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"Tear gas sucks"
I was minding my own business when the Seattle cops gassed me.
By Zach Works
[12/02/99]

A no-win situation
Nonviolent protesters get hit from both sides at the WTO conference in Seattle.
By L.A. Kauffman
[12/02/99]

If he can make it here ...
Arizona Sen. John McCain's toughest opponent in the New York primary is not George W. Bush, but the state's Byzantine process for qualifying for the ballot.
By Andrea Bernstein
[12/02/99]

WTO protesters go to the Web
Guerrilla journalists and webcams bring you all the tear-gassed excitement of Seattle's street protests.
By Fiona Morgan
[12/01/99]

Bare breasts, green condoms and rubber bullets
The WTO has united labor and the radical, countercultural left in a way the anti-war movement never could.
By David Moberg
[12/01/99]

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Traveling with Sen. John McCain on his seven-seater campaign airplane, puddle-jumping around his home state of Arizona, it seemed suddenly too obvious that he owes some of his status as front-runner among GOP second-runners to the care and feeding of people like me. McCain is certainly the media darling of the presidential candidates. The very week I was with McCain, he was the subject of a flood of glowing profiles in national magazines, and overtook George W. Bush in a New Hampshire poll.

Watching McCain at work -- cracking Bob Novak jokes, impersonating Jay Leno, teasing his wife, barking mock orders at his staff, making me feel intelligent and full of insight -- it seemed clear that if he succeeds in toppling George W. Bush, it will be due to his cultivation of that crucial bloc of the American electorate: political reporters.

Also Today McCain's world order The iconoclastic presidential candidate offers a five-point foreign policy plan and picks up a surprising endorsement. By Jake Tapper If he can make it here ... Arizona Sen. John McCain's toughest opponent in the New York primary is not George W. Bush, but the state's Byzantine process for qualifying for the ballot. By Andrea Bernstein

McCain is infinitely accessible to any member of the press who wants to tag along. As one national reporter joked, "If you asked McCain if you could sleep over, he'd probably let you." In fact, that's exactly the offer he extended to Michael Lewis, as the reporter revealed in a Nov. 21 New York Times Magazine piece. In the piece, Lewis confessed a personal affection for McCain, and how the senator even offered to allow Lewis to bunk with him in Washington. A huge Carl Bernstein profile in the December Vanity Fair tried to be a little more distant, but still fell for the McCain magic. Dorothy Rabinowitz took a crack at explaining the media's love affair in Monday's Wall Street Journal, but her thesis -- that reporters love McCain because they look up to the former prisoner of war as a bona fide hero -- predominantly reflected, rather than adequately explained, the hero-worship she sought to illuminate.

"I like talking to reporters," McCain told me. "I like shooting the breeze with intelligent people. And the people have the right to know what a candidate thinks and feels, and what he believes in."

But is that candor, or canned pandering? Nobody who's spent time around reporters thinks we're, on average, any more intelligent than anyone else involved in political campaigns, and some would argue less. But McCain, like political reporters, is an insider, and McCain appears to like talking shop. And the notion that talking to reporters equates to a high democratic responsibility meshes perfectly with the press's self-important view of itself. Like Machiavelli's Prince, we believe we are the ones who can communicate with both the kings and the commoners. Right or wrong, most reporters feel that they are doing some sort of public service, and equate their access to world leaders with the public's.

Still, McCain's approach to the media could only be so successful because of the contrast with front-runner Bush. If McCain is the friendly local diner of presidential candidates, Bush is the tony new restaurant of the moment where nobody can get a table. Reporters who follow the Texas governor routinely kill time by complaining about the lack of access to Bush.

While requests for an interview with the GOP front-runner turned into a series of unanswered formal written requests, with McCain, an interview request was immediately granted. In fact, three of the seven seats on the plane were reserved for reporters as he and his wife, Cindi, campaigned around Arizona. Traveling with the Bush campaign means joining a media circus, securing a seat in the three-bus caravan, and a spot behind the velvet rope, as if the press were screaming teenagers and Bush a member of the Backstreet Boys.

It's hard to find a reporter who doesn't have a gripe about covering the Bush campaign, whether it's perpetual complaining about a lack of face-time with the governor or getting jammed by Bush flacks for asking tough questions.

Bush's tension with the press escalated this week when the San Francisco Chronicle received a $2,600 bill for two reporters' brief use of a press filing center. Bush campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker defended the charge as "a common practice," but longtime political reporters said it was exorbitant.

Bush spokesman Scott McLellan said Bush is "continuing what he's done as governor of Texas, and that's being the most accessible governor in Texas history." McClellan said Bush conducts "30-40 one-on-one interviews a week, and has an average of four media availabilities a week." But media availabilities are usually brief affairs, lasting only 15-20 minutes as dozens of reporters struggle to get a question in, with no chance for follow-up.

Even in Austin, the Bush camp has earned a reputation for being hyper-selective of the reporters who get access, a reputation that is not without precedent among elected officials. And while he did earn a reputation as being more available as governor, he hasn't held a press conference in Austin since Aug. 18, when he was hit with questions about Funeralgate, and snapped at a reporter who pushed him on questions about his past.

At his recent foreign policy address, arguably the single most covered policy speech of the campaign to date, Bush stuck religiously to the script, and did not take a single question from the hordes of reporters in attendance. A standard McCain stump speech, by contrast, consists of a 10-minute monologue, and 30-45 minutes of questions from the audience.

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