Recount: A Magazine of Contemporary Politics

On the Trail with Matt Bai

By Sandra Ogle | Oct 14, 2004 Print

“As a newspaper reporter, it’s not my job to sit in judgment of every interpretation of government. It is my job to protect the bedrock foundation of American principles, such that we can withstand bad interpretations of government,” said Matt Bai, a campaign reporter for the New York Times Magazine, at a recent New York University lecture. “What you try to do [as a reporter] is get the broader concepts beneath the phrases you read in the paper every day,” he explained.

Bai, who began working for the Times in 2002, says he writes for people that aren’t interested in politics. To engage the non-politically minded, Bai strives to make the elusive more concrete, and to give fuzzy concepts sharp edges. In the past, Bai, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, worked as a city desk reporter for the Boston Globe, as a national correspondent for Newsweek and as a national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine. Although his Rolling Stone tenure was brief, it is perhaps the most emblematic tidbit on his resume, as it points to his desire to reach people who are foreigners in political jargon-land. “What I do is a public service,” Bai said.

Earlier this year, Bai was assigned to do a series of four columns,all of which were big cover pieces aimed at defining the campaign in the best way possible. Bai’s first cover story, “The Multilevel Marketing of the President,” focused on Republican grassroot strategies to increase voter turnout in the exurbs of Ohio. His second, “Wiring the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,” plumbed the minutiae of how the funding of nonprofit 527s, like MoveOn.org, will change the face of the Democratic Party. During his lecture, Bai described how journalists often reach a consensus among themselves and start to use terms – like “voter turnout” and “non-profit 527s” – without ever looking deeper into them. As a result, a certain level of acceptance seeps into the newspapers, and the public never really knows what’s beneath the new terms or what their origins or implications are in the political landscape.

“Kerry’s Undeclared War,” his third piece (published this past Sunday), was written in an attempt to make sense of John Kerry’s foreign policy, a heated issue in the most recent debates. Bai and his editors wanted to emulate a New Yorker piece that they felt was the defining profile of Al Gore during the 2000 election. The article was chock-full of Gore’s political history and contained implicit revelations that heightened the reader’s understanding of the candidate. They wanted to do a profile that would stand out because it was simply revelatory.

Bai avoided the platitudes that many political journalists on the trail of a presidential candidate succumb to – going to campaign speeches, analyzing debates, traveling with other journalists. “Access in and of itself is not overrated. Every time I get access to a politician, I’m there. But there’s access and then the kind of access that they’ll give you.” He added that in some cases a reporter could travel for months and get absolutely nothing. For his article, Bai negotiated with Kerry’s aides in order to get three one-on-one interviews.

Aside from policy, the most interesting part of his second of three interviews with Kerry was the fact that the presidential contender wouldn’t drink Evian water and was wary of explaining why not, an interaction included in Bai’s article and in his NYU speech. During their idle chit chat, Bai felt that Kerry was especially guarded even in the most harmless asides. In his article he wrote, “I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I’m out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn’t demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French – important to stay away from anything even remotely French.”

The inclusion of telling details such as this is part of the reason that Bai’s political reportage stands out. In the Kerry piece, he explained, “What was important is underneath what he said.” “Quotes,” he added, “are always secondary to what you’re seeing.”

Sandra Ogle can be reached at smo238@nyu.edu.

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