Shaking hands, flipping burgers, visiting doughnut shops: The life of a presidential candidate can seem a cross between the tedious and the comical. Inside the Magazine this week is a celebration of photographs that captures the primary campaigns in all their color and curiosity.

Washington Post staff writer Joel Achenbach was online Monday, July 7 at noon ET to discuss his cover story, "Landscape, with Candidates."

Achenblogger Achenbach is also a staff writer on the Post's national desk. He is the author of six books, including The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West and It Looks Like a President, Only Smaller: Trailing Campaign 2000.

A transcript follows.

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Joel Achenbach: Is this mike on.

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Joel Achenbach: Oh.

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Joel Achenbach: Hi everyone! Let's talk about the magazine story, which is really just a very long caption to some wonderful pics from the campaign trail. I mentioned the backstory of the piece on my blog:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/

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Howard Dean: Dear Joel: Thanks to you and all your colleagues at The Washington Post for your free commercials on behalf of our Democratic candidate for president. Because your advertisements are presented as articles, it gives our cause all the more credibility. (And thanks for the nice little aside about how completely understandable it was that Hillary would make a silly mistake like saying she'd been subjected to sniper fire. Just because she's not our presumed presidential candidate, she may well end up being out VP choice, so your additional ode to her was welcomed.)

Love, Howard Dean

Joel Achenbach: Dear Howard:

You're so welcome! It's rare that we actually get a compliment for a political story, so I'm delighted that you're delighted! And notice how I am oblivious to your sarcasm! Just as you were to mine, apparently.

I guess you're not the same person who posted a comment online saying my piece was a piece of shameless McCain propaganda.

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Vienna, Va.: Hey Joel, approximately how much time did you spend with Obama and with Clinton on the campaign trails during the primaries? Did your perception of either or both candidates change significantly during the primary season?

Thanks,

VintageLady

Joel Achenbach: I was never on the bus or on the plane -- we have real reporters who do that. But I saw them speak many times starting in about January 2007, in DC, New Hampshire, Iowa, and such places, and in general I thought Hillary was underrated as a campaigner -- she had discipline, poise, was really good at working a room, knew everyone by name. She had a weakness for policy -- every punch line was a policy position. Obama struck me as needing the right audience (ideally a big one) to hit his stride. I saw him at a firefighter's gig, for example, in spring 2007 at which he was very flat and seemed to bomb. But that wasn't his crowd. Get him in front of a few thousand people and he really is a tremendous speaker. More on this question in a bit...

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Boise, Idaho: Do you have any vivid images in mind from the campaign that didn't become photographs, that you wish you could have had for this story?

Joel Achenbach: Chris Dodd working an Irish bar in New Hampshire, and then a veteran's club in Des Moines... That kind of very small-scale retail campaigning with very ordinary folks and almost no press at all, gotta be a bit humbling.

Our photo essay focused on the three major candidates as of late May/early June when we were putting it together but conceivably we could have expanded the scope, and I could imagine that when the books are published about the Great Campaign some of the also-rans will get more attention than we gave them.

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Herndon, Va.: Mr. A: This was a great article! (We expect the best from you, and we get it). Could you provide us with any anecdotes about the worst-informed voters you met while out on "the trail"? After the Post article about the town in Ohio with so many people misinformed about Obama, I worry that the electorate is becoming less-informed with every election.

washingtonpost.com: In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors are Flying (Washington Post, June 30)

Joel Achenbach: That was a terrific piece by Eli Saslow. On the worst-informed voters, I'd say they included all of us in the press corps that predicted Obama would win New Hampshire by double-digits.

I think the electorate is probably no more or less informed today than it was in some mythical Golden Age. We do live, after all, in the Information Age. The problem is that so much of the information is either irrelevant, or simply wrong. At the very least it is twisted for maximum partisan advantage. So you get more data but less wisdom.

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High Country, Colorado: Joel,

I hope you will use this format for some of the DNC and RNC coverage. Pictures can speak a thousand words.

Joel Achenbach: I'd love to get back to Colorado (was just in Aspen as you know from voracious reading of my blog) but at the moment no one has invited me to the conventions. I am thinking of covering the Dem convention from my brother's place in Longmont, which would be advantageous because we can just have a non-stop barbecue and I wouldn't be obliged to attend any actual events, but could watch on TV.

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Curmudgeonville, Boodlevania: Hey, Joel. Turn down the squelch; there, that's better.

Between this campaign and your coverage (and book about) the 2000 campaign, you've put in a lot of shoe leather covering politics. Your magazine piece took some flack (unfairly) and a fair amount of other campaign coverage by various and sundry have dealt with "style" and "image" and that sort of thing, as opposed to what the complainers think would be "better": substance, "the issues," white papers and policies, etc.

Given all this, do you think it is necessarily a bad thing that we spend so much time and effort looking at how candidates eat their waffles, tell dirty jokes on the campaign plane (according to Stephen Hunter's essay with reference to McCain's alleged sense of humor on his campaign plane), Hillary's and/or Romney's hair, ad infinitum.

Do you think the role of personal "character" and of "values" (real or carefully orchestrated and choreographed)is really all that important, versus "competence" and general political skills?

Hang in there; keep up the good work.

washingtonpost.com: Leading Men by Stephen Hunter (Washington Post, July 6)

Joel Achenbach: Yeah, we're obsessed with style over substance -- not just the news media but probably as a society we've turned the president into the celebrity-in-chief -- and after all this coverage I'm not sure we yet know what Obama or McCain would actually be like as president -- what skills or traits would be most prominently brought to bear in the Oval Office -- who would be in the Cabinet -- what policies would be at the top of the president's agenda (as opposed to at the top of the candidate's list of talking points). But just for the record, the original idea for the mag piece was to run some photographs from the campaign so that people could see what it really looked like. I'm not opposed, intellectually, to the concept of a photograph. I know it probably freaked people out in, what, 1839 when these things first appeared. But I like photos. This campaign produced a ton of really interesting images. My job was to write a long caption for them. I got a nice email from a professional photographer -- that made my day and makes up for anyone who thinks our piece was too fluffy or stylish or whatever.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: It was nice seeing some of the backstage photographs. The public doesn't get to see too many photographs of candidates other than when they are before the public. How often are photographers allowed to be backstage and when they are, why don't they publish more of those photographs? Do newspapers primarily want photographs of candidates speaking? Wouldn't a variety of different kinds of photographs be more interesting?

Joel Achenbach: The control of The Image is a cornerstone of modern presidential campaigning. Photographers are usually pre-positioned on risers -- with, typically, Ordinary Citizens as a kind of human wallpaper behind the candidate -- but a good photog knows how to get behind, under, on top of the manufactured scene.

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Mars : Well, I think we can all agree that President Bush is still not getting the credit he deserves for this great economy.

Joel Achenbach: Martian punditry.

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No women named Jim or Bob around here: Excuse me, I'm from the Midwest, and would like you to know that we have a wider variety of names here in the dustbowl than you realize, and none of the women I know, here in southwestern Ohio, are named "Jim or Bob," let alone all of us. What an incredibly stupid "witticism."

Joel Achenbach: Good point, JimBob.

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North McLean, Va.: It could be argued that on a purely rational level the wonderful little moments captured here should have no bearing on how well an individual performs as President. Yet in some weird gestalt way they clearly do.

As someone who has covered several campaigns, do you believe that this is a good thing or a bad thing?

That is, do you wish voters paid more attention to position papers and the like, or is the more heuristic approach so cleverly documented in your article best?

Joel Achenbach: I will venture that the photos and my accompanying long-caption are not and could not conceivably be very helpful to anyone trying to make a decision on whom to vote for. [Is that grammatical?]

If this were Nov. 3, it might be kind of late in the game to publish something that was fundamentally about texture and not about substance. But it's still July and it actually seemed like a good July 4-weekend story -- note that great cover shot of the little girl playing in the confetti at a campaign rally -- and although we get awfully cynical (even in newsrooms!) about the democratic process, I do think that this year we saw candidates really working hard, all over the country, in rich cities and poor rural towns and everywhere in between, to get every last possible vote. And to me it was a good year for the USA in a small-d democratic sense.

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Yuma, Ariz.: Did you choose which photos would be in the article, or did Shroder choose them, or a committee, or what?

Joel Achenbach: Shroder, Sydney, Evan Kriss, J Porter...we sat around and looked through many dozens of photos...I think Evan did the first round of screening.

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Baltimore, Md.: Hi, Joel; Nice piece - I actually prefer photos (and not just because they don't hurt my brain like words do). It's fun trying to puzzle out meanings and information from photos, even knowing that you're probably very, very wrong... Anyway, I just wanted to mention that I enjoy your writing for the most part, and this was a fine example of a political thingy; fundamentally meaningless, but more or less equally offensive to everybody. I'd like to think Mark Twain would have approved of your attitude, if not your prose. Keep up the good work!

Joel Achenbach: Thanks! I know that when you say my work is "fundamentally meaningless" you mean it in the best possible sense of the phrase.

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Gaithersburg, Md: Mr. Achenbach, Do you feel there is less cooperation from people because you have a blog?

Joel Achenbach: Just less cooperation from my editors on the national desk, but otherwise it's all good.

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Columbia, Md.: Mr. Achenbach, thanks for taking my question. With the scorched earth primary fight to the last state, the Democratic party pretty much canvassed the whole map, with McCain sitting and waiting by the side awaiting for the Republican coronation. Do you think the mobilization of the new Democratic voters will change the dynamic of the politics (presidency and 13% approval rated Congress), even the entangled red state/blue state mentality?

Joel Achenbach: It had to have helped Democratic registration dramatically and my neighbor who is a bigshot Dem operative says that his party is obliterating the GOP in self-ID party affiliation and that, as a result, Obama's primary objective is simply to make sure he wins the Democratic vote. If he can get 90 percent of self-ID'd Democrats he probably can't lose.

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Woodbridge, Virginia: Good morning -- My question surrounds the photos of the candidate campaigns from the Post Magazine of July 6, 2008. Was it your intention to portray Senator Obama as a "man of the people" and Senator McCain as a sneaky and hard man? The "man of the people" pictures speak for themselves, the sneaky (peeking through the curtains) and the hard man (the bull/steer with the sharp horns) pictures were the ones in particular that had the strongest contrast. It makes one candidate seem so much more approachable than the other.

Joel Achenbach: That's an interesting comment. I think the story makes clear that Obama has a particular challenge in trying to pass himself off as 'a man of the people' ... for example, there's this passage:

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.

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Mark Twain: Sorry, JoelAch, you are not in my league. Not remotely.

Joel Achenbach: This has, in fact, occurred to me.

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JustOutsideTheBeltway, Md.: How difficult was your internal struggle to avoid nepotistically shoehorning in one of the many fine examples of Achenbachian photography from the campaign trail?

Joel Achenbach: Yeah, what about my photos? Where's the love? I got some good shots, and so did my daughter Paris and her friend Amanda when I took them to New Hampshire.

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Washington, D.C.: You wrote: "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."

Is there a reason that every Democrat is painted as an elitist whereas every Republican is salt of the earth? I guess it's only fair because it's not like Bush was ushered into Andover or Yale. And it's not like McCain ditched his first wife to marry an heiress.

It's cheap shots like these that have helped bring Republicans to power.

Joel Achenbach: Oh, lighten up. Obama is known to be a rather fastidious (healthy) eater and isn't the type to hang out at Dunkin Donuts.

I have a feeling that the Obama campaign will not be destroyed by a donut joke from Achenbach.

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Waldorf, Md.: Following up a bit on Philadelphia's good point about there not being enough campaign photographs, I think one major reason is that newspapers for a long period in the 20th century were NOT the primary vehicle for showing lots of photographs (they'd show a handful, at best); it was the big magazines like "Life" and "Look" that really did the photo spreads. I suppose TV came along and killed that end of the magazine business -- but it didn't do even a halfway decent job of "replacing" what "Life" used to cover routinely. Jeez, I miss the old "Life" magazine. (And Sat. Evening Post, for that matter.)

Joel Achenbach: Excellent point and I never thought of that. Wish I had made it in my piece.

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Wilbrod, Nome: Nice article. Aside from Howard Dean's endorsement of your article, how much time did you spend covering the Republicans?

Would you be interested in standing outside the Republican convention covering the protests I hear are projected to occur?

Minnesota is lovely this time of year, just bring the Off! and use it. I have a fair idea of what McCain would be like a president -- he'd bring in a lot of the old guys that have already been in the last 3 Republican administration... maybe 5, including Nixon and Ford. When I look at the resumes of the guys in this current administration I keep thinking, there are nearly 300 million Americans now, a good chunk of them Republicans. I CANNOT believe that they can't fill an administration made up entirely of younger, more talented people that don't have grey hair already.

Joel Achenbach: McCain will bring in Nixon and Ford? I guess to look younger by comparison!

Wilbrod, I spent roughly the same time with GOP and Democrats, I think. More with McCain than with the other Republicans (maybe because I knew way back in like 1997 that he'd win the nomination).

I'll remember to bring the Deep Woods Off to Minnesota even if I'm only to be in the city.

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Upper Marlboro, Md.: Okay, I'm an Obama supporter, but even I was struck by the pictures chosen to open the article, which stick in my mind. If the WaPo kisses Obama's behind any harder, will he have permanent lip marks? We've got the point folks, stand down!

Joel Achenbach: Hmmm...I didn't see the layout that way. I loved how it appeared that McCain was glaring at Obama. But I think you're projecting bias into that. McCain looked pretty steely to me, pretty tough -- I didn't think it was unflattering.

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Brag, Md.: I thought the Dunkin Donuts caption the best in the article and had a good laugh. It also reveals the mentality of the voters (shudder)

Joel Achenbach: Thanks!

I think we're going to wrap this up. Thanks very much for reading the piece and for joining us today in this chat.

You can always wander over to the Achenblog and post additional comments, arguments, obsequious praise, links to something you've written, whatever. Doors are open there pretty much around the clock but last call is usually at 1 a.m.

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Joel Achenbach: And fyi you can always contact me by the ancient technology known as email: achenbachj@washpost.com

Cheers, Joel

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