Overlooked in the Heat of Campaigning

Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren’t watching politics in action. The real stuff happens behind closed doors, where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handling equally faceless members of the political donor class, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off in very specific favors over the course of the net four years. That’s the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we don’t get to sit at the table.