Some Like It Cool

But what did become clear (on the first bus; in the comfortably arranged back section of the much-discussed newly refitted Obama plane, where drinks and crudités and dip were available from the moment we boarded; in the after-dinner hours in Springfield, Mo., where we were escorted to the Holiday Inn Express and handed a downloaded, photocopied, marked-up local map to find the diners and bars) was the degree to which the press live in their own world.

There are two press contingents: "pool" and "nonpool." Reporters rotate between the two, the former being an exclusive coterie that follows the candidate everywhere he goes. They follow him to the gym at dawn, and sit outside while he lifts weights. They follow him to every meeting, however private, and wait on the doorstep until he's done. On his precious days off, they sit outside his house, and when he emerges—to go for a walk, to visit a friend—they follow him there. They have specific rules about what they may and may not photograph; they do not report on what might constitute his private life, his time with family and friends. The pool, one of them told me, is like a deathwatch: always present just in case something happens. This group, in their minibus, is like a second Secret Service detail or, more grimly, like a flock of vultures: they shadow him at all times. Everyone else is "nonpool." They ride on a big bus with tinted windows (though not as dark as the windows of Obama's bus, behind which nothing can be seen), the upholstery and the scented disinfectant of which change with every new city, but which is otherwise always the same. They are not privy to everything, but attend all public events, rushing busily into the cordoned-off area reserved for traveling press, where the ubiquitous tables with power strips await. Everyone sets up at top speed in readiness for whatever speeches or presentations lie ahead. And as soon as the candidate is done, even before he has finished shaking hands with his admirers, the press retires, en masse, to a private file room, where there are more rows of tables, more power strips and, often, lunch.

In this world, journalists barely look up from their computers and their BlackBerrys. On the bus, at night, their faces are bathed in the blue electric glow of their machinery. They are responsible for absorbing all the breaking news about the candidate, and about his opponent. Google alerts send every article, every blog, every voiced opinion and every official response to their fingertips. The journalists are constantly reading, constantly writing. They rarely amble among the public, notebook in hand. They rarely have time to gawp at the local eccentricities. (Of what interest the Marine recruiting station and the Little Tattoo2 parlor on the edge of the Missouri State University campus in Springfield? Of what interest the exhortations to young athletes in the Glendale High School wrestling gym: FATIGUE IS AN EXCUSE FOR THE WEAK TO GET OUT OF WORK?)

And, crucially, they rarely have a chance to approach the candidate himself. Here is the inglorious truth of my week on the campaign trail: on my first day, it was laughingly promised that I would meet him, as if it were madness even to question so inevitable an event. On my second and third days, there were ever more vague suggestions of a possible encounter. On my fourth day, it was acknowledged that it might be difficult. On my fifth day, I was given apologies and excuses both, with heartfelt insistence that this had been an exceptionally tough week. But from more than one veteran journalist, I heard grumbles that Obama rarely speaks to them. He hadn't wandered to the back of the plane for a chat in weeks. Said one, "You know, with McCain, sometimes he talks so much you wish he'd go away. But Obama's the opposite."

If you think about Obama as an ordinary person, you can't blame him for his reserve. You wouldn't want to make charming conversation with a bunch of strangers with computers and cameras either, after a long day of reaching out to thousands of voters. You wouldn't want to risk saying something that could be misconstrued and used against you, in the course of casual banter over crudités in the back of your airplane. But of course, you probably don't have an airplane, or not one with your name emblazoned on the side in enormous letters; whereas Obama now does.

Even though it is key to his platform, Obama can no longer be an ordinary person. He foresaw this—wrote eloquently about it in "The Audacity of Hope"—but in foreseeing it, could not forestall it. The process—this process of relentless scrutiny, of unending public appearances, this warping distortion of an individual that seems, quite aside from the election at its end, like an insane torture experiment—is transforming him into a wholly public figure. What the implications of this might be—for himself, and for the voters—are not entirely clear. His aim has been to remain subtle, to remain supple, not to be forced to simplify his presence, or his message, and to endeavor, insofar as is possible, to keep listening to the voices of ordinary Americans. But instead, inevitably, he is engaged in the strange performance art of campaigning, in which he pauses at a roadside fruit stand in Florida in order, ostensibly, to meet regular folks, but arrives with such an entourage of milling cameras and journalists and handlers that by the time he's ready to press the fruit ("Am I allowed to squeeze these peaches?") or press the flesh, there are very few regular folks in sight, and it all seems rather like an act.

In this weird campaign world, in which the candidate is ubiquitous but, in any practical sense, elusive, the primary source of interest for the press necessarily becomes the rest of the press. They've heard the stump speech a thousand times, and surely, now, are barely listening as Obama revisits his familiar talking points. But they still need to file stories. What makes a story noteworthy is that it is taken up by the media, repeated and bounced around in the press until it becomes, as Obama once wrote, "a hard particle of reality." For example, during the week in which I followed him, we all heard him say numerous times, in the course of his stump speech, "They [the Republicans] are going to say 'He's risky. He's new, he doesn't look like all the other presidents before'." We heard him say it, and almost nobody reported on it; nobody, that is, until the McCain camp accused him, in saying this, of "playing the race card from the bottom of the deck." Then, suddenly, the unnoticed joke-in-passing erupted into a small firestorm: the same journalists who had let the comment slide were called upon to provide speedy analysis of its significance. In this case, the McCain campaign set the spin. Oftentimes it's the journalists themselves—the reporters, but also the columnists, at home at their desks—who set the agenda, who create arguments, who sow doubts, and it is to these that the press will reflexively respond.