I came across a very, very good but not perfect article by David Foster Wallace about being on the McCain campaign trail for 7 days. It appeared in the April 2000 issue of Rolling Stone (DMX is on the cover). "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub" also appears in one of those "Best of Magazine Writing" books. Anyway, Wallace says that the best political insight came from the veteran tech crews, especially NBC and CBS's. They argued that the establishment party candidates, Bush and Gore, have an interest in keeping voter turnout low in the primaries, b/c young, new voters are more likely to vote for the challengers, Bradley and McCain. So, for example Shrub went very negative despite a promise not to.
Try to find a copy of Foster Wallace's article if you can. He gives a brief glossary of campaign trail vocab. For example: "Baggage Call: The grotesquely early A.M. time when you've got to have your suitcase back in the bus's bowles and have a seat staked out and be ready to go or else you get left behind and have to try wheedle a ride to the first THM (town hall meeting) from Fox News, which is a drag in all kinds of ways. Twelve Monkeys (or 12M): The techs' private code-name for the most elite and least popular pencils (print journalists) in the McCain press corps .... As you might already have gathered, Rolling Stone dislikes the 12M intensely, for all the above reasons, plus the fact that they're tighter than a duck's butt when it comes to sharing even very basic general-knowledge political information that might help somebody write a slightly better article, plus the issue of two seperate occasions at late-night hotel check-ins when one or more of the Twelve Monkeys just out of nowhere turned and handed Rolling Stone their suitcases to carry, as if Rolling Stone were a bellboy or gofer instead of a hard-working journalist just like them even if he didn't have a portable Paul Stuart steamer for his blazer."
and something the left should pay attention to instead of just scolding and nagging American workers about bolstering the Evil Empire: "It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn't seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000's adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A., as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to dislike - what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even."
Peter