Fear and Loathing in the Making of a President

For the last several months I have had a series of somewhat peckish arguments with a friend who is also interested in politics. He has a pathological dislike of the current incumbent and about a month and a half ago argued that Senator Obama would win in a landslide. I told him I thought the American people are still in the deciding mode (maybe because that is where I am). He kept bringing up this or that poll. And I kept arguing that the polls at this point are noise.

It came to me this afternoon that he is a lot like Theordore White. In the 1960 campaign for President White meticulously detailed the ins and outs of the campaign. If JFK or Nixon burped, White covered it and analyzed it. That campaign became the first to cover the race like a horse race. His book and that campaign was a breakthrough. White did followups with the 1964 and 1968 elections, although neither sold very well.

But then came the 1972 campaign. That was the year of White's last presidential chronicle. He was replaced in large part by another writer named Hunter S. Thompson. If White was a meticulous researcher, Thompson's main quality was as a braggart. White was Harvard educated. Thompson had little formal education. White cared about the facts, Thompson did not. Rather than starting out as a post election analysis Thompson's eventual book first appeared as a serialized set of articles in Rolling Stone. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail made a point of making personal attacks on candidates. Thompson made up a yarn about the early front runner, Edmund S. Muskie, that he was addicted to a exotic Brazilian drug which all but confirmed his decline from front runner status. No one believed the story, but it did not matter - it ridiculed the candidate and Muskie was done.

Thompson's gift was not White's which was an attention to detail but rather he seemed to understand the ebbs and flows of campaigns. Rather than treating the candidates with respect and the campaign as a solemn event - he looked at this as a chance to hang out with the guys and spin a yarn - he became the story. But he was uncanny in that year in calling trends before they became apparent. He called his trade "gonzo journalism."

My friend is a disciple of Theodore White, yet he wants to recreate White's style in real time. White's books were published soon after the election but he had the benefit of (even slight) distance. With the 24/7 news cycle it is possible to get too involved in the day to day machinations of the campaign.

Thompson's one big race was 1972 - he tried some later efforts but he did not catch the moment. Thompson's gift, at least in that first book on a presidential election, was the ability of insight. This could be a critical election. I have not discovered Thompson's successor in this election. There are a lot of people trying to pick up the mantel.