Thursday, April 12, 2007

Hot on the 2008 Campaign Trail


This cartoon took WAY too long to create. Want to see the process I went through? Visit http://malloryart.blogspot.com/2007/04/mystic-art-revealed.html

Put me in Coach, I think I'm ready
Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper — Schleswig Leader, Thursday, April 12, 2007 – Page 3

I can’t help it. Other guys fantasize about playing major league baseball. Me? My daydream would be to follow along the campaign trail for the Post or the Tribune. One of the perks to living in Iowa for a political news junkie like me is that every four years the candidates come a courting.

This season, instead of just calling upon voters in their homes and cafes, there are at least a couple of candidates have been given the moniker, “rock-star,” because they draw crowds in the hundreds. I’d seen Sen. John Edwards last time around on someone’s front porch in Dunlap and had mixed feelings. I was impressed with his enthusiasm and passion and his creativity- his willingness to think outside of convention, but like any half-ways level headed, Iowan, I was skeptical of how he planned to accomplish some of his lofty goals. Call me “Blue-Dog Democrat” or a fiscal conservative, but I figure you have to either pay-as-you-go or start smaller and build up the idealistic stuff once you can. I didn’t go out of my way to rearrange my schedule to see him when he held a much bigger gathering at Cronk’s restaurant in Denison.

But, at the risk of fulfilling some people’s stereotype of the left-wing journalist, I have to admit to you that I was excited to attend the first Barack Obama town meeting at Denison High School a couple of weeks ago. Of course, it didn’t hurt that one of my former students was a volunteer and called to nag me. I was just curious at first. Plenty of people were more impressed with his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention than with John Kerry, John Edwards, or any of the other people there. So with all of the media coverage that has been building, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at his book. I read a few pages at the library and then got my own copy.

I will tell you that reading his book, The Audacity of Hope, revealed to me that there are at least four important things that make him the virtual antithesis to President George W.Bush; He’s intelligent, he’s eloquent, he respects and understands the U.S. Constitution, and he places a greater value on the well being of people than of any political party. That would be more than enough to vote for him if he were running against W, but first he has to face off with Hillary and Edwards, and if he wins the nomination, he’ll probably have to go up against Guliani or McCain.

So I wanted to hear more. I’ve had something of a benign fascination with the city of Chicago since high school anyway. (I’m not sure why, The original bob Newhart Show, the band Chicago, the ’84 Bears, the Blues Brothers, columnists Mike Royko & Bob Greene? Who knows?)

So I went. Maybe a little too early for someone who wasn’t volunteering. I figured, this is a major national figure, I should cover it for the newspaper, so I brought a camera and a notepad. When I went to sign in, some guy in a sport coat saw my camera and lead me over to the press table. Rock on, wear a camera around your neck and people assume you’re official. The sport coat guy gave me a quick orientation to where the candidate was going to stand, how long he planned on talking, where the microphones would be for taking questions, yadda yadda yadda. As if I’d never been in gymnasium before and I couldn’t see how the chairs were arranged, where the flag was hung or where the mics were. But it still made me feel kind of important in a pretending to be a heap big reporter when I’m really just some schmo with a blog.

I have to have been to a billion basketball games and concerts and graduations where I stand around and take yearbook pictures, but I never got such a buzz of adrenaline waiting for an event to start before. What was the big deal? I hadn’t even seen Barack yet and I had told myself that as impressed as I was so far, I didn’t want to make up my mind already with a whole year to go. Then some kid was leaning back on his chair on the stage and fell off. That broke the tension. Just so you know, he wasn’t hurt, just embarrassed, but I brought it up because it snapped me out of my building anxiety and because when you see the clips of these candidates on TV you tend to forget that they’re real, not edited.

If I weren’t so shy, I should’ve struck up conversations with the photographer and videographer from the Associated Press. He looked like he knew what he was doing more than the sport coat guy and his digital TV camera looked cutting edge. She looked like she was just out of college. She couldn’t have been more than 5’ 4” and 120 pounds, but she was lugging easily 120 pounds of equipment, including four cameras.

Fortunately, the woman who runs the Spanish newspaper talked to me quite a bit, and so did Denison photo-legend Bruce Binning. I noticed that he used the exact same model of camera that I do, so that made me feel pretty good. If you'd like to see all of the pictures I took, visit http://tmal.multiply.com/photos/album/49

Finally Obama arrived, spoke, answered questions, shook hands and gave autographs. Then the volunteers had to lug hundreds of chairs back to the band room and it was over.
There’s something I can’t explain to you about covering an event rather than just attending it. In some ways you feel like you’re not included because you’re working too hard to get a picture or to jot down notes to be able to just take things in. On the other hand, you’re forced to pay closer attention, so you never have those moments when no matter how much you like the speaker, your attention drifts or you need to stifle a yawn.

What I can tell you it that the impression that I got was much like what I got from his book. He came off as very smart without being too technical or boring. He chooses his words carefully, but in a way that seems deliberate without being too “slick or calculated.” He seems warm and genuine, but not gushy or touchy-feely. I know from his book that he is working very hard, but he doesn’t but he doesn’t sound like he is, like Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and McCain can, but he also doesn’t sound like one of those people who makes it look so easy, like Bill Clinton used to.

Like Bill Clinton, his positions seem to be pretty centrist and intended to help, not just be popular. He didn’t have Al Gore’s sense of humor or John Edward’s exuberance, but at the risk of sounding like I’m endorsing him, I think we could do a lot worse. Come to think of it, he have done a lot worse.



Ted Mallory lives in Charter Oak and teaches at Boyer Valley Schools in Dunlap. ‘Ted’s Column’ has appeared weekly in the Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper since 2002. If you’d like to see any of Ted’s editorial cartoons bigger and brighter, you can visit http://tmal.multiply.com/photos/album/2
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