Riding on the Straight Talk Express
I spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning riding with Senator McCain and his campaign in Southern New Hampshire. I urge other bloggers to take advantage of this opportunity. I doubt that any future candidate of John McCain’s stature, or anything approaching it, will ever offer the kind of access McCain provides. Indeed, one journalist who has been following the major candidates this year told me that McCain probably answered more questions from reporters on Saturday afternoon than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney has answered during the entire campaign.
High on the list of the grievances expressed against McCain by some of our conservative readers is the perception that he became the darling of the mainstream media during the 2000 campaign by expressing disdain for conservatives to reporters. One imagines McCain charming the reporters who traveled with him in 1999 and 2000 by making wise-cracks at the expense of the conservative base.
I wasn’t with the McCain campaign in 2000, so I don’t know whether this image, which I confess to having conjured up myself, has any basis in reality. After this weekend, though, I can offer a simpler explanation for why members of the mainstream media like McCain – the extraordinary access he provides and the good cheer with which he provides it.
The Straight Talk Express is divided into two segments. The first consists of eight comfortable chairs. This is where the campaign staff works. The second, separated from the first by a curtain, consists of a round semi-circular sofa. It’s there, with journalists squeezed onto the sofa with him, that McCain holds court, taking question after question and not ducking any of them.
The “campaign” is essentially absent at “court.” Occasionally a staffer will stand by the curtain and listen in, but they don’t impinge on the proceedings. I recall McCain interacting with the campaign on the bus only three times yesterday. Once he asked a staffer to remind him to call the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. Once a staffer brought a blackberry and showed McCain a message. He said he’d deal with it later. Once, as we were boarding the bus after a stop, the Senator and his top confidante Mark Salter went to the back for a meeting. It lasted maybe a minute. The rest of the time it was just McCain and us.
After a leg or two, we run out of questions, so “court” becomes a conversation about politics and public policy. By the final leg, the conversation has drifted away from politics and public policy, and into history and sports. McCain sprinkles the conversation with anecdotes – some about his travels; some about famous people he’s known. He also asks a trivia question or two.
There are plenty of wise-cracks, but none during my time on the bus was anti-conservative. A good example was a joke he directed at me. During his blogger calls, McCain likes to chide bloggers for sitting in their recliners instead of going on the road with him. I mentioned that, while I had taken him up on this offer, the rest of the blog world was hanging out in Las Vegas at a blog expo. McCain responded, “what that tells me is that your priorities are seriously [messed] up.”
Reporters, then, have ample reason to like McCain that have nothing to do with ideology or anti-conservative tone. It’s only natural to like a politician who is constantly accessible, who answers all of your questions, and who even converses with you not as if you were an enemy or an annoyance, but as if you were a guest at his house. This would be true even if other candidates of his stature did not treat the media as warily as they apparently do.
And there’s more to this than merely liking someone who treats you well. It’s an article of faith among reporters that democracy works better when public figures are willing to answer their questions. And even though I don’t make my living by putting questions to public figures, I share that view, as long as the questions are serious and non-abusive, and the answers are reported fairly. Yesterday, the questions were serious and non-abusive, and I got the strong sense that the journalists on board will bend over backwards to report the day fairly. This is not pro-McCain bias, although it might become that if the same journalists “punish” candidates who are not as accessible and respectful.
In any case, other things being equal it would better to have a president who interacts with the media the way John McCain does than a president who interacts with it the way just about every one else at that level does these days.
JOHN objects: I take umbrage at the suggestion that my priorities are "[messed] up." This could, indeed, be the case, but my attendance at the Blog World Expo is hardly the best evidence for that proposition. Be that as it may, I'd much rather have spent the time on McCain's bus.
PAUL responds: McCain was on your side, or at least pretended to be for purposes of needling me.
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