Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail

Sometime early last May, I began to have this goofy notion, which turned into a daydream and eventually became a recurring fantasy. It went like this: One morning, I would wake up to the news that the previous evening, with no advance warning to the media, Mitt and Ann Romney stopped by the White House at the invitation of Barack and Michelle Obama. No one was certain what happened while they were there or what they talked about or how it came together, though eventually some details would trickle out. The couples told funny stories from the campaign trail and shared pictures of their families. Mitt drank lemonade, and Michelle led a moonlit tour of her garden. Everyone ate hot dogs loaded with toppings, which inspired a cable christening of the “Sauerkraut Summit.”

But that's what I was doing to an alarming degree. Maybe it had to do with how bad off the country felt and how outmatched our politicians were by the severity of our problems and how obvious it was that the proverbial “tone” of Washington wouldn't change no matter who won. Or maybe it was because my daughters were getting older and starting to tune in more. When I drop them off at school, I sometimes watch them stare wondrously at the vice president's motorcade as it sirens past en route to the White House. It is a moment of fascination and reverence and one of the cool things about raising a family in what is otherwise the most disappointing city in America. I had also just been through a rough winter in which my 11-year-old suffered a head injury that brought some terrifying and unexplained side effects that incapacitated her for months. There's something about wondering whether your kid will ever be able to go back to school and live a normal life that makes a steady ingestion of super-PAC poison, talking-point Novocain and fund-raising spam a little harder to take.

I couldn't shake the idea of this Obama-Romney evening at the White House. I found myself talking about it to people I have actual professional or quasi-professional relationships with. The first was Alex Castellanos,LIVESTRONG Cycling the Republican media strategist and CNN contributor,Garmin Cycling whom I ran into at a wedding over Memorial Day weekend (yes, the kind of incestuous small-town encounter that also goes with living here). He said he liked it, and then he went immediately into analyst mode, saying it would be “helpful” to whoever made the invitation and was thus “seen as magnanimous.” A week or so later I mentioned the idea to a top Obama aide, who called it “interesting” and then listed all the reasons Obama does not like to mix personal time with work (see: golf invitation made to John Boehner after a full two and a half years in the White House). I started bringing it up casually to people I met at campaign events. They seemed more enthused. “It would be a sign that something nice is possible,” said Bob Grandison, a retired technician for Ohio Edison whom I met at an Obama rally in Akron.

This isn't all a setup for one of those gauzy laments about how “our politics have never been meaner” or how “we've lost our civility as a society” and it would all be so much better if our leaders could just emulate the oft-invoked after-hours salons of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill (a tradition way overstated). Nor am I a member of the “deeply saddened and troubled” club,buy moncler jackets like John McCain (or whoever tweets for him), who recently called this campaign the “worst I've ever seen.” This from someone who in 2000 had to field the race-baiting accusation that he fathered his adopted Bangladeshi daughter, out of wedlock, with a black woman.

I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about politics because beneath that cynicism I understand that the stakes are high. On top of which, oddly, the job also keeps me patriotic, a byproduct of seeing — as I did at a Romney event in Ohio in July — things like a Korean War veteran in a wheelchair removing his insignia cap and struggling to his feet to salute the flag during the national anthem. (Immediately after which, I looked down at my BlackBerry to learn that the Democratic National Committee had just released a new ad ridiculing Ann Romney's dressage horse.)

But what's been completely missing this year has been, for lack of a better word,duvetica jackets joy. Yes, it's always kind of fun to follow Joe Biden around and wait to hear what will come out of his mouth next, and who knows what Paul Ryan has hidden under his oversize jacket. But the principals don't seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn't been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day's supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers' spending blindly on redundant warfare.moncler coats How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?