Mark Halperin

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John Heilemann and Mark Halperin recently released Game Change, a behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 campaign. Halperin is editor-at-large and senior political analyst for Time magazine and worked at ABC news for nearly 20 years. Campus Progress caught up with Halperin recently to talk about his new book, the youth vote, the book’s treatment of Elizabeth Edwards, and what young politicos need to do to climb the political journalism ladder.

There was more coverage of this campaign than there had ever been, but John Heilemann and I were convinced that a lot of the coverage was intense for twenty-four, forty-eight hours but then the pack kind of moved on to the next story of the moment, and that if we took our time, took a bit of a risk to wait to bring the book out after over a year after the election that we’d be able to go back and do long detailed interviews with people and try to bring to life the story behind the story, the story of what really happened with the most interesting set of presidential candidates and spouses we’d ever covered.

Yeah, and it’s quite a gripping account. You do a good job of weaving in that news narrative in the book.

We assumed that our readers would be pretty familiar with the main events that occurred, when the primaries and caucuses occurred, who won and lost, so we don’t dwell on that kind of process-oriented stuff of polling and tactics and strategy. Our focus, pretty relentlessly, is on the candidates and their spouses and to try to take people behind the high human drama of how they experienced this very difficult fight. It is a political book in the sense it’s about political candidates and their spouses but we tried to write it for an audience beyond the beltway beyond political junkies, people who are just interested in interesting stories about compelling people.

And you’ve been covering campaigns for a while now, what would you say is changing about campaigns and the way they’re covered today.

There’s a lot of changes over time, some quite stark even in the space of my relatively short career. Certainly it’s harder to get to know presidential candidates, even as a reporter, traveling regularly with them. The digital age makes candidates more wary and it’s more difficult to get near them. And the campaign trail to some extent, isn’t as relevant as it was. The campaign is fought more days than not in cyberspace, competing press releases, internet websites, rather than on the campaign trail with the candidate.

Sometimes I think, other young progressives and other even older progressives become frustrated with these lighter political stories, the $400 haircuts over the nitty-gritty of the health care proposals and things like that. Yet these lighter stories are the ones that are more popular get more traction and more traffic. Is there a way to balance those two tensions?

Voters have to demand serious coverage. Politics is always going to be a bit of a spectacle, particularly American presidential campaigns, because of their length and the incredible events that go on in conjunction with them. There’s always going to be room for spectacle. But, voters have to demand serious coverage. In the internet age, there can be unlimited serious coverage. And we have to find a way to encourage people to be interested in both the light and also the important.

This election was unique in many ways, but one thing that you talk about and mention in your prologue and is sort of a theme in your book is that there was a high volume of youth turnout that played a significant role in the ultimate outcome of the election. Obviously in the special elections and off-year elections since then youth voter turnout has been somewhat down. Are campaigns changing the way they reach out to youth or do you think this youth outreach was specific to Obama and the 2008 campaign?

I think that the jury is out and the burden of proof is on any candidate who wants to try to duplicate what Obama did. It’s common to say the Obama campaign changed politics forever in a variety of ways, including the ability to reach out to young people, but I think there was something special about the person, about the brand, about the moment in technological history that allowed Obama to do a lot of things that you can’t just duplicate by saying we’re going to duplicate, and it remains to be seen if anyone in either party in 2010, 2012 can harness what Obama was able to harness.

Some have been critical of this book’s treatment of Elizabeth Edwards, who has worked closely with CAP on healthcare reform among other things. Do you think the treatment in the book was fair of her and added something to the debate?

John and I have remarkable sympathy for and respect for Elizabeth Edwards, losing a son in an auto accident, dealing with cancer so publicly and heroically, and of course dealing with her husband’s public infidelity are incredible burdens, and her ability to keep her life together and raise her children is truly admirable. At the same time, in our reporting, we followed what our sources told us uniformly, even those with extraordinary sympathy and affection for Elizabeth to this day, that there was another side of her, in private, that they found important. And we felt, that in telling this story in full, that we needed to talk about that side as well, a side that could be very tough and demanding of the people around her, including her husband.

And with all that’s come out about John Edwards’s affair and his potentially inappropriate use of campaign funds, in some ways in retrospect it’s somewhat amazing to remember the significant amount of support he received, even if it was from a small constituency. And I’m sort of curious as a consumer of news, why did it take so long for some of these stories about him to come out?

I think there was a great deal of loyalty within Edwards’s circle to not tell these stories. They believed in him, thought he would be the best president, and also for some of them at least, there was a self-preservation aspect to it, their professional lives were really intertwined with his, and I think, like a lot of the stories in Game Change, it takes patience and a lot of interviews and the accumulation of the material, weaving it together, thinking about it and doing more interviews in order to bring things forward for history.

If you were to give advice to young people who want to become political reporters, what would you say to them?

Learn how to write correct English.

Anything else?

Nope. Anybody that does that will succeed.

Kay Steiger is editor of Campus Progress.