Claire Messud joins Obama on the campaign trail
Novelist Claire Messud recently went on the road with the Obama campaign, as she reports in a story for Newsweek. Messud studies her fellow journalists surrounding the Obama, who rarely have a chance to approach the candidate himself, but who are shaping the stories coming out of the campaign and setting the agenda in the media. She writes about the Americans whom Obama meets on the campaign trail, and their reactions to meeting him. And finally, she writes of Obama himself—with his star quality meets ''nerdy earnestness''—asserting how for the remainder of the campaign he needs to:
take control of the storyline and provide the details that will give that storyline authenticity, and authority, so that when the journalists, or the public, want to know who he really is and what he really believes, he will already—convincingly, and with a complexity worthy of his message—have told us.
Posted August 28, 2008 2:31 PM