Landscape, With Candidates

Two photos, two very different candidates:

Barack Obama dribbles a basketball on an unadorned slab of concrete in what you can tell, even from ground level, is flyover country -- a square in the checkerboard of Middle America [See photo 1 in gallery at right]. He's in the back yard of the Evers family, in a place called Union Mills, Ind. A few evergreens and shrubs labor as landscaping. In the distance we see a plowed field.

People are watching Obama. The men stand with feet planted apart, as if they haven't budged in hours. They don't look like a limber bunch of folks. But look at Obama: He's all grace and ease. He's not only about to become the first nominee who's African American, he's surely the first who could be described as "lithe."

He's dribbling with his left hand, a high and confident dribble, as he tightropes along the edge of the court where it meets the grass. Campaigning for president is a balancing act, maybe especially if you're a black guy with a strange name and you're trying to win in places where everyone is named Bob or Jim, including the women.

Now, photo two:

We see John McCain standing underneath the mounted head of a longhorn [Photo 2]. He's in Houston, in the middle of one of his town hall meetings, listening to the 325,743rd question from an Ordinary Citizen. He appears to be glowering, but maybe he's just laser-focused, and grinding out another day on the campaign trail. Being a candidate is sometimes about as liberating as being mounted on a wall.

McCain often jokes that he is older than dirt and has more scars than Frankenstein. He never looks physically comfortable -- and can't comb his own hair -- because of the severe injuries he suffered as a prisoner of war for 5½ years. The campaign trail is rough, but McCain has been through worse.

The photograph reminds us that McCain is on the horns of a dilemma. He needs the support of the Republican base, but he was never the base's favorite candidate. Lots of Republicans don't like him at all. He can't repudiate President Bush, but neither can he fully embrace him. He's running against a candidate who's younger and fresher and has raised a lot more money.

What can McCain do? Same thing as always: keep grinding.

Campaigns are intensely visual enterprises. No campaign is won with position papers. You could have the best Web site in the world and never win a delegate. You have to show up. You have to plunge into the messy mix of America, from the gritty diners of New Hampshire to the fancy hotels of Los Angeles.

Along the way, you construct a visual narrative of your candidacy. Sure, some of the photo ops are stagey, but a lot of them are rough around the edges, the frames jumbled with unpolished characters.

Or concrete blocks. You see them strewn under a trailer where Hillary Clinton is making a visit with her entourage (that's her daughter, Chelsea, right behind her) to a hard-luck town in Appalachia [Photo 3]. There are a lot of votes in the boondocks, which is why candidates drag journalists to places that otherwise rarely get media attention. We know that money has undue influence in politics, but the system isn't a complete bust. In a democracy, one vote is as valuable as any other. The banker's ballot doesn't count any more than the ballot of the fellow whose home just went into foreclosure.