Changing the Campaign (and reporting?) Game
by Kevin Miller on March 10, 2010 in HKS News, News
On March 2, the JFK, Jr. Forum sharpened its focus on the 2008 presidential campaign with an evening featuring Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, noted journalists and authors of Game Change - Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.
The discussion, moderated by Boston Globe reporter Susan Milligan and co-sponsored by the IOP and Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, delved into the method and impetus for crafting an election narrative whose research and writing spanned from 2007 to early 2010.
HKS alum John Heilemann and Spring 2007 Visiting Fellow Mark Halperin cited their urge to answer unanswered questions about the campaigns and the captivating personalities of the candidates as catalysts for writing ‘Game Change.’
“We joke all the time that if you’ve got a presidential campaign where the 7th most interesting candidate is Rudy Giuliani, you know you’ve got a really interesting race on your hands,” said Halperin.
Early introduction of 2008 campaign-nostalgia was the unintended consequence of the more than 300 interviews with 200 campaign insiders, from aides and advisers to candidates and their spouses.
These interviews, many spanning six to seven hours each, created in-depth oral histories. Susan Milligan took Halperin and Heilemann’s choice to leave their sources unnamed head-on, asking whether directly quoted and paraphrased conversations should be believed.
Heilemann placed Game Change in the context of the established convention of ‘deep background’ interviews, utilized by such journalists as Bob Woodward and Richard Ben Cramer.
“It turns out to be essential,” he said. “The only way you’re going to get [the story behind the story] is to give people the protection and the anonymity to get the candor you want …to get past what the public has already seen.”
While the flow of the discussion hit snares when treading into topics that straddle the public and private tensions intrinsic to contemporary political figures, the two authors rooted the discussion in revealing and broadly applicable insights.
“If you’re going to run for president or vice-president, don’t look like Tina Fey. You won’t get that from most academics, but it’s a pretty important [point],” Halperin noted blithely in reference to the lampooning of Palin on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
As if on cue, Heilemann added, “Two years at the Kennedy School and nobody ever said that to me.”
Halperin and Heilemann’s banter framed the more substantive insights unearthed by their extensive research. The whimsy of their presentation may have come from realizing the informational vacuum in which that both reporters and campaigns operate while in the moment, admitted Heilemann.
“There are moments when you realize, ‘Man, I was covering this campaign with a bag over my head.’ I think [this] is true for a lot of the campaigns…Some of the feedback we get is that they got an insight into their opponents that they didn’t get before reading the book,” he said.
Both Halperin and Heilemann referred to the central role played by candidates’ spouses in their campaigns, from the “gung-ho” attitude of Bill Clinton, to reservations of Michelle Obama and flat-out opposition by Cindy McCain.
Heilemann said that Cindy McCain’s campaign apprehension fueled John McCain’s initial ambivalence to running, which was further hindered by his opposition to being paraded as “the edifice of front-runner-dom [sic].”
According to Heilemann, McCain only regained his vigor for the campaign when his campaign was beginning to totter and the public began writing him off in the summer of 2007.
“McCain prefers to run as this loner, as this outsider, as this guerilla candidate, close to the ground living off the land, that’s where he’s happiest. That’s when he finally finds the actual conviction and fire in his belly to want to win,” he said.
Halperin observed that the main stumbling block and weak link of the Obama campaign was Barack Obama himself.
“[Obama] had real frustrations about going out and campaigning,” said Halperin. “One of the things he felt was that every time he gave a speech, people basically expected it to be a reenactment of [his keynote address] at the 2004 DNC.”
Anecdotes shared by the authors hinted at the deep, interpersonal undercurrents filling in the gaps of a campaign storyline whose focus was blurred by a newsmedia beleaguered with a deficit of attention.
“John McCain picks Sarah Palin, and for 48 hours the press is obsessed with the question of, ‘How did she get on the radar?’… Then 48 hours later you’re on to Sarah Palin’s address to the RNC. Then a few days after that the nation is gripped by the important public policy of what Barack Obama meant by lipstick on a pig, and so you move on to that,” said Halperin.
Therein, implied Halperin, lies the beauty and luxury of reflection preceding reporting.
Both authors expressed their gratitude to the IOP and Shorenstein Center, whose pre- and post-campaign symposia facilitating gathering information from sources closest to the candidates in the same Forum they addressed that evening.
Both Heilemann and Halperin expressed their gratitude to the IOP and Shorenstein Center, which had helped the authors organize panel discussions featuring campaign managers and operatives across the political spectrum both before and after the election – all of which provided good material for their book.
“We should thank the Charles Hotel for all the room service that we ate, because it was a big bill,” he said with a smile.
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