Landscape, With Candidates
The exhausting campaign for the presidential nominations isn't just about winning delegates, it's about creating images. Uniquely American images.

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, July 6, 2008

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.

The photographic record of the 2008 campaign -- which started, really, in December 2006, when Obama made his first, media-hyped trip to New Hampshire -- will be an enduring catalogue of Americana. These photos prove that running for president is a physical act. It's exhausting. And someone's watching your every move.

The primary season began with stages full of candidates, most of them Forgotten on Arrival. Jim Gilmore: Who dat? Duncan Hunter: Sorry, dudn't ring a bell.

Look at the motley crew of Democrats [Photo 4]: Joe Biden seems ready to catch a tossed watermelon. Chris Dodd is meditating on whether he will finish the race with one delegate or zero (the latter). Bill Richardson is trying to occupy as much of the stage as is anatomically possible. Obama is honking an imaginary horn. John Edwards can't decide if he's thrilled with himself or merely very, very pleased. Dennis Kucinich is pointing to an offstage spaceship from the planet Zorgog. And Hillary Clinton is wondering who the heck is this guy to her left.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have 10 mostly middle-aged white guys running, which is the party's way of saying, "Our idea of diversity is letting a Mormon onstage" [Photo 5].

There were some characters among the also-rans. Ron Paul demanded an end to the war in Iraq, a heretical stance on the Republican stage. Tom Tancredo warned that America was in danger of collapse under the assault of immigrants. Fred Thompson set a new standard for campaign trail sloth -- he could go a week without a single event. Thank God for Mike Huckabee, who jammed on bass guitar and used action hero Chuck Norris as his warm-up act. Huckabee won lots of affection, even as he got bogged down explaining how human beings once lived side by side with dinosaurs, just like in the Raquel Welch movie "One Million Years B.C."

Mitt Romney is the spit-shined guy in the middle of the debate photo: Even from far away, you can tell that he has, inside those wingtips, a pedicure. At no point did a single Romney hair dare to stray. His positions were precision-crafted to please the base. He could write his own checks. What he couldn't buy, though, was the perception of authenticity.

There are stations of the cross in a political campaign. They include the Iowa ethanol plant.

There are, in fact, dozens of Iowa ethanol plants, but for some reason, the one that the candidates tended to visit was in Nevada (Ne-VAY-da), a town just east of Ames [Photo 6]. We see McCain wearing a silly hard hat, silly protective glasses and a silly smile. He's with a group of guys who look very amused, probably because they know that McCain is going to get about three votes in the entire state. McCain doesn't support ethanol subsidies, which means that, in Iowa, he's as popular as an outbreak of corn rust.

Candidates also go to VFW and American Legion halls, where older folks sit in folding chairs and look up at the candidates on a makeshift stage. Veterans are a core McCain constituency. They know what he went through in North Vietnam. For them, he's the one who's the rock star.

Candidates go on TV. We see McCain about to tape a cable news program [Photo 7]. He's standing at attention as if on the deck of an aircraft carrier sailing out of port. His feet are perfectly aligned where the tape on the floor tells them to be. His hands are fists. His smile is a grimace, his grimace a smile.

Candidates go to diners, a form of restaurant that exists in contemporary America solely for the purpose of supplying locales for campaign photo ops. We see Obama eating, or attempting to choke down, a meal in a diner in Manchester, N.H. At this diner, everyone stares at Obama as he eats [Photo 8]. There's a boom mike poised over the table as if trying to sprinkle salt on the senator's lunch. He appears to be chewing with great strain. He leans forward as if something is stuck in his throat, like maybe the idea of Hillary as his running mate.

Candidates go to Dunkin' Donuts. This has been a tradition among Democrats since 1992, when Bill Clinton visited, and ate his way through, every Dunkin' Donuts in New Hampshire. We see Obama looking like he's going to order at a Dunkin' Donuts and show the posse of camera people that he's a real Dunkin' Donuts-patronizing person and not some elitist Starbucks frappuccino sipper [Photo 9]. Because Obama has to appeal to blue-collar Democrats, he has to drink crappy coffee until November. The reason he's taking so long to order at this Dunkin' Donuts is that he's looking for the doughnut with the tofu filling.

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.