In an Honest Way

We are well aware of the tightrope we're walking.

by Brian Howard

The moment we heard that Hillary Clinton had won Texas and Ohio — keeping the race for the Democratic nomination too close to concede — we knew they were coming. The big campaign operations of Clinton and Barack Obama would swoop down on Philadelphia like weary barflies at last call. Bearing lawn signs and clipboards, they would come wooing our voters and romancing our superdelegates. Not only would they make our fair city a battleground, they'd enlist Philadelphians as foot soldiers in their march toward a contentious convention.

And since they've gotten here, we've seen these campaigns play out in various guises — the early-month registration push, the traffic-tangling stump stops. The candidates have appeared out of thin air like poltergeists, haunting our schools and churches and steak shops. Do we need an exorcist? Both candidates have come courting on freaking WIP. (Does Obama rue the day he sat down with Cataldi? Was Clinton as creeped out as we were by the fawning Eskin?)

With all eyes on our hometown, we started looking at us, too. We wanted to know what Philadelphia looks like to all these fair-weather friends. Just how are they trying to play us, and how willing are we to be played?

But even more than that, we wanted to know what made these campaigns — so similar and yet so very different — tick. This Pennsylvania Primary is the first in forever that means anything to either party.

We should be expected to take our role seriously. The lone victor in this two-horse race is expected to lead our wayward country back to respectability and solvency. Our choice could mean the difference between four more years of the hell the last eight have been, or a saner, more enlightened course.

Unfortunately, insight into these candidates that hasn't been finely sculpted by handlers, or finely pointed by detractors, is hard to come by. Clinton and Obama both travel in an annoying maelstrom of spin, counterspin, topspin and backspin. We wanted to get beyond hope and experience, beyond Reverend Wright and phantom sniper fire.

In the name of providing as genuine an analysis as possible, we sent a reporter to each of the campaigns to sign up as an honest-to-god volunteer. We assigned them fake names to ensure the authenticity of the process they were taking part in. We insisted they volunteer as earnestly as possible. Get down in the trenches and get out the vote. See how they react to the process and how Philadelphia reacts to them.

In their accounts, both reporters express their desire to carry out their assignments in an honest way, to dig deeper than snippets and staged events. We are well aware of the tightrope we're walking: To get an honest account, we had to be somewhat duplicitous ourselves. Fake names or no, we didn't identify ourselves as reporters.

Sometimes, in the interest of serving the public and fulfilling what we feel to be a higher calling, it's what we have to do. Running the story is not a decision we made lightly. We went to a lot of sources — from newspaper vets to lawyers near and far — and finally to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics:

"Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story."

To protect their privacy, we've changed the name of every person in the "I Was a Clinton/Obama Volunteer" articles who did not know they were being observed by a reporter. While their specific identities are not key to the stories, their motivations, beliefs and actions, we feel, are key to reaching some better understanding of the 2008 Presidential Primary. The groundswell beneath the first African-American candidate with an actual chance to win. The steadfast and defiant support of the first woman with a shot to take it all home.

The stories Tom Namako and Mike Newall tell are political analysis. But they're also a sociological experiment. An attempt to quietly and fairly study the diligent, driven and hard-working volunteers on either side of two historic and historically significant campaigns, at the same time those campaigns are watching us.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)