...And Then There's Campaign Reporting!

I briefly caught THE MAVERICK mindlessly yammering on the tube this morning and watching some reporter lap it up ...like it was pâté from Maxim de Paris. And the next thing I know I was thinking about this Dan Savage classic from the 2000 Iowa Caucus-a-Thon:

On day three, still sick as a dog, I decided I had to get out of bed and do my job. I had planned on following one of the loopy conservative Christian candidates around -- Bauer or Keyes -- and writing something insightful and humanizing about the candidate, his campaign and his supporters. Then, from my deathbed, I caught Gary Bauer on MSNBC. "Our society will be destroyed if we say it's OK for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman," Bauer said. Seeing Bauer go off about gay marriage reminded me of something he said back in December when the Vermont Supreme Court came out for same-sex marriage. "I think what the Vermont Supreme Court did last week was in some ways worse than terrorism," Bauer told the Associated Press.

In my Sudafed-induced delirium I decided that if it's terrorism Bauer wants, then it's terrorism Bauer is going get -- and I'm just the man to terrorize him. Naked, feverish and higher than a kite on codeine aspirin, I called the Bauer campaign and volunteered. My plan? Get close enough to Bauer to give him the flu, which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary. I would go to Bauer's campaign office and cough on everything -- phones and pens, staplers and staffers. I even hatched a plan to infect the candidate himself. I would keep the pen in my mouth until Bauer dropped by his offices to rally the troops. And when he did, I would approach him and ask for his autograph, handing him the pen from my flu-virus incubating mouth.

[...]

The list I'd been given was of voters who'd indicated that Gary was their second choice. Of the 50 or so people I managed to get on the phone, most were voting for Forbes, a few for Keyes and only one for Bush. Despite ample opportunity, I'm not engaging in dirty tricks. I'm doing as told, reading from my script. Andy gives me a list of caucus sites, so that I can tell people where to go on Monday night. The list has both the Republican and Democratic caucus sites in each precinct. I'm tempted to send the Bauer supporters to Democratic caucuses in their neighborhoods, delivering them to the living rooms of Bradley and Gore supporters. I could cost Bauer a few hundred votes -- and every vote counts, Andy tells me, every vote counts.

But I don't do it. I can't. My work ethic won't allow it. The folks on the phone are so pleasant, and Andy is so nice to me, that I don't have it in my heart to do a bad job. What if one of the nice church ladies I get on the phone -- and that's just what they sound like, Dana Carvey's mid-'80s "SNL" Church Lady -- walks into a room of pot-smoking Bradley supporters and dies of a heart attack? I couldn't sleep at night if that happened, so I tell everyone the truth about their caucus locations.

Well, almost everyone.

Comments

[JP Stormcrow]

Kinda makes me want to go reread both HST's F & L on the Campaign Trail and Crouse's The Boys on the Bus. A great one-two punch from back in the day.

[Roxanne]

Matt Taibbi's also done some good stuff in the reporter-as-prankster genre.

[Frederick]

Good find. I wasn't much into politics back then, so I didn't catch it the first time.

BTW: Thanks for the link. You've earned a life time supply of photoshopping. I think this creation of mine would go good with the post...