Politics-a-palooza

You set out to report on the press as much as on the candidates. Was that a reasonable goal? Did asking questions of other reporters set you apart from the rest of the press corps?

Everybody was so conscious of "The Boys on the Bus" [Tim Crouse's book about the reporters covering the 1972 election] -- it's a clichi that people talk about constantly. I was asked, again and again, "Are you doing a 'Boys on the Bus' thing?" It was on everybody's mind all the time. I tried to ask some questions of the reporters on the record. But as soon as one journalist starts asking another journalist questions about how they're doing their job -- forget it, you're a pariah. Many days passed before anybody would talk to me after that. The news traveled so fast that when we went from Wisconsin to Las Vegas, I was in the middle of the plane, and then the next morning, when we got back on the plane, I had been reassigned to the rear. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but it sure seemed to me that somebody talked to the Kerry people and said, put this fucking guy in the back.

At the time of "The Boys on the Bus," that kind of reporting hadn't been done before: Nobody was worried about what Crouse was going to write, so they had their guard down. The modern press corps is a lot of company men, and I think back then there were more, well, unwieldy individuals. You would never have had a phenomenon like McGovern's Zoo Plane on today's campaign -- that's what they called the plane they put the press on. Legendary wild parties went on in there, drugs, sex acts. I would doubt that so much as one sex act occurred during the entire Kerry campaign.

Not even a hand job?

Well, maybe a hand job. I don't know. It certainly wasn't a fun gig.

It seems like everyone these days is a press critic, but you take what we might call a more activist approach. The book contains your Wimblehack series from the New York Press, which attempted to determine who was the worst journalist on the campaign trail. [Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, who recently filed a dispatch about the songs on Bush's iPod, was the eventual winner.] Did that make people angry?

There was one guy from the Times who actually asked me to step outside. He complained that I had insulted Jodi Wilgoren because I said she looked like Ernest Borgnine, and he sent me an e-mail basically saying, "Let's fight."

I think that normal press criticism is great: It makes people aware of the media to a degree that they never were before, but it doesn't have a whole lot of practical effect. FAIR will issue a press release pointing out an error, or some unethical practice, or some pattern in press coverage. So what? It's not going to change anything. My thinking, going back to the eXile, is that reporters are people too; they're sensitive and they're vain, and if you make it personally painful for them, it can have a bit of a prophylactic effect. That's not the reason I do it; mostly I do it because I'm just a little bit of an aggressive person.

Did you see any results with this approach?

I have to be honest, no. But when I was in Russia, we certainly had an effect on the American press corps in Moscow. When we threw a pie made of horse sperm into the face of the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, who had won our "Worst Journalist in Moscow" tournament, that was something that all the journalists in Moscow noticed.

There used to be different kinds of people who were journalists. There were real cynics, there were drunks, there were hardened smokers, and now there's this glamour and glow that goes along with being a part of the press corps. I guess what I'm trying to do is take away some of that glow and make it clear it's not quite as cool as they make it out to be. I don't know if that has an effect or not, but that's sort of the strategy.

You often make reference to Russia in your writing about American politics -- is that a lens through which you see things?

I was there for 10 years -- I basically grew up in Russia, considering that I went in my early 20s. When I came back I was a little shocked to find that what I saw looked a lot like Russia, particularly the lingering Soviet aspects of Russia: the celebration of stupid ideas as though they were new and original, the dumb patriotism -- the style of the patriotism. You can go to any town in America today, and you see the same Blockbuster Video, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, or Jack in the Box -- every place looks the same, they all have the same strip malls, and so on. This is how it was in communist Russia: You could go to any city in the country, and you saw the same Meat and Fish Store No. 6 or Gastronome No. 4 that was in your hometown; even the street names were the same.

The Bush scene on the aircraft carrier was straight out of Soviet Russia: the sailors in their colored sweaters rushing out to greet the leader who himself hasn't served in the military. It made me think of Brezhnev, who wore a zillion fucking medals and was probably the only person in Russia who didn't know how to put together a Kalashnikov.

The genius of the Russian system was its appeal to people's laziness. They said, "Look, get drunk, don't do any work at all, we'll give you just enough money to live, and we'll take care of everything else." That's what Soviet Russia was all about: Live in your shitty village, we'll give you cheap vodka, and we'll take care of your medical bills, and you don't have to worry about all that other stuff. They counted on the fact that Russians would rather wallow in their own shit than organize and protest anything that's actually happening in their country. It is really kind of similar to what's going on here. People bitch and moan, but basically all they really want to do is sit in front of their televisions and watch the football game. Even people on the left who complain about Bush, when it comes right down to it, they don't really want to do anything. If they do go to protests, they go, and then they come home, and it's all over.

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