'Prince' reporters recall lessons from a week on the campaign trail

With $30 a day for our subsistence and a room at the Nashua Comfort Inn, we lived the high life among students on the New Hampshire campaign trail.

Our inexperience allowed us to slip into offices without alerting volunteers vigilantly protecting their campaign headquarters from snooping reporters. Our press passes got us a spot in the jostling, gossipy crowd of career journalists who crisscrossed the state on the candidates' heels.

For four days, we joined the swarm of students and reporters who descended on a state with only three Starbucks, one million residents and, much to our dismay, very few road signs.

We were impressed the first time we saw a candidate speak, and surprised by the apparent boredom of our fellow reporters. By the third time listening to the exact same speech, we too were talking on our cell phones over the noise of enraptured voters.

We eavesdropped as familiar faces from CNN and C-SPAN summarized the events we had just witnessed. One reported even scoffed at us when we asked how we could get her job.

Our schedule revolved around impromptu lunches with student volunteers, chance sightings of the candidates in local bars and, most important, the battery life of our digital cameras — which forced us to listen to Rep. Dennis Kucinich's rant against the "pathetic, paltry, penurious, retrograde, weak proposals" of his competitors while we made use of the electric sockets in his volunteer office.

We served as Gen. Wesley Clark's impromptu advisors, informing him that the "little girl" he had just greeted outside a Manchester polling booth was actually a boy.

"But he had an earring," Clark protested, as he posed for a photo with us. We conversed with student volunteers who had already learned to guard their words around the press, frequently reminding themselves not to grumble to impressionable voters about freezing temperatures, long hours and lack of sleep.

As campaign managers treaded carefully around cameramen and journalists, cautious to avoid causing even the slightest inconvenience, we were reminded that media perception was often more important than the event itself.

We realized how fortunate New Hampshire residents are to have direct access to each of the candidates while most of the nation gets its news through a filter.

We understood why Rob Buerki '06 called the media a "funhouse mirror," distorting candidates' images with dramatic labels to differentiate a field in which each candidate that pledged to solve America's educational, fiscal and foreign policy problems if only given a shot at the White House.

We laughed as Buerki prompted us to note how the media implied, "Here's Dean, the nut who eats kittens for breakfast. And here's He-man Bush."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Though we pledged to maintain our journalistic impartiality, we caught the excitement of a state conscious that it was in the national spotlight. We willingly set alarm clocks for 5 a.m. to follow students to polling stations on primary morning, and collapsed 20 hours later after attending several charged "victory parties" for the losers.

By the time our series commenced, the national media had left New Hampshire. Yet our extended look at one state's primary brought us face-to-face with those shaping a process that often seems far removed from Princeton's lecture halls.

The people who believe in their obligation to vote, the volunteers who understand the power of a phone call and the reporters who recognize the importance of faithful journalism – together, these unextraordinary individuals have the ability to shape the course of national politics.