The US election cost more than the GDP of a small country. Anne Davies joined the media frenzy; illustration by Ray Hirst 

As 240,000 people crammed into Grant Park in Chicago to watch the final historic moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, it was hard not to wish that some of the enthusiasm produced by United States elections could be transplanted to Australia. In those last few weeks, it was inspiring, if a little weird, to see armies of supporters out doorknocking or attending rallies in their thousands and chanting “Yes, we can”, “Drill, baby, drill” or “Sarah, Sarah”.

In Australia, if a politician appears at a football game we are more likely to boo him than cheer him, let alone line up for hours in sub-zero temperatures to see him. It all made me wonder about the role of the media in the US campaign. They are a central part of transmitting the razzle-dazzle to millions, in exchange for high ratings and sometimes at the expense of analysing what is put before the public in the way of policies.

The main reason for the hoopla that accompanies American elections is that getting the grass roots mobilised is central to winning in an electoral system where voting is not compulsory and where, in a good year such as 2008, only 65 per cent of registered voters vote. Sure, there’s a need to persuade the undecided voters, but that’s only half the story. In a bad year, turnout can be closer to 60 per cent. When the popular vote is often close – within one to six points – getting your own team to the polling place is as important as recruiting swinging voters.

In contrast, Australian political communications tend to be about defining the leader, attacking the opposition and explaining policy differences. The target is undecided voters, who are often the least engaged in the political process. The media are an essential part of the carnival, from the mighty cable networks to the increasingly influential video bloggers.

When the primaries season started, there were maybe 300 to 800 journalists turning up for important primaries and debates. For example, at Hillary Clinton’s victory speech after the Indiana primary, when she narrowly won and declared it “the tie breaker”, I counted fifty camera crews, dozens of people with handheld videos and hundreds of print journalists and bloggers. But these, it turns out, were reasonably small media packs.

By the end of the campaign, with the world fascinated by the prospect of Barack Obama making history as the first African-American president, the weight of media interest was almost crushing the campaigns. At the Democratic convention the estimates of media in town were about 8000 – all of them could not get into the huge stadiums – and at Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park the media pack was close to 4000. There were television crews from every nation. When a campaign speech got under way there would be TV crews doing standups using the candidate as background in Russian, Japanese, Arabic, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Sometimes it was hard to hear the candidate.

The demands of 24-hour coverage by networks, cable channels and internet sites means that campaigns are now expected to provide camera positions, desks, electricity and wi-fi or broadband at venues. At major events like the victory speeches and the debates, the campaign had to build a small media city. In Grant Park the television crews were housed in a four-storey tent pitched over the ‘riser’, a massive stepped stage for cameras. Underneath the riser were multiple studios, and beyond that were the satellite uplink trucks.
The bloggers and print journalists were in another huge tent the size of a football field, and an outdoor area, also fit for a football game, had been roped off as well.

To ensure security, all gear was screened by armies of secret service men, who checked every item with sniffer dogs and often required that it be turned on to prove it was real. Reporters, like the public, were put through metal detectors and bag searches. Getting around was also a challenge and required the average foreign journalist to become highly proficient at using internet travel sites to book flights, hotels and cars. Most foreign journalists got themselves around the campaign trail. I quickly learnt to always get a car with a GPS, to never believe an American who tells you it is only a “short drive” and to check the weather before leaving (after I drove the length of Ohio in a snow storm, watching cars around me slide off the interstate).

The campaign planes and touring buses, such as McCain’s Straight Talk Express, were largely reserved for the domestic media, although occasionally foreign media would get a seat for a couple of days. This offers additional access to staff, and occasionally a brief brush with the candidate, who might come down the back of the plane to say hello. But these occasions were almost always off the record, and as the campaign wore on the candidates became more tightly scripted. Most US media outlets sent more junior reporters on the trail, armed with digital VCRs as well as laptops to capture any unguarded moment.

But there are not many of these. The name of the game on the US campaign trail is total control of the message. Early on in the primary season and in the first stages of the presidential campaign, Senator McCain favoured town meetings where the public could ask questions. These were real people asking real questions, but as the campaign wore on there was an uncomfortable feeling that the questions had been vetted. Senator Clinton got into trouble for this after one young woman went public saying she had been given a question to ask about the environment.

By the end of the campaign Obama, McCain and their running mates were all using autocues at their rallies and not straying from their scripts, which were tweaked each day to reflect current events, but only in minor ways. The only unscripted moments were likely to come from the rope lines at the end of an event, when the candidate shook hands with real people, and even these were kept as short as possible at the end.

Some of the best stories of the campaign came from functions where the media were not welcome, or in interactions with real people in less-formal settings. For example Obama’s comments about working-class people “clinging to their religion and their guns” was captured by a blogger who gave a recorder to a friend attending a fundraiser in San Francisco. It appeared on the liberal Huffington Post website and was quickly picked up by the mainstream media.

Joe the Plumber was adopted as the quintessential small businessman for the McCain campaign after he was captured by a TV crew as Senator Obama did “pic fac” door-knocking in Joe’s home town of Toledo, Ohio. Joe was in his front yard and he asked Obama about his tax plan. The rest, as they say, is history. Hillary Clinton’s famous “tearing up” moment came as she sat around a table with some women in New Hampshire to hear about their issues and one of them asked her how she could withstand the pressure.

Press conferences are far and few between on the US campaign trail, and there seems to be little expectation of them. I went to one in Florida when Hillary Clinton was campaigning for Obama, and there was a long debate about whether I would be allowed in because it was for “local media only”. Senator McCain did several “press availabilities” during the campaign but Senator Obama only rarely held press conferences, and usually when he had a problem he could not let fester, such as the release of videos of Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s sermons or the removal of two girls in Muslim headscarves who were sitting behind the Senator in a televised rally.

And of course Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was under constant fire for not making herself open to the press. Even after becoming president-elect Obama has kept his first press conferences tightly controlled, answering only a handful of questions from pre-selected journalists. They were nothing like the rough-and-tumble affair of an Australian press conference, which can run for up to an hour and range across a wide range of issues.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no attempt to get the campaign viewpoint out there on a daily basis. Both presidential candidates used daily phone conferences for the media, leaving it to their staff or surrogates to point out a gaffe or provide more trenchant criticisms of the opponent’s policies than the candidate would be prepared to do in a speech. These advisers are on the record and can be quoted, which gives additional material. But it also gives the candidate deniability. For example, when McCain’s chief economic adviser Phil Gramm said that America was in “a mental recession” and America was “a nation of whiners” or Senator Obama’s adviser Austan Goolsbee was caught offering a more conciliatory view of the North American Free Trade Agreement to Canadian officials, their bosses just said their advisers were talking out of school.

Advisers also play a prominent role after the presidential and primary debates in the “spin room”. Yes, its really called the spin room. Accompanied by a young person holding their name aloft, advisers hold impromptu huddles with journalists to tell them how their guy won the debate. There has been a lot written about the use of the internet for fundraising, but less about using it as a tool for managing the media. As well as regular press releases the Obama campaign bombarded journalists during the debates with real-time commentary via email. Television commercials were released online, as were the rebuttals, often within an hour or two.

Do US candidates face more scrutiny during the campaign than Australian politicians? There’s no doubt they are out in public more hours a day than Australian politicians. They face scrutiny in television interviews and they are put in the public spotlight on their policies in the three presidential debates and the multiple debates during the primary season (Obama and Clinton debated 27 times). Most major US magazines and newspapers got interviews with them. Yet there was still something lacking. US journalists make no attempt to cost promises or to consider the effect of campaign promises on the budget. In a way, that’s refreshing because it takes the campaign to a loftier level. But the level of economic debate is generally poor, particularly when contrasted with the depth of analysis in international relations.

Perhaps that will change in future elections, given the importance that economic strategies will have in this current presidency and the likely blowout in the US deficit. Then there is the huge cost of the campaign. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the 2008 elections for the White House and Congress cost $US5.3 billion – more than the GDP of Belize, but less than Americans spent on Valentine’s Day this year. The presidential race alone cost $US2.4 billion and the candidates raised more than $US1 billion in donations.

Much of that spending went back into the media coffers. The long campaign has been a godsend for the US cable companies, who might have had to lay out millions to cover this campaign but who got it back in advertising from the campaigns and in big improvements in ratings.
It also put many blogs on the map and led to innovations such as interactive sites to predict the outcome, citizen-generated internet TV stations, and even CNN’s dubious experiment with hologram cameras to bring their journalists into the studio on election night.

Standing in Grant Park on election night, it was hard not to share the sense of pride that Americans felt in their democratic process. Many people wept openly as they talked of feeling like they had been part of changing the direction of their country. Australia could do with a little more enthusiasm for elections, if not the huge costs that the US system entails. It should start with the major political parties letting go of their iron grip on membership and inviting a wider participation. It might also require that media works a little harder to celebrate the right to make a choice on election day.

Anne Davies is the Washington correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age