous news, is the extent to which everything gets magnified and exaggerated, so that the trivial becomes cardinal and the quotidian becomes epochal. Moments are rarely anything other than defining. Initiatives are at all times make or break. Candidates are forever delivering the most important speeches of their lives. Set-piece events, such as the party conventions, receive the kind of over-hyped coverage associated with a world heavyweight-boxing bout.

  The televised debates are a case in point. Beforehand, the talk always is of knockout punches, even though most debates live in the memory about as long as a one-day cricket international and are about as exciting as a scoreless draw in a football match. Ahead of the first presidential debate, we always perform the ritual of trawling through the archive to produce short preparatory television packages showing the highlights from debates past. Alas, there has never been much blood on the canvas. Ronald Reagan delivered a couple of hefty blows against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, and Dan Quayle was decapitated by Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 when he made the mistake of likening himself to
Jack Kennedy. But that was about it.

  Because the first televised debate between Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy had turned the 1960 presidential race on its head, the assumption was that every subsequent face-off would have the same transformative effect. However, even the Kennedy–Nixon debates were bereft of a knockdown punch. It was not Nixon’s glass jaw that was the problem but rather the flop sweat on his forehead and upper lip.

  If televised debates had a tendency of being instantly forgettable, then so, too, did those other great set-piece staples of US campaigns, the party conventions. Up until the late-1960s, after which primaries became decisive, conventions used to pick the presidential nominee in rooms that were choked with smoke and testosterone, and often splattered with blood. Now, their central function was merely to anoint the nominee, and they had essentially become week-long infomercials.

  Just about my only recollections from the Republican convention in Philadelphia are of the visuals: the images that the political consultants who choreographed these events hoped would plant themselves in our minds. ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, the hero of Gulf War one, was beamed into the convention hall from the floodlit deck of the USS New Jersey docked nearby, probably with little inkling that Gulf War two was just around the corner. The wrestling champion The Rock made a triumphant entrance on stage, like the great prizefighter that he was.

  In sharp contrast, Dick Cheney, George W.’s vice-presidential selector and eventual pick, shuffled self-consciously to the speaking podium with a leather folder tucked under his arm, as if he were a backroom aide delivering a file rather than about to deliver a speech. Visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, his appearance perhaps foreshadowed his role during the Bush presidency, where his influence was mammoth but largely in the shadows.

  Like everyone, I recall being amazed by the number of African-Americans on display: black keynote speakers, such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and the former gridiron star and congressman J. C. Watts; black preachers, who delivered impassioned invocations that could easily have echoed from pulpits in Selma or Birmingham; and so many black entertainers that journalists scoffed the GOP convention looked more like a minstrel show.

  A BBC colleague, who had opened most of his news reports that week with pictures of soul and R&B bands performing before the delegates on stage, even thought it necessary to advise viewers not to adjust their sets. ‘Yes, this is the Republican convention,’ he bellowed, over yet more footage of a black ensemble swaying from side to side. Still more surprising was the sight of the GOP’s only openly gay congressman, Jim Kolbe of Arizona, delivering a brief, three-minute speech in prime time. Throughout, the Texas delegation, which had been allotted seats directly in front of the speaking podium, sat with bowed heads in mumbling prayer, with cowboy hats covering their hearts. However, it was George W., their favourite son, who had insisted that Kolbe speak, and also that African-Americans be given a much more prominent role – more proof that his conservatism was also compassionate.

  Tellingly, I can hardly remember the actual words that were spoken in Philadelphia. Bush’s acceptance speech, the supposed highpoint of the week, was serviceable at best and produced little more than the usual bromides. ‘This nation is daring and decent and ready for change,’ he said, with poppy Bush staring down proudly from the stands of the basketball arena. ‘We will use these good times for great goals.’

  It was hardly the Gettysburg Address, but Bush was smart enough to keep it simple. In any case, by now he thought he had the measure of Al Gore. An aide had pointed out to him a profile from The New Yorker in which Al Gore spoke admiringly about the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his opus Phenomenology of Perception. ‘Venus and Mars, man!’ was Bush’s reaction. ‘I can’t imagine anybody who’s less like me. That makes it easy for me to run against him.’

  Up against the perpetually angst-ridden Gore, Bush would portray himself as a man comfortable in his own skin, the reformed frat boy up against a class nerd who used to watch Star Trek at Harvard and wile away hours in his dorm punching out tunes on the keypad of his phone.

  For all Bush’s swagger and Texan braggadocio, his was a fairly thin skin. Sometime during convention week, George W. either watched, or was told about, a BBC report that described him as a ‘hollow man’, a description that clearly irked him. Up until that moment, we had enjoyed friendly relations with Team Bush. In fact, his media advisers appeared to think that the mere act of sitting for a BBC interview immediately boosted his foreign-policy credentials. The governor himself could usually be relied upon for a quick soundbite or grab. However, when a colleague tried to buttonhole him on a rope line as he boarded a plane out of Philly, the usual cry of ‘BBC, Mr Governor, BBC’ was met with an icy burst of uncongeniality. ‘Hollow man, huh?’ he harrumphed, and then brushed past.

  He need not have worried. Hollow man or not, he was getting much better press than his opponent, Al Gore.

  Had it been rehearsed? Had it been focus-grouped? Would it be seen as a blatantly political ploy? Had there been any tongue? While it was customary during the course of campaigns to report on sexual peccadillos and marital unfaithfulness, never before had so much attention been lavished by commentators on a presidential candidate kissing his own wife. Al Gore had done so with such lustre as he mounted the stage ahead of his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention at the Staples Center in Los Angeles that it looked for a moment as if he might mount poor Tipper.

  Afterwards, The New York Times likened it to an amorous groom being invited to kiss his bride, but to others it was more like the passion held back for the honeymoon suite afterwards. Rarely have I witnessed such a visceral reaction from the press gallery. ‘Gross!’ the American reporters cried in unison, as if they had walked into the lounge room to find their parents in flagrante. ‘Yuck!’ scoffed the Brits.

  Naturally, the kiss revealed much more about Al Gore’s relationship with Bill Clinton than about his rapport with his wife. Angered by the Lewinsky scandal and also repulsed by it – his own daughters were roughly the same age as Monica – the vice president was determined to demonstrate he was the anti-Clinton: a good husband; a loving father; a moral man. To offer more proof, his wife’s lips provided the perfect prop, even if the subliminal message came dripping in saliva. Appearing later on CNN’s Larry King Live, Gore stressed that the kiss was real passion rather than realpolitik. ‘One of the political analysts said, “Were you trying to send a message?”,’ Gore commented, before adding, as if butter would not melt in his mouth, ‘I was trying to send a message to Tipper.’

  ‘Message received,’ whispered his normally demur spouse, who was sat at his side.

  In a normal political season obeying normal political rules, Al Gore’s election should have been something of a formality. Peace and prosperity was not just a bumper-sticker slogan but also a reality for everyday Americans. Household incomes had never been higher. The economy was close to full employment. The budget was in surplus. Politically, as well, Gore was well positioned to reap a harvest. The Democratic Party was united, which was historically unusual. Bill Clinton was enjoying enviably high approval ratings. Senior Republicans had been the main victims of the impeachment crisis. Moreover, the view among delegates at the convention in Los Angeles was that, in George W. Bush, they were up against a complete knuckle-brain. The problem for the Democrats was that Al Gore was up against himself.

  If ever there was a case of a candidate getting lost in his own campaign, it was Al Gore in 2000. Though he wanted to champion his signature issue, global warming, his advisers talked him out of it. Though he was one of the most prescient and innovative policymakers of the post-war era, and particularly well credentialed to fight a new-millennial campaign, he and his advisers opted for crude populism, a ‘poor against the powerful’ tirade that hailed from the mid-1930s.

  Though he should have credited the American people with the guile to differentiate what was good about the Clinton years – t
he economy – from what was bad – its sordidness – he decided to virtually ignore the administration’s record altogether. He therefore ran as an insurgent rather than an incumbent, even though most Americans had never had it so good.

  From start to finish, Gore allowed himself to be defined by the focus groups and the polls, and disgruntled aides sighed that they had rarely seen a candidate so thoroughly dependent on the numbers. Watching from the sidelines, where Gore was determined he should remain, Bill Clinton could hardly believe his deputy’s haplessness. Paradoxically, Gore should have paid much closer heed to the advice from Naomi Wolf. Her main recommendation had nothing to do with his wardrobe. Instead, she argued that the real Al Gore should be allowed out of the closet.

  It was a measure of his insecurity that in the three presidential debates we saw three different Al Gores. During their first encounter in Boston, having tutted and sighed his way through George W. Bush’s answers, he came across as petulant and antsy. He was also daubed with so much make-up that he looked like the lead baritone in a light operatic society just about to perform The Mikado. In the second debate, after being stung by an acid shower of criticism in the aftermath of the first, Gore overcompensated by being unusually nice. Then, in the third debate, he alternated between the two. Gore had flunked the great ‘who would you rather have a beer with?’ test, even though, as has oft been pointed out, the free world might have been better served by a nerdy designated driver.

  For me, the event that most neatly encapsulated Gore’s problems was staged in Nashville, when he appeared at a late-night fund-raiser at the famed Wildhorse Saloon. With little more than a week to go before election day, it came to be known as the hoedown before the showdown. Tennessee, which he had represented as a congressman and senator for 16 years, was the last place Gore wanted to be at this late stage, but now he faced the hurtful prospect of becoming the first presidential candidate since George McGovern in 1972 to lose his home state.