A bit more than three years ago I read a chuck out from Sutton Library called 'Ambling into History' by one Frank Bruni, a serious journalist who spent serious time on the Bush (the younger) battle bus during Bush's campaign for the presidency in 2000, a campaign he ultimately won by a whisker, amid much controversy about the minutiae of the machines used for counting the votes in Florida. My report at that time is to be found at reference 1. Book now reread after having taken a serious dose of West Wing, that is to say, series 1 and series 3, completely overlooked when they came around on UK TV, seemingly more than 10 years ago now, but picked up last year at a Hook Road car booter - or some such.
While I stand by what I said first time around, the serious dose of West Wing does seem to have brought the whole thing more to life.
Covering a presidential campaign from close quarters, getting plenty of time with Bush, his wife and his team, was not for the faint hearted. Long hours, many of them spent in or in waiting for buses and aeroplanes, many of then spent on media driven froth and nonsense, many hotels and, by the sound of it, far too much food laid on. One also spent enough time with or near Bush to get to know him and to get to like him. And leaving his politics aside, he was a likeable guy in private, which was one thing - he also managed to pull off the rather harder trick of being a likeable guy in public - a trick which the loser, Gore, did not manage. Then there was the trade off between knocking the man in your stories and continuing to be friends, to get access and the odd plum. It must have been hard to be in the campaign in the way that Bruni was, without becoming part of it.
Being the presidential candidate was not for the faint hearted either. One also needed some special skills, to have some special qualities and to be very keen indeed - on which last point, some doubted whether Bush had it - but, as it turned out, he did.
Bruni is interesting on the tension between the need for a candidate to be likeable, to be one of the chaps, one of the boys, to be a wow at kissing babies and tossing pancakes, and the need for a candidate also to appear to be all knowing, all knowing about all manner of things. An all knowing which can only come, in reality, from quality briefing from quality support staff, as neither candidates nor presidents can afford to spend much of their own time on that sort of thing.
He does not speculate in this book on whether there is a mismatch between what it takes to get elected and what it takes when one has been elected. I started out thinking that there was, but now I am not so sure. In our sort of democracy, maybe the two things go together, and many of the skills one needs to get elected are needed when you have been elected. Both before and after you need, for example, to be very good with people in general - and with the press in particular. You have to be able to win hearts and minds. You have to be able to delegate. You need to be able to cope with a large chunk of your life being lived in public, either with the public at large or with the many inhabitants of your outer office. You have to have a family who will put up with up it all.
We enjoyed West Wing, excellent light entertainment, entertainment which, incidentally, seemed to square with what little I knew about the goings on around high office from my time at the Treasury. I now think that it also squares with what Bruni has to say about the goings on around presidential campaigns - with there being clear read across between some of the scenes in the series and some of the scenes in the book,
Maybe the next stop is series 7, at which we baulked on the first attempt. Too much seemed to have changed since series 3. The US accents seemed to have become too strong for our older ears. So perhaps we should wait until some car booter or charity shop comes up with the intervening series.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=ambling+history.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bruni.
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