There’s a giant green and yellow swath of ick rolling over Georgia on the animated radar right now, so there’s really no point in trying to wait it out before donning cheap rain gear and riding through the slop on a bike not built for weather. Giddyup.
Then after a few productive hours in the lab where I seem to have a biaxial extensometer finally up and running, it’s off to another conference — this one, luckily, just around the corner and not up in Kennesaw.
This event is a first-of-its-kind meeting to bring together up-and-coming journalists, established news-hounds, acclaimed academics, technology and media executives, Internet influencers and many others to discuss how new computing technologies will shape and reshape the news business for generations to come.
I’m back from my wintry travels, trying to re-acclimate to my graduate studies, and trying to figure out once again this whole work-life balance going forward.
And I’m still hacking up small bits of lung that withered and died in the single-digit Iowa air.
I’ve even gotten all my new cables, connectors, and tiny gizmos sorted and stored in individually marked plastic zip-top bags, which I think will be a key element of carrying around the one-person television production studio in my new backpack and not leaving anything behind when the story is done.
Last Monday night, I met my 50 other Street Team ‘08 cohorts and got quite a bit of pep talk from the president of MTV, the VP of MTV News, and our new producers. After loading us up with wine and snacks, they loaded us up with enough gear to make a U.S. Marine remember boot camp and sent us back to the hotel. There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun mic; an external hard drive the size of a Bible for footage; and a laptop the size of a boogie board (Dell, not MBP, but hey), all jammed into a spiffy and very comfortable backpack with our Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 logos embroidered thereupon.
Day one of orientation started off with more legal jargon than you could shake a stick at, and right off the bat I believe we covered what will in retrospect be discussed with great scrutiny when the evolution-of-media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Leonard Witt start the autopsy on MTV and the Knight Foundation’s grand journalistic experiment of 2008. While the press release sang proudly that 51 “citizen journalists” had been hired to cover the election from the local level on up, we have now become something else. Like that catch-22 of quantum mechanics which prevents you from measuring a system without irrevocably altering it, so does hiring a citizen journalist make them not-so-much-a-citizen journalist. Whether that makes us “real” journalists is also a dubious suggestion: if you see me trying to elbow my way through the mainstream press at the John Edwards rally at the IBEW this weekend, take note of just how many of the people with cameras go chasing after every interviewee with a release form to sign. That would be me.
Yes, to appear in my videos — even if it’s because you stepped up to a microphone to ask John Edwards a question, in front of all those people and cameras — you need to sign my Guest Release. Otherwise, it’s the cutting room floor for you. I’m also going to need someone who is authorized to represent the Atlanta IBEW to sign my Location Agreement, saying I have permission to film there. Oh and I have to slap up Cablecast signs at the door, warning the rest of you that you’re wandering into the line of fire. Meanwhile, my MSM rivals will be pointing and laughing at me, who is now neither as credentialed as a “real” journalist, nor as free from restriction as a “citizen” journalist.
So we’ll just see how this goes. I’m sure I’ll become quite deft, before long, at effortlessly obtaining all the signatures and knowing how to shoot the story to avoid too many hurdles in the first place. But it is hard for me, as someone whose role in politics has been, most of the time, to jump up and down and yell “You’re doing it wrong!” about this new media thingamajig in the hope of improving people’s methods, to just ignore that aspect of it. The evolution of media seems to be about relinquishing great degrees of control, which is naturally very scary to the old guard, and the extent to which each organization decides to loosen up on the grip is a big element of how their new forays online pan out. Thus any concern I have about importing old world constraints into new media ventures only arises out of my desire for this whole project to kick ass and take names. I really will be curious to see what the Rosen-Jarvis-Witt types say about this whole model. Hell, I’m curious to see what you think of the operation so far, so why don’t you go poke around and opine about it?
We actually got to hear from Jay Rosen, a co-organizer of my old Off the Bus beat at Huffington Post, on day two. He got us all fired up about thinking about our national versus local beats, and thankfully fired off the occasional chastisement at our new employers to make sure they gave us all the tools we need for this to truly be a new media operation. RSS feeds? Yes plzkthx! (Our blogs and media channels currently lack them…but it’s planned, don’t worry.) Surprise, surprise, my “national beat” — or the overarching theme that will hopefully tie into, and at times stand in for, local Georgia reporting — will be science and technology. We’ll see what kind of prayer I have of making sense out of that.
Legal protocols of videography aside, the overarching message of the whole trip was what an awesome platform we’re setting out to create and how excited our backers (oh, and we the Street Team, too) are about our prospects. Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation told us about pitching the idea of giving a Knight News Challenge Grant to MTV of all networks, and his enthusiasm for the project was infectious, even through some of our hangovers. Just hearing about the hope some very serious backers have for us was a wake-up call for how we’re not in YouTube anymore, Toto.
We also got a great send-off from Keven Roach, executive producer of AP’s online video network, Ron Fournier, former chief political writer for the AP and now their online political editor. Selected pieces of ours will be distributed over the AP’s online network to over 1,800 member sites, which is a huge platform for us and quite the incentive to produce that noteworthy video clip — and they couldn’t have been more excited about this whole venture either (even if it was somewhat muted by 36 straight sleepless hours of New Hampshire primary coverage). It was quite reassuring to get such optimistic words from someone so credible, but we were also warned that with much attention will come much scrutiny, and we’d better thicken up our skin for the inevitable criticism. Ron even brought some advice from other heavy hitters, in the form of a video he compiled while in Des Moines, IA, of advice for us newbies from the likes of Tim Russert, Sam Donaldson, and Andrea Mitchell.
Yeah, I think that was about the time it really sank in what a holy-shit step this was in my online career. Thank God Sen. Biden told me I’d better finish my dissertation at the end of the campaign. Thank Joe Biden, says my mother.
The rest of the Street Team seems pretty cool — even the small handful of Republicans! Well, what do you want, it is MTV after all, so our conservative caucus definitely has the look of a token minority; but I’m sure Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and I believe even Alaska (she’s hard to call) will do you right-wingers proud. The group is split right down the middle in gender, and, as an ever-so-slightly snarky article about our orientation in the Boston Globe says, we even have enough diversity to appeal to “Hispanics, African-Americans, and lesbians.”
She neglected to mention that we are also really, really, incredibly good looking, and do other stuff good, too.
I do still need your help fleshing out my local beat. If you’ve got a story — and you’re willing to sign a Guest Release, damnit — get in touch. There’s a contact link right up at the top of this page. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a notebook with my dissertation thoughts in it somewhere under all this video gear.
First and foremost, thank you. Not to Iowans in their bizarre political shenanigans and inability not only to be polled but even to bother to get their lazy asses registered as voters prior to caucus night. No, thanks go to those of you who tuned in, made the chat room lively, kept me updated to the conversation via text message, and of course, dropped a little somethin’ in the tip jar. I really appreciated your virtual companionship on the nerve-wracking and ultimately disappointing campaign trail, as I do your assistance in subsidizing that trip of a lifetime.
I also really ought to thank the folks on Joe Biden’s campaign who put their trust in me as a hybrid supporter-citizen journalist and basically threw open their doors and let me pick and choose where I would do some reporting and where I would do some volunteering. The fact that they ever wanted my help with some YouTubery or other online communications efforts over the last several months has really kept me going when I’ve wondered why I’m trying to balance my technically-challenged dissertation and, well, anything that is not dissertation. They were a great bunch of people to work with, even though it was largely over the internets until the last couple of days.
Their trust was made even more special when it survived an ugly Off the Bus episode the morning of the caucus, thanks to the bizarre and unsourced rumor promulgated by one of my OTB cohorts, Beverly Davis. She claimed to have spoken to one of the Biden campaign’s “national consultants” at a bar on New Year’s Eve, and this anonymous source suggested that a deal was in the offing between Biden and Obama, described by Davis in such a way as to make Biden’s campaign for President sound suddenly less serious, more like the speculative “He’s just running for VP” crap that’s always alleged of any second tier candidate. No one at Biden HQ had any idea what “national consultant” Davis might have been speaking to, nor was there any such deal ever in the work; Biden has a fine day job and was in this to do as well as his bluntly stated positions could get him. The story was posted on the 2nd, I believe, and by the time I got to the office on Thursday morning it was already keeping Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach’s blackberry buzzing furiously. Lucky for me, Beverly Davis referred to herself in the aggrandizing institutional third person, saying, “Off the Bus spoke to…” about her drunken gossiper, leaving a tiny grammatical question in a few people’s minds at that morning’s staff meeting. “She didn’t mean Shelby, did she?” That was apparently one fleeting thought that was quickly dismissed — and solidly confirmed when I talked to staff in person. I wasn’t even in Iowa for New Year’s Eve, and they know me well enough by this point to have faith that I wouldn’t run with such speculative crap without confirming it more solidly with someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. There was a similar moment in Greenville, SC, when the wheels came off the wagon for a few minutes and the whole campaign caravan fractured into several disconnected clusters when the Senator wanted to sneak off for a quiet lunch away from the crowds and the remaining aides lost track of the day’s agenda for a few minutes. I lingered outside the college fair where Biden was supposed to shake hands for a while and his former bodyman and a state committee member tried desperately to reconvene the group via multiple cellphone messages. The latter, not knowing quite who I was (but only seeing my fake press badge), looked askance at me before he was reassured that I could be trusted not to use this perfectly ordinary moment of campaign chaos to write a smear article, or I would under no circumstances be allowed within earshot of these phone calls in the first place.
That kind of trust raises a much broader question about this new-fangled citizen journalism stuff, as was reiterated to me yesterday by Leonard Witt, professor of communications at Kennesaw State University and networked journalism enthusiast. I will be co-hosting a dinner table discussion on politics and new media with our friend Grayson at the upcoming Southern Social Media Convention in a few weeks at Leonard’s request. In our emails I mentioned that while in Iowa I was a sort of hybrid campaign volunteer/embedded reporter, and it was tricky explaining to some people how that worked; he said he, too, would have questions about how that worked, and justifiably so. Just what kind of “journalism” could you expect to get out of me regarding the now defunct Biden campaign? Would I basically be shilling propaganda under the cloak of news? Absolutely not. For the most part, I provided video to Huffington Post, so what you saw is what you got. The text article I wrote about the Greenville trip was basically presenting the mood of the meetings, the policy topics discussed, and even a mention of the caravan’s consistent lateness and my speeding across South Carolina to keep up. I was not blowing sunshine up anyone’s skirt, to butcher a cliche. But there was certainly a lot of trust between me and a campaign I liked, and I was not going to rush to publish something before making sure it was a real story just for the sake of a gotcha. After the Beverly Davis flap, I asked the communications staff what the real deal was and said I’d be interested in publishing my own piece on their response, whether it was a denial or a “no comment” or what have you. The Press Secretary pointed out that Marc Ambinder had already published the official campaign statement on his blog, and that slowly some of the major news outlets were updating their parrot stories appropriately; as far as the campaign was concerned, that was the end of the story. My decision not to follow up on my own was two-fold: first, and most objectively, I had plenty of other things to work on, story-wise, so if Ambinder had already written it up, there was little point in my repeating old news; second, and perhaps biased on my part, if I continued to make a story of the non-story, the non-story would BE the story, and I’d just give legs to what was bunk in the first place. I didn’t want to do that to the candidate I was most fond of, and so to that extent, I was a biased citizen journalist.
So what does that say about citizen journalism? I guess the usual as with any kind of reporter: caveat emptor. In most of these new media outlets, the goal is not to eliminate or stifle bias, as in the old model, but to own up to and publicize it. You want to hear a bunch of pro-Obama fuzzy lovin’? Read just about everyone else on Off the Bus. You want straight coverage of the positive points of second tier brainiacs like Biden? Try me. You want mud? Try Drudge.
For the record, here are some final video clips from Caucus Day that I didn’t have the energy to deal with for a while.
I’m in New York now getting ready for my MTV Choose or Lose ‘08 Street Team orientation, just in time to turn the page. (Expect some more videos this week.) I think with the testing and dissertation writing on the up-slope at school, and MTV reporting probably taking the rest of the time, it’s time to close the Huffington Post chapter. The Bev Davis fiasco was probably all the excuse I needed, anyway.
I’m probably also done with politics for a while. People have already been asking whom I’m for now, while the body was still warm even. Right now, I don’t feel like I’m “for” anyone. I’ll go into a little more detail on my thought processes here when I wrap up this MTV trip, but frankly, the rest of you haven’t got much to wow me with. You never gave the smartest, most qualified guy in the room a chance, so I’m disinclined to give a hoot about your celebrity right now — and I’m definitely not inclined to waste any more graduate school time getting them nominated. Talk to me when we’ve got one polished show horse standing, and I’ll see what I can do.
Now, time to go hemorrhage some cash in Manhattan!
MTV Taps 51 State-Based Citizen Journalists for “Choose or Lose ‘08″
AP Online Video Network & Top Mobile Carriers to Distribute Weekly “Street Team ‘08″ Reports
Knight Foundation Grant Helps Power Mobile Media Election Coverage Experiment
NEW YORK, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire/ — MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign (http://www.ChooseorLose.com), today unveiled “Street Team ‘08″: a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists — one from every state and Washington, D.C. — who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network. Carefully selected by MTV after an extensive nationwide search, the one-of-a-kind press corps will be armed with mobile media like laptops, video cameras and cell phones, and charged with uncovering the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their respective states
…
The “Street Team ‘08″ program is made possible by a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge, at http://www.newschallenge.org, is an annual worldwide competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas that use digital media to inform and inspire communities. The Knight Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.
And yes, the punchline is that I am your humble Georgia correspondent citizen journalist. So after 20 hours of online training in Adobe Creative Suite and a two-day orientation in Manhattan next month, I am charged with uncovering the untold stories here in the Peach State.
You know what this means? I mean besides the fact that I’m about to get handed a superfancy new video camera and a (Windows) laptop (please God not Vista) and will be expected to file one story every week (through video, primarily, or text and photos or podcasts or what have you), and that the real shiny stories from the Street Team will get floated up to the MTV cable networks (while the rest remain online), and meanwhile I’ll be getting even less sleep and still have a dissertation to write.
It means I need untold stories. I bet you have stories. You’ve got an issue, a non-profit organization, a candidate, a crusade that you believe in, but you’ve got no platform. Well I’ve got me a very nice platform here, but I’m a little short on causes and crusades. So let’s get your chocolate in my peanut butter, if you know what I mean.
Seriously, who the hell ever thought that was a good advertising campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? And right there is a highlight of one of the first overwhelming challenges this new opportunity presents to me and a handful of other Choose or Lose Street Team members™: Gen X, meet the Millennials. I know the boundaries are pretty hazy, but I’ve seen enough birth year ranges that say I got caught in the last few years of Gen X — and the real point of the matter is that in my frame of reference, getting someone’s peanut butter on your chocolate doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics! Yet now a handful of us CoLSTM’s™, ranging from 29 to 39, are going to have to craft a message a week for an audience that knows “I has a flavor” doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics, either.
I know, that’s a terrible example. See? I can’t even come up with a hip new dirty phrase that is not a sexual euphemism. So while obviously this is all great! and yay! and I’m totally stoked! (see? do kids still say that?) and I’m fired up for this opportunity, that’s also how I’m sure a lot of new Army Rangers feel when they get pinned, and they get their shiny new gun and body armor (sometimes) and night vision goggles and it’s all great! and yay! and then Welcome to Sadr City! and the yay! kinda takes a back seat to adrenaline and trying not to poop.
A representative of the Knight Foundation, which helps fund this project, summarized our call to arms (well, cameras) thusly:
“We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event — the election of a president — matters to young people, and whether or not it matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone,” said Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation.
And as if to highlight the challenge for the recipients of the Knight News Challenge Grant, MTV issued another press release to the Newswire exactly two hours later:
* The finale of “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” delivered a 5.9 P12-34 rating to become the highest rated series telecast on MTV since August 2005.
* For the night (8PM-11PM), “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” finale was the most watched telecast across all of television among P12-34, even out-delivering broadcast.
* “The Hangover” Aftershow at 11PM averaged a strong 3.6 P12-34 rating, ranking right behind the “A Shot At Love” finale as the #2 rated cable telecast for the night.
How many people do you think I’ll be able to pull in to watch my live video coverage of the Iowa caucuses? I mean, without putting on the bikini, ’cause you know it’s pretty cold in Iowa this time of year.
But seriously, send your chocolate over to my peanut butter. We’ll talk.
I couldn’t resist the ultimate citizen journalism project of the winter, and considering how much time and effort I’ve put into this campaign, I’m not about to miss the champagne corks a-flyin’ when Iowa defies the polls yet again and Biden vaults into contention*. See how much fun they have in Iowa? With the snow and many layers of the clothings?
I’m heading over on the 2nd and coming back on the 4th, so if you’re interested in watching caucus day unfold from the battle front, stay tuned here. I’m bringing the live streaming gear (I may even upgrade to cellular broadband so I can roam beyond free WiFi clouds) and the other camera(s) will be cranking out the occasional YouTube product. I may try to go into an actual caucus — we’ll see — but I’ll probably base myself at the Biden campaign HQ in Des Moines and catch the occasional ride with volunteers to show their final hour ground game (heck, maybe I’ll even help out).
I’ll collect various players and communicative widgets for the trip over on a dedicated page, shelbinator.com/iowa, but it’ll probably wind up here on the front page, too, if I feel like activating a sticky-post plugin.
* Since even at this stage of the game I’m still hearing negative Nancies pull that “doesn’t have a chance” crap, I’ll share this thought from Chris Matthews.
It’s been a while since I actually wrote anything here that remotely engaged you, dear lurker, so today I shall kill two birds with one stone, by asking you for input out of pure laziness.
I need a three-line bio by tomorrow. I am, of course, far too amazing to be contained in such a wee paragraph, so I’m just going to have to make some crap up.
What kind of crap would you make up about me in three lines?
In a video posted today, wacky quasi-conspiracy theorist Davis Fleetwood, who was one of YouTube’s guests at the debate in Charleston, reports that he’s been hired by the Kucinich for President campaign, making him, he believes (and I can’t dispute) the first “videoblogger” (whatever that word means) to be hired by a presidential campaign.
See, Ma?
Hope that works out better for him and the campaign than John Edwards’s aborted attempt to hire some opinionated bloggers. But hey, it’s only Dennis Kucinich; what has he got to lose?
On the other hand, people who read the Huffington Post still aren’t interested in videos. Maybe it’s the quiet atmosphere of their office where they’re screwing off by reading political blogs but don’t want to give away the game by playing something with volume. But different audiences are definitely more interested: my Biden interview was over 250 views on the first day just from being posted on a couple of nerdier political blogs by Biden supporters; since it launched on HuffPost, it’s only gotten to the high 300’s, a lot of which is probably still coming from the other blogs and this li’l blog itself. A video that managed to go to press before mine — not that that was hard, considering the way my story spent 30-ish hours in limbo up someone’s keister while several others popped up throughout the day (glad I stayed up so late to get it done) — has only mustered 210 views, despite its association with the big NPR station WNYC. (And half of its traffic is coming from a non-HuffPost website.)
The suspicion only gets reinforced: YouTube is no place for serious politics. YouTube is for setting yourself on fire.
But hey, setting yourself on fire might land you a job.
Since no one is watching videos on Huffington Post yet, I thought I’d try my hand at a regular ol’ article and see if it generated any more discussion. Yeah, it’s long as hell, but (1) it’s about Joe Biden, so what’d you expect, and (2) Obama got an OTB novella, too, so nyaaah.
Now we just wait and see how long it takes HuffPost to get around to publishing this one; it seems by timestamp that two stories on Hillarack have already leapfrogged me in the queue, surprise surprise. (Man, if I’m this sensitive, it’s no wonder those Ron Paulbots are so stark raving tinfoil hat about an MSM conspiracy.)
Over five weeks of backpacking around Ireland, one of my lasting impressions of the Irish — my brethren in moniker only for this Polish-Catholic “Fighting Irish” alumnus — was that they definitely do not share the same sense of personal space that your average American has, becoming nose-to-nose chums with you as soon as you belly up next to them at the bar. Delaware Senator Joseph R. Biden, “grandson of Ambrose Finnegan” as he described himself to the IAFF, clearly inherited this trait from his father’s side of the family, and it’s an indispensable part of his political repertoire. Perhaps it’s just a benefit of being in the so-called “second tier,” but while I’ve seen more celebrated candidates (in person and on C-SPAN) move along “rope lines” dispensing handshakes, Biden’s events are more familial affairs, where an arm thrown over your shoulder is almost the minimum ante when meeting the man of honor.
After leaping, or rather, spilling out of bed at oh-dark-hundred on a Saturday morning in Atlanta and driving across the foggy finger lakes of South Carolina as the sun came up, I sure wished my hands weren’t full of camera equipment so I could have a cup of coffee at the Anderson County Democratic Party breakfast. The ACDP had moved their usual 9:00 a.m. gathering up to 8:00 a.m. to accommodate their special guest, and I don’t know what their usual attendance is like, but their reserved dining room at the Golden Corral was standing room only and spilling into the wings by the time Joe Biden arrived. He worked the crowd, leaning over waffles and bacon and dodging trays of hot coffee, as the county party chairman started in on a little preliminary business. This was Biden’s fourth of nine events in a twenty-four hour swing through the palmetto state.
While every candidate is betting the farm, so to speak, on the first caucuses in Iowa, Joe Biden sees South Carolina as the other bookend that will determine the electoral story of 2008 and is not shy about saying so. Biden for President was the first campaign to open an office in South Carolina because the argument he makes to the Anderson County Democrats in November is the same one he made to the Lee County Democrats in March. “I’ve been saying for the last two years: South Carolina is going to determine who the next president of the United States is going to be,” he tells the crowd. “And I’m not joking when I say that, it’s not hyperbole,” he says, because by the time Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada cull the field, “there’s only going to be two or three [candidates] in South Carolina.”
To take Joe Biden at his word, he is almost never joking or being hyperbolic, all kidding aside, when he tells you what what is literally, literally the case in American politics today. With all of his disclaimers, one almost expects to hear Inigo Montoya step in and chastise him, “You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” And yet to hear him say it in person, it is easy to see that Joe Biden believes to his core the almost grandiose points he makes: that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, and that the next president will have the opportunity to “literally, literally change the direction of the world.”
And why else would Biden want to subject himself to this race, particularly when all it seems anyone cares to blog about him are his abortive 1988 bid and his handful of verbal gaffes? One justification some attribute to what they consider “hopeless” campaigns is the national soapbox available to an otherwise unrecognized politician for self-promotion. But Biden’s ubiquitous presence on the Sunday morning talk shows was already a topic of conversation, with Joe “Meet the Press” Biden conceding to the Anderson Democrats, “I’m on them too much.”
The other possible motivation, frequently attributed equally to Biden and New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson, of vying for a VP or Secretary of State nod — a post arguably no more attractive than the pedestal of a Foreign Relations Committee chairmanship — was itself the basis for Biden’s capstone argument to the ACDP why he should earn their vote. “My colleagues Bill Richardson and Hillary and Barack…say, ‘Biden would be the best possible Secretary of State we could have.’ And they say that hoping that no one will think of me as President.” His breakfast audience laughed, but chuckles subsided to smiles and finally to very serious, stoic faces as he continued with a challenge. “But let me ask you a rhetorical question: in this election, are you ready to vote for anyone for president who’s not fully capable of being Secretary of State. And ask yourself the other rhetorical question: would you appoint any one of them Secretary of State?”
He continued with his “brief” opening remarks for about another eighteen minutes, daring to touch on the topic of electability: “I know it’s not appropriate in some people’s minds to talk about electability. I think it’s pretty important not only who can get elected, but how they can get elected, and where they can win.” If the Democratic nominee in 2008, he argued, has to rely on the same twenty-blue-states-plus-one strategy as in the last two elections, upon reaching the White House “they will not be able to govern,” because they will not have the kind of mandate they need to sway congressional votes from redder states.
Closing his speech, Biden went on to answer a few questions for another twenty minutes and change. When the answer to his final, quick question — taken under the admonishment from his staff that it was time to think about getting to the next event — was stretching into its seventh minute, I could only imagine his handlers’ heart palpitations as I realized my opportunity for the interview I requested was quickly evaporating. Biden’s reputation for being loquacious is well-deserved, but then so was President Bartlett’s on NBC’s “The West Wing,” and I know few Democrats who wouldn’t vote for that fictitious world leader right after Al Gore if they had their druthers. This also might be why the six-term senator has a hard time breaking out of the second tier when his main platform is a series of debates that are little more than aggregated sound bites.
As the entourage tried to build momentum toward the door, Biden’s campaign press secretary, Mark Paustenbach, asked me if I wanted to horn in on the microscopic press availability in the foyer for the local paper. “Are you kidding? It’s almost 9:40,” I pointed out, and the candidate was allegedly taking part in a parade in Greenville, 30 miles away, at 10:00.
Looks like I’m going to Greenville. So much for watching another Notre Dame defeat on the telly.
The last place you want to be in a pack of speeding cars is at the very back, but not having expected a second campaign stop in my day, and not having printed out the appropriate Google map, that is exactly where I found myself. Fortunately for me, I made it to Greenville with neither the ounces of gasoline I had left burning past vapors nor a South Carolina highway patrol falling in behind us to spot my lack of a 2008 sticker on my license plate (it’s in my glove box, I swear). Fortunately for the candidate, we delivered him to the starting intersection of the inaugural parade for the HBCU Classic precisely as his convertible prepared to roll out. “Just in time” delivery, the key to American competitiveness!
I parked my car illegally in some parking lot I would soon forget the location of, threw all my fake-reporter gear back on and ran as un-awkwardly as I could back to the police barricade the motorcade had explained its way through. A couple of campaign staffers were triumphantly watching their candidate ride into the distance and told me they were about to return to the cars and drive over to the end of the procession where the next press availability ought to be. “No thanks,” I said, and hoofed it down the street, camera rolling, under the delusion I could catch a car while carrying a small internet television station on my back.
I caught up with the Bidenmoble at the terminal parking lot as Sen. Biden disembarked and resumed working the crowd. One of his South Carolina hosts, state Representative Fletcher Smith, was in his orbit, talking to observers wondering what was the fuss about this vaguely familiar-looking guy with the cameras around him. Smith had only endorsed Biden’s bid for the nomination a few weeks earlier, stepping down as co-chair of Bill Richardson’s state committee due to differences in their views on a sensible withdrawal from Iraq. “You watch him in Iowa,” he told onlookers of Biden, “you’ll be surprised.”
A real reporter with more chutzpah would have taken advantage of the emerging down time, as the marching band marched off and the rest of the crowd started to think about going to watch some football, to grab Joe Biden by the arm and put him in front of another camera, background noise be damned. I am not a real reporter, so I stood idly by shooting B-roll footage as Biden inquired about his schedule and mused about finally getting a bite to eat. The entire entourage, which had grown since Anderson county, started moving toward vehicles talking of lunch, and I clung like a remora fish hoping there’d be time for questions between bites of a sandwich. But a few fragments of conversation were tossed back and forth, the momentum sputtered, and the entourage went back into hover mode — and the candidate, with the state chair behind the wheel, disappeared.
Even “second-tier” candidates need some quiet time.
But unlike the celebrity candidates who need their time in public managed like a troop deployment and crowds controlled like flood waters behind a dam, Biden only sneaks his respite in after he’s managed to put an arm around every last person in shouting distance. In four personally observed campaign trips, there’s never been a “get me out of here” moment; it’s always the candidate that the staff has to tear away from the crowd and not vice-versa. A reporter for The Item in Sumter, SC chided me that not following Biden to the local Huddle House for a late dinner back in March was a major journalistic mistake on my part, as he was still as willing to make his case “after hours” as when the long day had begun. When media-controlled elevator pitches aren’t enough to mount an effective insurgent campaign, Biden knows that every minute of face time he can get in the first four states is vital to his bid for the nomination.
The campaign reassembled at the Allen Temple Community Development Center to tour a college fair associated with the HBCU parade events. A dozen or so area colleges and a few employers were tabling in the auditorium, and a local Biden supporter — the driver of the Bidenmobile in the parade — sat at an unadorned table handing out stapled packets of Biden’s presidential plans to potential young voters and their parents. There was a press conference supposedly promised with the event that Biden was going to take part in, but the only media outlets that heeded the press advisory were the local Fox affiliate, whose lone cameraman milled about collecting his own B-roll footage, and, well, little ol’ me.
But Biden didn’t turn tail to make the next event on time because of the lack of cameras. He was back in his element, at least as much here as when discussing the wonk-tastic fine points of international security: his wife, Jill, who recently completed her doctorate in education, teaches at Delaware Technical and Community College. He grabbed a group of boys coming out of the auditorium and drew them into a huddle, asking them about their college plans before telling them about the beat-down tackles he had to run from in his early days of football when the boys’ answers turned to athletic plans.
Biden himself has made education one of the underpinnings of his agenda for domestic revival. When asked that morning in Anderson about creating more jobs, he dealt with the expected talking points on fair trade before explaining his education proposals to make America more competitive in the world market. “Do you realize the average kid we compete with around the world puts in somewhere between twenty-five and fifteen percent more class time than our kids do?” To correct this, Biden proposes a sixteen year education system over our current twelve year setup: two more years of pre-school at the beginning “if their parents choose to do it,” and guaranteeing a two-year associate’s degree by assisting those who can’t afford it.
“Just imagine what we could do,” he said quietly, surprising me at my side while I fidgeted with my camera and he gazed out over the several dozen kids talking to recruiters. “Four hundred thousand of these kids can’t go to colleges they get into,” because of financial constraints — a chief obstacle he hopes to eliminate with his plan, and one he had to skirt himself when his father couldn’t get the loan required for his college tuition at the University of Delaware. When it came to his own children’s college and post-grad education, he said, “I was lucky, I had a house that actually appreciated in value,” which he sold five years ago to pay off the average of $82 thousand of loans each between his three graduates.
And Biden’s love of talking education with anyone who will listen would be the next harbinger of doom for my interview plans. Paustenbach was already looking nervous about time again when he told me to set up outside for my chat with the senator on their way to the car, as they had affairs to attend to before a football game at which Biden would be tossing the opening coin — an event that cannot be delayed on account of some presidential hopeful. I deferred to college football and settled for two of my half-dozen intended questions: what are those recent bills sponsored on Burma and the International Violence Against Women Act, and what the hell do we do about Pakistan? (See the interview video below.)
“The single most significant thing that we could do to change the international environment according to most scholars is literally to empower women in countries where they’re not empowered at all,” he said after dealing with the latest round in the Biden-Giuliani street fight. And then, there was Pakistan — which, unbeknownst to either of us non-Blackberry-wearing fellows, was at that very moment going down the kind of spiral that Biden had warned, in a debate four days earlier, was more frightening than Iran’s furtive nuclear program. I asked him, on the heels of Karen Hughes’s second departure from the Bush administration, how we worry about Pakistan as a threat while bringing up our 15% favorability rating among its people.
“You’ve got to have a Pakistani policy and not a Musharraf policy. This administration has a General Musharraf policy. So what you have to do is — there’s a vast majority, a significant middle of the population of Pakistan, [that] is democratic and middle-class. But what’s happening is, absent free elections, you’re forcing them underground, radicalizing them, and you’re giving great sway to that portion of the population that’s already radicalized,” he said, and argued that aid to education with an eye toward economic development is more conducive to long term goals in the country.
Absent free elections in Pakistan? Get out. That’s crazy talk.
“If we were ever to attack Iran,” he continued after tying in our strategy in Afghanistan, “we will radicalize Pakistan beyond anything it is now. You’ll see Musharraf fall, you will see the circumstances in Kabul change drastically — all these things are connected. And my sense is none of the Republicans except John McCain understands it.”
I lacked the journalistic instincts to ask him if any of the other Democrats understood it; I just thanked him for his time and wished him speed on the road.
“Thanks for covering me,” he said with his satellite-detectable grin and a vigorous handshake as he started to walk to the car that had been creeping up on us, anxious to whisk him to the next appointment. But with a mainstream media discussing almost nothing but “inevitability” while paying little mind to the guy more than one political analyst describes as many Iowa caucusers’ “favorite second choice,” how could I not?
Greenville, SC, is a lovely town; if you ever have the occasion, I suggest a weekend getaway there. I would not, however, suggest any kind of getaway in Islamabad.
While I was in Greenville interviewing Senator Joe Biden about Pakistan, among other things, General Pervez Musharraf decided to suspend the constitution in Pakistan and declare a general charlie-foxtrot. If I had only checked my stupid email on my crappy cellphone while waiting for my face time with the Senator, I could have gotten his first, raw reaction to the actualization of the kind of suck he warned us about in last Tuesday’s debate. Little old me and my camcorder. But no, I had to settle for the much less exciting, measured, official statement after we drove off in opposite directions and everyone checked their damn PDAs:
“General Musharraf’s decision to declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution underscores the need for the United States to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy. President Bush should personally make clear to General Musharraf the risks to U.S.-Pakistani relations if he does not restore the constitution, permit free and fair elections and take off his uniform as promised. Then, we have to build a new relationship with the Pakistani people, with more non-military aid, sustained over a long period of time, so that the moderate majority in Pakistan has a chance to succeed.” –Joe Biden
Rusty at Radical Georgia Moderate is hosting this semi-month’s Georgia Blog Carnival, and did quite the job sorting and categorizing a lot of local content. Go kill the rest of your Friday.
I thought I might, then decided not to, submit a video for this round of Carnival, which I whipped up last weekend for a final submission to the MTV Choose or Lose citizen journalism thingamabob. I was so underwhelmed with my own product that I didn’t even post it here, and it really isn’t worth posting to the Carnival because I didn’t say anything in it that Grift didn’t already say much more intelligently. I just needed a “story in my area” to send off to MTV since I’m apparently one of the “three finalists” in my state to get this part-time job.
Yes, finalists. For a job. Well, for a job-like thing. MTV is hiring 51 videoblogger types to cover the ‘08 election in each state (I’m not sure if floater #51 is Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia), and what the hell, I applied. Caveat number one: I don’t think there are two other finalists. I looked at all the Georgia profiles on thinkMTV, where we’re supposed to have uploaded our final video, and not one of the other Georgians has any videos listed. Same goes for former Young Democrats of America Executive Director Jane Fleming-Kleeb in Nebraska (total thinkMTV members: 14), and a real, actual, on-TV newswoman in Alaska (total thinkMTV members: 4), Dani Carlson. I supposed we could have made paper finger-puppets in front of a webcam and still gotten the job, but hey, E for Effort, right?
Caveat number two: I think the thing that threw me most (aside from the weekly pay that is half what I made as a Graduate Research Assistant) was the phone interview question about how I’d make content that’s appealing to MTV’s target demographic of 16-24 year olds. I was probably in trouble when the first thing that came to mind — after references to alcohol and frontal nudity (not mine for chrissakes, I’m a good Catholic boy) — was just to beat it into their no-good Wii-playing skulls until they relented. I hadn’t even given it serious consideration before, figuring that I’m already trying to make politics as amusing as it can be (with extremely mixed success), so take it or leave it. Still, I think I was sufficiently stunned by the interview as to come across somewhat condescending or pedagogic in this puff-piece about Georgia’s current water crisis. So, against my better judgment, here’s my audition. Have a good weekend.
And for God’s sake keep the Hillary cakes out of my face.
Obligatory Cloverfield post Cloverfield is what it is: a big, indestructible monster shows up out of nowhere, attacks Manhattan, and lots of people die. You should know already if this is your kind of movie or not, but if it is, definitely see it in the theaters!
This event is a first-of-its-kind meeting to bring together up-and-coming journalists, established news-hounds, acclaimed academics, technology and media executives, Internet influencers and many others to discuss how new computing technologies will shape and reshape the news business for generations to come.
I caught up with the Bidenmoble at the terminal parking lot as Sen. Biden disembarked and resumed working the crowd. One of his South Carolina hosts, state Representative Fletcher Smith, was in his orbit, talking to observers wondering what was the fuss about this vaguely familiar-looking guy with the cameras around him. Smith had only endorsed Biden’s bid for the nomination a few weeks earlier, stepping down as co-chair of Bill Richardson’s state committee due to differences in their views on a sensible withdrawal from Iraq. “You watch him in Iowa,” he told onlookers of Biden, “you’ll be surprised.”
