Landscape, With Candidates

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The Picture of Democracy

Indelible images from the campaign for the presidential nominations.

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Candidates go to state fairs. We see Hillary Clinton, wearing an apron, flipping pork burgers at the Iowa State Fair, looking quite pleased that she's figured out how to use this contraption called a "spatula" [Photo 10].

So much of campaigning is done with the hands. Campaign rhetoric must be accompanied by dramatic, confident gestures. No candidate wants to be thought of as an incompetent gesticulator. Voters might think: This one is smart, tough, eloquent, but has never mastered the hacking-away-at-red-tape gesture.

We see McCain's hand in mid-chop [Photo 11]. The other hands belong to the scribbling tribe of journalists, many of them thrusting gaffe-craving tape recorders toward the candidate. In the future, journalists will aim brain-scanning devices that can discern inappropriate political thoughts at a distance.

We see Obama's hands holding keepsakes that people have given him [Photo 12]. Their diversity -- what is that strange Hindu-looking thing? -- is a reminder that Obama is himself heterogeneous, part white American, part black African, born and raised in Hawaii, schooled for a time in Indonesia.

The bread and butter of campaigning is handshaking: Candidates must touch somehow, and kiss, hug, elbow-grab and/or shoulder-clamp. Words must be verified by physical contact. We see Obama backstage at a campaign event with Teddy and Caroline Kennedy [Photo 13]. It looks as if we've stumbled onto the moment when the torch is getting passed. Or maybe it's just an old warrior wishing the young one good luck.

A familiar head of hair approaches a door in Manchester [Photo 14]. Peering from inside are some white people. This is the first campaign in which white people were routinely discussed as a separate demographic. Hillary even got in trouble when she referred to "hardworking Americans, white Americans." All this is great fodder for the professors in New England who run those programs in Whiteness Studies.

Did sexism keep Hillary from winning the nomination? Hard to say. But let's discuss, for a moment, her hair. In the 1990s, Hillary's hair was controversial. There were Web sites devoted to her hair. But, over time, her hair settled down, moderated, became more comfortable with itself. This year, amazingly, her hair incited less controversy than Romney's. She was, as a campaigner, disciplined and on-message, and she didn't show up as a completely different person every three or four weeks.

So, perhaps she invented a sniper incident in Bosnia that never happened. Who hasn't occasionally thought himself or herself under fire when in fact he or she was just in a parade? The point is, she was a surprisingly good campaigner and won a ton of big states amid constant sniping from the Hillary haters. All the postmortems on what Hillary did wrong failed to give her adequate credit for how consistently good she was out there.

Back in January, on the day after the Iowa caucuses, the veteran CBS newsman Bob Schieffer held forth in the media pen at an Obama rally in Concord, N.H. He ran through all the possible ways the primaries might turn out. The best-case scenario, just for drama and storytelling, he said, would be Obama vs. McCain. "That'd be the Great Campaign," he said.

Done! And here we go, hanging on tight for a wild ride to November. Both candidates have fascinating biographies and compelling personas. But McCain may find it hard to get as much attention as Obama. Look at that picture of Obama on his bus [Photo 19]: fatigued, but calm. Feeling pretty good about things and putting his feet up. He's looking nearly directly at us. Wondering what we're going to decide.

Joel Achenbach is a Post staff writer who blogs at washingtonpost.com/achenblog. He can be reached at achenbachj@washpost.com and will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.