Spanking the Donkey is out

[eridani]

Interview with Matt Taibbi.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/05/01/son_of_gonzo/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Ideas+Section

Who's running?'' That's (more or less) how one New Hampshirite responded during the Democratic primaries last year when Matt Taibbi, a journalist covering the race for the New York Press, The Nation, and Rolling Stone, asked who she'd vote for. After following the candidates around the country, Taibbi could relate. So as he recounts in his acerbic new campaign-trail diary, ''Spanking the Donkey'' (New Press), he did what any honest reporter should: He took drugs, went on a hunger strike, and wore a gorilla suit.

Taibbi, who grew up in Hingham and in Westport, explained his antics last week via telephone from Louisville, Ky., where he was covering Bill Frist's anti-filibuster telecast.

IDEAS: Your book reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's ''Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72,'' in which he chronicled his own excesses as he followed the McGovern campaign across America. Was Thompson a model?

TAIBBI: I love that book, and it has certainly influenced me. But look, the emotional center of that book is the fact that Thompson was a McGovern supporter – so it's a really suspenseful us-versus-them story. My book doesn't have that going for it, because I couldn't find a candidate I wanted to root for.

IDEAS: Why not? Didn't you decide that you admired Kucinich?
TAIBBI: Yes, because Kucinich was the only candidate who defiantly refused to dumb his ideas down and make speeches full of mechanized platitudes. But there's a corrective instinct among the national press corps, which ends up subtly endorsing some candidates and picking on others – that's why Howard Dean was asked 30 times a day if he was too prickly or too leftist to be president.... Also, I admire Kucinich for being an idealist, someone who questions our culture of violence and commercialism. But journalists painted him as a kook – because mature, sane people realize that force and commerce are the chief engines of social organization.... That's why I came to see the primaries as a commercial for political consensus.

IDEAS: Are you suggesting the press has a conservative bias?

TAIBBI: It's not that simple. From the first moment I stepped onto Kerry's campaign plane, it was high school all over again. The popular kids – the reporters who covered the campaign like it was a rolling sports story – sat up front while the unpopular kids were relegated to the back. Every morning Kerry came out and threw a football around on the tarmac, and every morning 80 nationally respected journalists followed him like herd animals, recording the scene. They filed reports on the size of the crowds, how much money Kerry had raised – but almost never asked him where he stood on the issues. That's why the guys who win elections tend to be handsome, football-throwing types.

[dorktv]

1. That was funny. I think I might get that book.

[NYCGirl]

2. Here's an interview from today's Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/05/12/taibbi/print.html

Kerry fans won't like this book, I gather, from the interview. (BTW, in the following, when he refers to Florida, Taibbi was sent on assignment to pose as a Bush campaign worker and infiltrate the campaign.)

Interviewer:
After Kerry lost, I had this feeling of great shame -- I thought, I can't believe I bought into this, I should have known better than to put any hope in this guy.

Taibbi:
I couldn't believe that they picked Kerry. When I was in Florida volunteering for Bush, this came up quite a bit. Everybody there was so glad Kerry was the nominee. They all said the same thing: Thank God it wasn't Howard Dean. They felt Dean would have turned out the kids. It was clear even people who were going to vote for Kerry weren't enthusiastic about him. I traveled with Dean, and I could see, from a horse race perspective, his electoral weaknesses. But this guy was turning out crowds of 10,000 people in the summer of 2003. If you went to a Kerry rally late in the primaries -- after he was already the nominee, basically -- you'd be lucky to find 300 or 400 people.

In New Hampshire, I saw Kerry, many times, just go up to anybody who had on an Army outfit and start talking about Vietnam -- he had such a hard-on for his Vietnam past that he was always looking for any pretext to bring it up. So I started showing up at campaign events with POW-MIA shirts on, stuff like that, hoping that I would fall into his line of fire long enough for him to pull that stunt with me. I did it four or five times, but he never talked to me.

I did see him go up to another guy -- I had my POW-MIA costume on, but there was another guy in a hunting outfit, all orange, big orange hat, vest, everything. Kerry went up to that guy and said, "Were you in the service?" "No," the guy replied, "I'm a fucking hunter."