I'm sitting in Logan Airport, about ready to board my plane back to DC. My main takeaway from the primaries? Covering them is exhausting. They're inescapably panoramic, messy, sprawling, and unpredictable. They don't lend themselves to graphs or data. The traditional methods of reportage only offer two ways to cover the race: From the campaign's point of view, or from the reporter's. Nobody knows how to cover it from the perspective of the voters (which is different than the perspective of a voter). In theory, very little of use is learned -- at least so far as the horserace coverage goes -- in advance of the results. But so very much is written. The end product entertains, but it only appears to inform. In reality, it speculates and arranges facts and observations such that they form plausible hypotheses on essentially unknowable questions -- questions that will, soon enough, be answered with real data. But being in such close proximity to the process is an emotional trip: Occasionally inspiring, often dispiriting, and always interesting. I was actually touched by the "political tourists" I found wandering the state; ordinary Americans who flew in, on their own dime, to watch, witness, and participate in this electoral epicenter. What a very, very cool thing. In the aggregate, though, campaign life is totally absorbing in a way that I imagine is very bad for campaign reporters, political operatives, and others who live in this realm. Thinking this much about campaigns -- which are, in effect and content, the commercial breaks of our democracy -- naturally leaves you thinking that victories, rather than policies and change, are the end point of the process. This much discussion of who's up and who's down habituates you to thinking about who's up and who's down. The fact that campaign reporting is one of the most broadly accepted paths to political punditry and analysis helps explain a fair number of the press's problems. If you're trained to think in terms of campaigns, then the whole of politics begins to look like one mega-campaign. It's the frame in which you know to evaluate events, and thus, it's how you evaluate them. But turning all of politics into a campaign isn't necessarily a good thing.
