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| Jason Moscovitz |
By Jason Moscovitz
For a political reporter, an election campaign is what you live for. To
be on a party leader’s tour means so much adrenaline and so little sleep. It’s
a professional experience like no other as people live together in a bubble, in
airplanes and busses, for weeks at a time.
Now, so many years after my last campaign, I can still feel the
excitement as others do it. The technology is much improved, but the game is
the same. It is a time when the leaders sell themselves and their party
platforms to voters, and they still need journalists to help them do it.
Listening to the same campaign speech every day is tedious, but in the
world of electoral politics you know that every day will provide a statement, a
reaction, or a mistake that will propel scribes on the tour to getting their
stories out.
There are usually no scoops on a campaign tour. The stories are pretty
similar and that is precisely what the political planners want. Control. The
political pros who work the campaigns always like to know, not so much what the
journalists are writing, but rather, what they are thinking.
Reporters are often led into conversations that always start friendly
and innocently, but the whole point of talking to them is find out what their
take is on certain things. Political staffers need to know what reporters
think, individually and collectively, because they can’t afford not to.
Surprises are bad for business. Reporters know to be careful, but it is hard at
close quarters.
I never liked the term “handler,” but that is still the term used for
the political staff who travel on the tour. Their tasks range from talking to
reporters to advising the leader, while others facilitate hotels and meals.
While media outlets pay for the travel, food and hotels, it is the political
parties who organize it and, in some cases, subsidize it.
The rule of thumb has always been that if reporters are kept happy and
well fed, their reporting will be more favourable. It sounds dumb, but it’s
not. Hungry people don’t write well.
A well organized, efficient campaign is one whose planners think of
everything. A badly organized effort sends out a message that if people can’t
organize an election campaign properly, chances are they can’t run a
government. That may be too simple, but a campaign is a test in a bubble, and
the bubble can’t burst.
It has been a longstanding policy for media outlets not to keep the same
reporter on any one campaign for too long. Rotation is a common practice for
two reasons. If a political party considered a reporter overly and
unnecessarily negative, rotating reporters alleviates the complaint. And then
there is the risk of Stockholm syndrome. Too long in one bubble and a reporter
might begin to believe everything he or she hears. Overly positive also needs
to be avoided and rotation takes care of that, too.
Looking back I now realize how little of an election campaign the public
actually sees or hears about. What is missed the most is the humour. Political
reporters instinctively develop, in private, an innate way of joking about the
politicians they cover.
Put them on a long flight with a few drinks and the humour gets funnier
– but, somehow, funny doesn’t fit. It is a cutting kind of humour that would not
be appropriate in real life. An election campaign in the sky is not real life.
It is the only place that political staffers can enjoy the humour at the
expense of their bosses.
Often, certainly past the halfway point, the telltale signs are there to
know who is winning and who is losing. There is a gaiety with a winning
campaign ride that creates a lightness in spirit and somehow, when that
lightness hits, media workrooms give up the doughnuts and replace them with
canopies and lattes.
Losing campaigns stick to the doughnuts and bad coffee while the staff
keeps smiling. It is one thing to know you are losing and another to admit it.
It is called the game face, the face that says what Yogi Berra used to say, “It
ain’t over till it’s over.”
At the end of the campaign reporters feel sad, tired and empty. The
adrenaline leaves the body and the rush is over.
Believe me, it takes a long time to land.
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