Posted by Ryan S. Jackson

The Sound Transit bus stopped in Bellevue and I got out near the Westin, where Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was about to give a speech to the party faithful and, before that, spend some time with a few reporters—myself included, to my surprise.

This was last Thursday. It was my first press conference during a presidential campaign, and I approached it with a sort of fanboy enthusiasm. Covering presidential campaigns is a subject that has been given an ugly glamor by campaign trail diaries like Tim Crouse’s “The Boys On The Bus” or Matt Taibbi’s “Spanking The Donkey;” a sexy downward spiral decried by people who continue to go back to do it again and again.

I found myself pacing outside the doors of a second-floor Westin meeting room waiting for the press conference to begin, making some nervous jokes while speaking with David Postman of The Seattle Times, who assured me that so long as I had a tape recorder I’d be fine. I pictured myself stumbling over a question, my hands shaking, trying to recover but babbling madly at Huckabee as I was discreetly tasered by a Republican operative and dragged from the room. There would almost certainly be a subsequent YouTube video that would haunt me for the rest of my professional life.

We were led in, Huckabee sitting behind an imposing table. There is absolutely no oxygen in the room at a presidential candidate press conference, even one that has a relatively small attendance like the one I was at on Thursday. The time to ask your question generally comes during the microsecond of silence that arrives just after the candidate ends a thought; if you hesitate for a moment, someone else will fill that silence—either the candidate himself or another reporter. If, like I was, you’re in the presence of three veteran political reporters who have the preparation for that brief moment hardwired into their very souls, you’re pretty much doomed in trying to get in a question.

Which I was. Every time my mouth opened to ask the grinning Southerner a question, Postman or Neil Modie of the PI would get there a second faster. My journalistic kung fu was totally unprepared for this environment. But I did get to watch an interesting scene unfold.

The odd reporter out at this event was Don Ward of the right wing blog Sound Politics who, I learned later, sees himself as something of an arbiter of local journalistic ethics. In a Unabomber-esque manifesto posted last month, Ward had questioned the ethics of the majority of the Seattle journalism community, including Postman and The Stranger's Josh Feit. Among other things, he exhorted Postman to get off his "lazy, dead ass" and suggested Feit might be strung out on meth. Just before the Huckabee event, Ward put his competitors on notice: "I'll be tailing Mike Huckabee today and hopefully will be able to ask some real questions that local readers want to know; as opposed to the drivel about polls and fund-raising which will dominate local coverage today."

Ward's first reportorial volley at the Huckabee press conference?

Ward: Well I suppose I can start out with a, with a , with a , with a, with a softball, but...

Huckabee: Good, I like those.

Ward: But, but, you know, talking to a lot of Republicans, uh, one of the things I get from them is, 'Gosh, I like Mike Huckabee. He's a great guy. But is he electable?' And how do you convince, uh, primary voters that you are electable?

I might have gone for the slightly less subtle:

Governor, would you call yourself awesome? Or really awesome? Because honestly, I think you're really awesome.

For what it's worth, Huckabee Tomahawk-dunked every single one of Ward's questions, though most of those answers didn't make the write-ups that appeared after the event. The local journalistic conspiracy of dunces (and alleged drug addicts) triumphing again?

Ward's approach differed considerably from that of another reporter in the room, the legendary Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker and former editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Hertzberg's line of questioning was dogged and tenacious, seeking answers from Huckabee on how he intended to fix the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Huckabee attempted to dodge and revert to generalities about the implacable nature of the Islamo-fascist threat, Hertzberg stayed with him, slightly rephrasing and sharpening his questions in order to pin Huckabee down to an actual strategy for resolving said threat.

In his post-interview write up noting what a fantastic guy Huckabee is, Sound Politics’ Ward described Hertzberg’s questions as a bear trap Huckabee couldn’t wait to get out of. It might have been one of the few spot-on pieces of analysis he managed all night.

The most jarring moment of the event was simply seeing the candidate in his environment, flood-lit by the camera from the Q13 news crew, Huckabee’s press secretary hovering alertly off to the side. I was experiencing something that, when watched on TV, seems almost detached from reality, and now it was going on in all its perverse glory right in front of me. There was the candidate, well-lit, well-coiffed, dodging and weaving and artfully trying to avoid having to answer a question.

The conference ended fast, and felt like it went faster. As Huckabee tried to leave Ward approached him to ask a couple more questions, this time focusing on the recent endorsement of Huckabee by Chuck Norris. Huckabee took the bait immediately, asking everyone in attendance if they understood how big Norris had become on the internet. Light-hearted banter spilled forth.

This was the candidate drawing us in and making us feel like we mattered, just like Tim Crouse said he would. It was a weird kind of fun.