Politics, the way it used to be

My foray into paid political journalism lasted all of four days: specifically, the four days of the disastrous 1992 Republican Convention in the Houston Astrodome, the convention that (more because of how it was spun than what actually was said) basically sealed the next four (and, because the hapless Bob Dole was next in line, eight) years in the white house for Bill Clinton.

I was hired by an Illinois news service to file reports from the floor: reports dealing with the convention as a whole, and those dealing with delegates and concerns of DuPage County, the ultra-conservative suburb located to the west of Chicago, the service area of my employers.

In those (for me, anyway) pre-internet, pre-email days, when non-prestigious reporters were disallowed from parking their cars in the Astrodome parking lot (we had to drive to Rice University, park near the football field, board a bus, take the bus to the Dome, then take it back to Rice when the work was done), my work day took on an odd pace. I would stay at the Dome until the last speeches, take the bus to my car, drive home, type out my copy until I collapsed onto my keyboard. Then I would wake up at nine, drive to a Kinko's, fax my report, go home to bed for a few hours, then start the process over again.

All of this, for sixty-three dollars an article. Plus another ten for a sidebar.

It was very clear: I had been hired since, as a Houston resident, the news service would not have to pay for a hotel room. Or a per diem. (I once found myself, at the cash register in the food court, directly behind Morton Kondracke. "Like your work," I told him. "Well, thank you very much," he said, with a smile and a nod.) Then I forked over an overlarge amount for my cheeseburger and Coke.

But . . . I loved it. I loved sitting in press row, listening to political reporters laughing out loud at Pat Buchanan's rousing speech, then retreating to the press room to write, "divisive," "dangerous," "racist," and so on. I loved seeing Ronald Reagan in person, delivering the last major speech of his life. I loved discovering the hopelessness of Phil Graham's Presidential aspirations. During Graham's speech, I called the hotel room of Henry Hyde, the Congressman who represented most of the news service's readers. I had hoped, at best, to leave a message with his voice mail. When he answered his own phone in his own hotel room, I was startled . . . and apologetic. With Graham's keynote speech going on on the monitor above my head, I told the Congressman that, so as not to interrupt his viewing of the keynote speech, I could call again later.

"No, no," Congressman Hyde said. "We can talk now." And he gave me a splendid ten minutes, as Senator Graham went on. And on. When we hung up, I had my sixty-three dollars in hand. And Phil Graham was finished as a national political force.

That one taste with journalism, politics, and power left me wondering what I missed by throwing myself into the world of higher education. I used to have my regrets.

No more.

What we are approaching should be the greatest (at least, the most entertaining) politcal nominating process since 1952, or maybe 1920.

It is said that this election will be the first since 1952 in which neither a sitting President nor Vice-President is running. This would, it is assumed, take in Harry Truman, who in 1952 received some bad news in New Hampshire and withdrew (much as LBJ, sixteen years later, would similarly withdraw, over a war that had no ending).

The real blank slate is 1920, the year in which Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge ran against James M. Cox and a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, had won the war. but such was Americans' revulsion to anything international that Harding, with his promise of "a return to normalcy," swept the election.

So?

One would hope that the forthcoming election would at least be entertaining. Rudy, McCain, Romney, Hillary, Obama. Great fun.

But the truncated primary schedule?

A year's worth of build-up. Over in ten weeks.

I miss the good old days.