151: Primary

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life.

Ira Glass

All of our stories today, brought to you from New Hampshire, where it has started again. Voters looking to fall for a candidate-- candidates, according to voters.

Ira Glass

Today on our program, people looking for something to believe in, and many of them finding it, and what they know about the candidates that you don't know. Take, for example, Kahari Mosley and Garcia Suzinko. Three days into the beginning of the new millennium, they left home to do something they had never done before. They hopped on a bus in Pennsylvania and headed up to New Hampshire to volunteer for a presidential campaign. Kahari had never been to New England before. He looked out the bus window, he says, and saw trees all close together, boxy houses 100 years old.

Ira Glass

In rural New Hampshire, wherever Kahari and Garcia went, they could pretty much count on being the only African-Americans for miles. Knocking on doors for their candidate, they found a surprising number of people who wanted to tell them how great Colin Powell is. They tried to steer the conversation toward their candidate, Bill Bradley. They also did lit drops, put together canvassing kits, painted signs for a Bradley event down in Boston.

Ira Glass

And what motivated these two college students to hop on a bus at their own expense and head north to work for free? It was one television appearance. One of those Sunday morning talk shows where, as Kahari remembers it, Bill Bradley said the two biggest social problems facing America are racism and materialism. Materialism. Kahari could not believe it. It was like running against the very idea of America.

Ira Glass

And so he bought his bus ticket for Manchester. Today on our program, the politicians are looking for a way to connect with voters. The voters want candidates who inspire them. So how come so few of us are like Kahari? How come so few of us have a candidate we love? Today, we bring you stories that explain how come and stories of voters who have found inspiration.

Act One of today's show, Eliminate the Middleman. Sarah Vowell visits a high school class in Concord that decided to take on the national press. Act Two, The Mask Behind the Mask, in which an intrepid reporter tries to get beyond the sound bites with Governor George W. Bush and succeeds-- as well as anyone, anyway. Act Three, Pay No Attention to the Candidate Behind the Mosh Pit, in which we answer the question what is a presidential campaign good for anyway? Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Eliminate the Middleman. Here in America, here is how we interact with our political candidates. We dispatch middlemen to the scene. They tell us what the candidates say, they research the candidates' backgrounds, and they tell us what they think is most important. These middlemen, of course, are journalists. Sarah Vowell has this fable about the difference between the way the middlemen see the world and the way non-journalists see it.

Sarah Vowell

It all started when Joanne McGlynn's media literacy class at Concord High School invited all the presidential candidates to speak. Known to loiter in New Hampshire ceaselessly before the state's primary elections, a whopping 50% of the eight major candidates accepted. Alan Keyes, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, and Al Gore. They were asked to speak on the subject of school violence, not just because of the killings at Columbine but also because a Concord High School student was killed at school a couple of years ago.

Gore spoke to the student body on November 30, 1999, and contrary to conventional wisdom regarding his charisma deficiency, he was a hit. Students Lucas Gallo, Ashley Pettingill, and Alyssa Spellman recalled the event.

Sarah Vowell

While the students were impressed by Gore's easygoing manner, his form, Joanne McGlynn was pleased with his content, the way he talked about school violence.

Sarah Vowell

Then during the question and answer period, something happened that seemed unremarkable at the time.

Sarah Vowell

Now I'm going to play you that little story. In the days that followed Gore's appearance, this story was twisted, distorted, and ultimately more fought over than a piece of Jerusalem real estate, which is why I am going to play what he said in its entirety.

Sarah Vowell

The night after the speech, Joanne McGlynn was at home and a friend called her, asking if she'd seen The New York Times.

Sarah Vowell

Let me read from Katharine Seelye's article in The New York Times on December 1. In a 17-paragraph piece about one day in the Gore campaign, four paragraphs are devoted to the Concord High appearance. Seelye quoted Gore, "'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue in Toone, Tennessee,' he said, 'but I was the one that started it all.'" Curiously The Washington Post made the exact same mistake. Also on December 1, Post staff writer Ceci Connolly quoted, "I was the one that started it all."

Sarah Vowell

After The Times and The Post, the Love Canal mistake snowballed. US News & World Report listed "I was the one that started it all" as one of its quotes of the week. And then there was the following little round table on This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. Among the two hosts, George Stephanopoulos and Bill Kristol.

Sarah Vowell

The Late Show with David Letterman dreamed up a list of the Top 10 other achievements also claimed by Al Gore.

Sarah Vowell

Initially, the students were upset about the misquote. But the more they thought about it and the more they watched the misquote evolve, they were really flabbergasted by the misrepresentation of Gore's appearance at their school.

Sarah Vowell

If I can come clean on whom I identify with the most in this story, it isn't the students or their teacher. I identify with the New York Times reporter Katharine Seelye, who misheard a word. She was the one that started it all. I am convinced that this woman, whose job it is to follow around a man with two jobs, running for president and being vice president, is beyond overworked. I know this partly because the first chance she got to return my phone call about all of this was at 1:15 in the morning. This poor reporter, this gatekeeper of democracy, was getting her first break of the day in the middle of the night. And considering that I am a writer who has publicly misspelled names, confused Sinclair Lewis with Upton Sinclair, and gotten who knows how many things wrong over the years, I am one pot who should not be calling The Grey Lady black.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post did publish corrections. And this is what Seelye told me. About the students of Concord High, she said, "These kids are well intentioned. They're paying attention. We did get one word wrong. But they're magnifying what happened. Gore did say, 'I found a little town in upstate New York called Love Canal.'" She continued, "He called the AP in Buffalo the next day and apologized for presuming to take credit for that."

The journalists were, in fact, correct when they said that Love Canal was already a front-page story, an official national emergency months before Al Gore ever held hearings. But as you heard yourself, Gore never claimed to have been the one to have first brought Love Canal to national attention. He only claimed to have held the first congressional hearings on it.

Sarah Vowell

I asked 16-year-old Ashley Pettingill what we lose when the press omits descriptions of how a candidate might actually make a good president.

Sarah Vowell

At Concord High School, a politician actually spoke inspiringly and connected with the audience, which to me is news. But no reporter reported this. And in fact, these kind of moments are routinely overlooked by the press. They're barely part of our national political discourse.

But why? For one thing, so much political speech is lies, spin, and misrepresentation, it's understandable that journalists report these inspiring moments skeptically, if at all. And beyond that, the way most of the press works is pretty much as you suspect. Representatives of the news media carry around storylines of the candidates in their heads, and reporters light up when reality randomly corroborates these pictures.

One of the great mysteries of modern politics is which storylines get told and which get ignored. And in the primary season, that storyline is still up for grabs. John McCain's storyline, hero, threatened to become hypocrite in light of his helping a major donor with the FCC. Not long after George W. Bush flunked a foreign policy pop quiz, it appeared his name tag at the Correspondents Dinner was destined to read, "Hello, my name is Dunderhead."

Gore's storyline, that he's a bore, is spiced up by this secondary storyline, that he's a braggart, that he takes credit for ridiculous things, for inventing the internet, and for being the real life Oliver of Love Story. So of course the Love Canal misunderstanding screamed to reporters because it brought this particular fuzzy snapshot of Gore into sharper focus. It is telling that both the reporter for The Times and the one for The Post heard the exact same word incorrectly, almost as if that was what they wanted to hear. Teacher Joanne McGlynn says that this is a seductive impulse for both reporters and voters.

Sarah Vowell

I looked at Joanne McGlynn's syllabus for her media literacy course, the one she handed out at the beginning of the year stating the goals of the class. By the end of the year, she hoped her students would be better able to challenge everything from novels to newscasts, that they would come to identify just who is telling a story and how that person's point of view affects the story being told.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this lesson has been learned. In fact, just recently, a student came up to McGlynn and told her something all good teachers dream of hearing. The girl told the teacher that she was listening to the radio, singing along with her favorite song. And halfway through the singalong, she stopped and asked herself, what am I singing? What do these words mean? What are they trying to tell me? And then this young citizen of the republic jokingly complained, I can't even turn on the radio without thinking more.

Ira Glass

Sarah Vowell is a columnist for Salon, the online magazine. She has a new collection of essays coming out called Take the Cannoli. Coming up, the finger-wagging styles of presidential candidates throughout history, and how George W. Bush acts in his own car. That's in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Tales from the New Hampshire Primary, stories about why it is so hard for us to feel inspired by and connected to presidential candidates and of people who have managed that trick.

Ira Glass

We have arrived at act two of our program. Act Two, The Mask Behind the Mask. The front-runners always seem more protected. They are always the least spontaneous, the most packaged. They have the most to lose from a gaff, after all. And they have more people gunning for them too. Take George W. Bush. In debates, he'll often repeat the same few answers to several different questions. Sarah Koenig has been covering the Bush campaign for months for the newspaper The Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, trying to get to know the real George W. Bush, the man behind the message.

Sarah Koenig

I am in Austin, sitting in the back of George W. Bush's dusty blue Lincoln Town Car. He's twisting a gum wrapper around and around his finger, and he's grouchy. He's fighting the flu, I find out later. But right now, I think I must be letting him down somehow.

Back in his office at the state house, I had asked him about Texas politics and education reform. He seemed bored. His eyes moved around distractedly and his answers were the same ones I had heard him intone on the stump in New Hampshire about the American dream touching every willing heart. Suddenly he announced the interview was over. Bush must have sensed my disappointment because he said I could ride with him from his office to the Governor's mansion if I wanted.

He sits in the front seat and I sit in back. And after two and a half blocks, we arrive at the mansion. The driver pulls under the portico, but Bush doesn't like where he stops, so he makes him move up a few inches. I consider that a while, those few inches. After covering George Bush for months, this is what I've come to. I'm thinking any move he makes that isn't on a campaign schedule, anything he says that isn't scripted, even something as small as this, might be a clue to figuring out who he really is.

In New Hampshire, Bush had been friendly. He even seemed to like me. After just one meeting, he almost remembered who I was. We were next to each other in this heaving mass of reporters and townspeople, and he squinting at me and pointed. Yale, right? No, Governor, I said, almost. Then I think he asked my name, and after that, he knew who I was.

He would wink at me from the vortex of huge crowds. Once he walked past me on his way to deliver a speech about education policy and he pinched my elbow. When I was on his bus with some other reporters, he patted my knee. This wasn't flirting. It was a kind of affectionate teasing. It's a side of George Bush you don't see on television. You don't see how he leans in so close to people he looks as if he's going to kiss them. You don't hear the nicknames, the wisecracks, the asides.

But off screen, he bestows them liberally, especially to the press. A baby would cry and he'd blame the guy from The Houston Chronicle. He'd make the New York Times reporter giggle by telling him to get a haircut.

So here we are in Austin, parked in front of the mansion, sitting in the Lincoln Town Car, and despite our chummy rapport, the interview is proceeding miserably. Our conversation is petering out, and I think he's going to ditch any second. But he doesn't. Instead, he faces the windshield and his voice gets quiet.

And that's when he mentions his nest. He likes campaigning, he says, but he longs for the comforting feeling of being around his own cats and dog. "One thing about campaigning that I miss is not being in my nest," he says. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the first thing he's ever said to me that he hasn't said to anyone else.

His aides tell me to be at the mansion at 6:00 AM the next day if I want to observe Bush being interviewed by a 10-year-old. I go. In a fatherly tone, he recites for the boy the same platform points that have already saturated the national news, including that kid-friendly one about developing anti-ballistic missile systems. Afterward, we chat in one of the period sitting rooms, and Bush elaborates on his nesting pattern. He's the first up, he walks the dog, he feeds the little cat that sleeps inside, he lets in the yellow cat that sleeps outside, he feeds the little black cat that stays outside all the time, he makes coffee and brings it to the First Lady, they read newspapers in the sack. Then he has a light breakfast and gets dressed and wanders around the house looking for something to do. He's at work by 7:30 or 8:00.

I tell him I'm impressed and that I'm tired. It's now 6:30 in the morning. He asks me how old I am. Thirty, I tell him. See, I was sluggish, too, at 30, he says. He tells me by the time I'm his age, 53, I'll be more energetic. Your biological clock, he says, it's like clockwork.

Maybe I have just glimpsed the real George Bush. Maybe the real George Bush talks about his nest. Weeks later, I ask one of Bush's aides about it.

Sarah Koenig

In one sense, you want to give Bush and all these politicians a break. They have to talk to scores of people every day, and they're trying to win over every single one. It's like trying to land a date with an entire village. How many charming stories, stories that we'd be willing to broadcast, stories that have to be personal but not too personal, does any of us have? A dozen? A half dozen?

I figured if Bush was not in a position to tell me who he was, maybe people who had been around him in Texas could. I called Harvey Kronberg, a veteran political reporter who describes himself, like many Texans do, as a liberal Republican or a moderate Democrat. Kronberg tells me the Texas press had the same difficulty getting to know Bush when he was first running for governor.

Sarah Koenig

Kronberg said once he took office, Bush loosened up and understood the state's business as shrewdly as any of his predecessors. Sadly, for us non-Texans, now that Bush is again running for office, he's back on message in every conversation except when he's either joking around or annoyed. Those are the moments when Bush seems most real to me. In moments of irritation, you can glimpse his vulnerability, his youth, even.

Back in New Hampshire, I make another attempt to slip behind the sound bites. I know he reads the Bible every day, and I decide to ask him about it. I borrow a Gideon Bible from a Holiday Inn and bring it to a press availability in Portsmouth. Is there a particular passage he turns to for strength? I ask him.

Sarah Koenig

He finds the section he's looking for and holds it up so everyone can see. We all nod. Finally, I ask him outright how close the real George Bush is to the one we see campaigning, if there are parts of himself he withholds from the public.

Sarah Koenig

His wife, Laura, gently knocks on the door and comes in.

Sarah Koenig

Everyone I talk to about Bush, his friends, his colleagues, his brother Jeb, said the man they know is the same at home as he is at work, the same one we see. After watching him for months, I think that's probably true with one caveat. For now, every story he tells in public has a purpose.

Take the nesting story. Once I've heard it three times, I finally realize Bush's message is this. I do not snort cocaine or dance naked on table tops. I might live in a mansion, but I make my own coffee. I do not think the presidency is my birthright. I am a humble, loving family man, satisfied by simple pleasures such as providing for those meeker than myself, like my pets.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig is a political reporter for The Concord Monitor.

[MUSIC - "NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW" BY HANK WILLIAMS, SR.]

Ira Glass

Act Three. Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Mosh Pit. In this cynical age, we end our show today with a story of citizens who feel perfectly connected to their candidate of choice, who feel inspired by him. This American Life producer Alex Blumberg tells this story.

Alex Blumberg

Let's play a little game. I'll describe a group of people, you guess the candidate they support. Ready? It's a couple of dozen teenagers outside the presidential primary debates in Durham, New Hampshire. They're all wearing bright orange t-shirts, talking about punk rock and skateboarding in the freezing cold. One of the kids is wearing nothing but jeans and a t-shirt. Give up?

Alex Blumberg

Meet Youth for Forbes.

Alex Blumberg

A group of young people so psyched about their millionaire publisher candidate that they'll burst into spontaneous cheering at the slightest provocation. Witness this exchange.

Alex Blumberg

Maybe there are hard-bitten reporters out there who could resist such an enthusiastic reception, but I am not one of them. As we walk to their van from the debate site, I establish a few facts. They're not paid, they get no school credit, and though they're almost all from Republican families, their parents have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they're volunteering. Very few of their parents even support Steve Forbes. These kids are here because in their view, nothing could be more fun.

We get to the hall where New Hampshire's Forbes supporters have gathered to watch the debate on a big screen TV. It's striking that of the almost 200 people here, fully half of them aren't old enough to vote. The Forbes campaign claims to have the biggest Republican youth organization in New Hampshire. And when you go to campaign events, this claim seems believable. There are always more young people there for Forbes, which is incredible when you think about it. Steve Forbes, the flat tax candidate? I mean, can there be an issue less likely to inspire the nation's youth than the US tax code? Most teenagers haven't even seen a 1040 form.

Alex Blumberg

Aside from their views on taxes, most of what the Forbes kids say isn't what you'd typically call conservative. When I do pin them down on what issues they care about, they trot out these suspiciously liberal chestnuts-- global warming and education. I ask how Forbes' plan to radically scale back the size of government will help address these issues. An athletic type named John tells me it's simply a matter of resource allocation.

Alex Blumberg

During John's little speech, all the kids were crowding around and making these funny little hand gestures. It went like this. Hold your hand with your fingers extended in a karate chop position. Then fold the bottom two fingers back into your palm. The kids held both hands in this position, two fingers extended, and sort of chopped them up and down as John talked. Fifteen or 20 of them, all doing it at once.

I asked one of them about it. Oh, that's just what Steve does when he talks, Mike says. It's very French, Ryan explains. And then Ted demonstrates how the gesture fits into a timeline of presidential hand postures. He makes a fist, his thumb on top.

Alex Blumberg

He tucks the thumb into the fist.

Alex Blumberg

They say you can tell how excited he is by how high in the air his hands get.

Alex Blumberg

At the far side of the room, the presidential debate on television ended. And at a certain point, the call came that Forbes was on his way.

Alex Blumberg

Forbes finally arrives. And the kids' impersonations of his oratorical style are remarkably accurate. His hands karate chop up and down on every syllable. He looks like a badly operated puppet.

Alex Blumberg

At this, kids spontaneously burst into Wayne and Garth we're not worthy bows in the direction of Forbes' wife. She beams at them. They beam back. They've gone through this ritual before. On his way out, after finishing a speech, Forbes walked up to some of the kids, including Ryan and Chris, and shook their hands.

Alex Blumberg

Misty Flip, a snowboarding maneuver in which the rider turns a forward sommersault, while at the same time, rotating his body axially. Let's continue.

When I catch up with the candidate himself, he's clearly pleased with his newfound popularity among the cool kids, even if he doesn't completely understand it.

Alex Blumberg

He goes on to tell me that his campaign is an idealistic one, and that's part of the appeal to teenagers. But it still doesn't explain the essential question. How did this stiff, socially awkward man corral the passions of New Hampshire's skate punks? Well, meet 21-year-old Mike DelBene.

Alex Blumberg

Mike DelBene is a regional youth coordinator for Forbes 2000. He's also the reason all these teenagers love Steve Forbes. How does he do it? One of his main recruiting tricks is simply being Mike DelBene. Chelsea White, one of Mike's recruits, says that when Mike came to her school, he was somehow different than the competition.

Alex Blumberg

So what exactly did Mike say, I ask her, that made volunteering sound so fun, so appealing, that she signed up with Forbes?

Alex Blumberg

OK. Lit drops?

Alex Blumberg

Here, this is what Mike DelBene has wrought. At an all-ages punk show at the Sad Cafe in Plaistow, New Hampshire, there are high school seniors who can quote Steve Forbes' best lines in Steve Forbes' voice like their favorite song lyrics. And 17-year-old Ryan tells me this.

Alex Blumberg

Say hypothetically Forbes doesn't get the nomination this go-around. All the hours, all the volunteers, all the cold calls, what does it accomplish to run for president and lose? What does a failed presidential bid create in the world? It's entirely possible that the most lasting achievement of the Forbes campaign will be how it affects the lives of these teenagers, true believers in the flat tax, true believers in the political process. As New Hampshire's finest punk rock blasts through the club's speakers, I watch the kids, future campaign managers, press secretaries, political strategists, fling themselves around the mosh pit like spawning salmon.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachman and Starlee Kine, our producer trainee. This is her last program with us. We will badly, badly miss her.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with most stories of This American Life.

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