I love the stories of the journeys people take to make things happen. I’m fascinated when artists talk about how they wrestle with their work, when business executives describe the aha! moments that lead to the big turnaround. I would love to be in the room with U2 as they work out a new album, on a stool in the corner when April Gornik paints, at the table while the jury selection consultant advises the lawyers. I’m into process porn… and so I am enjoying immensely this series of Newsweek articles on the presidential campaign.
A team of Newsweek reporters were given special access to the various campaigns for a year, on the condition that they reported none of their findings until after the election. The result is seven in-depth articles that show the individual campaigns at work, as well as tracing the overall arc that brought Barack Obama to the Democratic nomination and then to the presidency.
It’s fascinating stuff — the campaign seen through the lens of human choices, relationships, how the candidates and their staffs responded to the pressures of the moment. It’s given me the best sense of context I’ve had for the campaign as a whole, and it’s full of observations of the candidates in both personal and political moments.
It’s easy for me to disengage from politics, to feel overwhelmed by the anger and the hyperbole and the sheer competitive win win gotta WIN! frenzy, the self-righteousness and other-hatred that sweeps people up and away. The process feels so dehumanizing to me. But the last weeks of Obama’s campaign made me begin to see him as a real person (as well as a politician)… and now the Newsweek writers have given me a doorway through which I may step back in and remember that everyone in the campaign was human. That it was after all a human process. I’m grateful for that.
Kelley, I also find the many ways in which creators experience The Room quite fascinating. I also wonder how April Gornik paints. Most of my friends talk my ears off while they are brushing those huge canvases of theirs. They shattered my fantasy of the quiet and contemplative painter. Not all are the same, sure. But let’s say that nine out of every ten I know are VERY chatty. When it comes to musicians putting an album together… hm… Groups seem more prone to chaos and often need lots of food and other things to keep it going. I’m sure you have many vivid stories of your own—such as the one you shared with us in DS—so I won’t bore you with mine.
I enjoyed reading the Newsweek articles from a PR/marketing point of view. Can’t talk politics right now, so I’ll spare you my bitterness around the subject.
I still wish it was one of us in that room, though. Then I could trust we were getting a more unobstructed view of the process. I ask too much, I know. But working in documentaries left me with a sense of how much of the juicy and truly revealing stuff never makes it to the final cut. And we were only observing/talking to a few respectable painters and sculptors, musicians and theater people. Even in such a small and relatively irrelevant scale, those holding the checkbook had a very clear idea of what they wanted or didn’t want to be associated with the artist they hoped to showcase. I can only imagine the extent of control exercised over journalists expected to report on something as heavy-weight as US presidential candidates, pre-candidates and their campaigns.
I have to say that I’m with Karina on this. The articles are useful to provide additional context but they certainly can’t be trusted to be “the truth”. I’ll say more once I’ve had time to read them all.
Oh, sure — I don’t think that “absolute truth” is possible when we are telling stories of what has happened. For me, truth is a relative thing — whose truth are we talking about? I assume these stories reflect a combination of the reporters’ truth and the truths of other people who tried to (or did) influence the process.
I’m not looking for some kind of definitive truth. I’m looking for windows into the human experience of the campaign, and I’m getting that from these articles. That’s a more important truth for me than “the facts” sometimes, which tends to frustrate the hell out of some folks who know me and wish I were more “rigorous” about such things. Oh, well (grin).
I like looking into windows, too. I’m also a fan of “never get the facts get in the way of a good story.” What bothers me here is the suspicion that we’re being led to one particular set of windows in hope that other less-pleasing ones will go unnoticed. But, as I said, I ask too much. And having access to “some windows” is better than “no windows at all.” So I guess I should be grateful and enjoy whatever peeping perks we’re offered.
I got the feeling that the journalists were even hinting at this requirement to play with the winner in the short paragraph that goes, “That night, in the press-filing center, New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza was putting the finishing touches on a 10,000-word story on Rocket Ship Obama. “I think I’m fâââed,” he said. “I have to write a completely different story.” I could even imagine them writing two different features—not unlikely. My skeptic self thinks there’s a very concrete reason they waited until the results announced who was to be the next US president.