Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

January 16, 2004 12:03 PM

Which is the best type of writer to cover a nine person campaign that lasts two years? A novelist of course. Only a novelist can come up with the sort of obvious truths that reporters can't or aren't allowed to write. Like, "I've met Sharpton before and I can say with full confidence the man is a liar, an opportunist, and a swine." The other candidates on Gore's endorsement, "Fuck fat fucking Al shit fucking Gore." Or Kucinich's campaign, "Just before I go to sleep I ask myself, Why not love your fellow man, why not peace on earth? ... And the answer occurs to me immediately—because the other guy wants to rape your women and kill your children." Stephen Elliott, four time novelist and card shark, is on the campaign.
posted by raaka (5 comments total)

As an ex-Iowan (born and raised in Cedar Rapids), every 4 years I'm treated to nostalgia during the Presidential Campaign. Just the other day, Kerry was having a snowball fight on the national news with his team not 2 doors down from where my oldest son was born.

Of all the links you gave, the Stephen Elliot Village Voice piece was the most evocative. People like to ignore the midwest occasionally as all farms and hicks...but there's beauty in the ability to see the stars, to smell the clean air, and to slow down to a more reasonable pace. I can't say the same for where I live now (Connecticut).

/goes into a corner and fiddles with the settings on his memory.
posted by thanotopsis at 1:01 PM on January 16, 2004

Hey, I was just about to write him off until you mentioned the Voice article. Now Mr. Elliott can sleep easy that he has been redeemed in my eyes.
posted by DenOfSizer at 2:56 PM on January 16, 2004

Of course we all know who we really want on the campaign trail.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 4:00 PM on January 16, 2004

but there's beauty in the ability to see the stars, to smell the clean air, and to slow down to a more reasonable pace. Thantopsis, you said a mouthful. Iowa's a sweet alternative to the sucker cities of the east and west coasts. As far as novelists covering the campaigns is concerned, we are far past the end of that cycle, which began with Norman Mailer and reached its apogee in the fiction-reportage of the above-mentioned Hunter Thompson. We all have the joke pretty well down now, with the wild-imaginative writer contrasting his addled sensibility to the banalities of the campaign tail, and the huge irony of the fact that control of the world's deadliest nuclear arsenal is won at pancake breakfasts in rural Iowa and New Hampshire. This approach can be entertaining, and certainly makes the writer and reader feel superior, but it hasn't elucidated much in the long run, and hasn't changed the political process for the better -- if, in fact, it needed to be changed at all. The best approach to the primary trail is to be found in the small town's newspapers themselves -- in the banal coverage of banality we find we find something much closer to the truth: if you're looking for novelistic meaning, look elsewhere. Politics IS a pancake breakfast.
posted by Faze at 7:37 AM on January 17, 2004

" it hasn't elucidated much in the long run, and hasn't changed the political process for the better"

Who said it was supposed to do either? Reading about the quiet moments of loud people or the backstory of one's near-failed political career is the sort of thing professional journalists don't and are not trained to do, but that's where the interesting and most readable material is.
posted by raaka at 2:44 PM on January 17, 2004