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Early on the morning of August 13, I intersected with John Edwards's broadband-ready, 45-foot "Fighting for One America" tour bus on the cusp of its seven-day, 31-community circumnavigation of Iowa. Six bales of precisely placed hay juxtaposed a rural message with modern technology. Wrapped bow-to-stern in blue and white vinyl, the bus was a radical upgrade from Bill Clinton's comparatively quaint vehicles we used to usher in the Age of the Bus Tour in 1992. The vendor—John L. Productions of Alabama—touts the motto, "If you are going to play, you've got to have the right toys," and offers these "War Wagons" across party lines, servicing the Bush campaigns in 1988 and 1992, Dole in 1996, and John Kerry in 2004.
In campaign stagecraft, modern hardware still takes a supporting role to the traditional interplay—often enabled by an advance person—between candidates and photojournalists covering political drama. Ronald Reagan at work on his ranch. Bill Clinton consoling a disaster victim. George W. Bush with his megaphone at the World Trade Center. Iconic images all. As the current crop of candidates vie to find their place in this pantheon, John Edwards is lucky to have as his guide the Peter Pan of advance men, Sam Myers, Sr., his trip director, now plying his trade in his eighth presidential contest. No advance man knows better the Rules of the Road.
On the other end of the lens are the shooters, following the legendary path paved by photojournalists like Dirck Halstead, Diana Walker, and David Hume Kennerly. Without them, front pages would contain only words. In Iowa, Joshua Lott, 28, Eric Thayer, 33, and Keith Bedford, 37, document the next chapter of photojournalism through their viewfinders. When I met them, Lott, Thayer, and Bedford were working on assignments for newswires on daily contracts between $200 and $400 a day. The stuff of a sitcom, they share a Des Moines home with three other freelancers and post their choicest shots each day on their website, thestumpinggrounds.com . "I'm having a blast," says Lott, a self-taught photographer who covered the Virginia Tech shootings and the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis. "I'm just here to make really good photos and put them there for people to see to let them know what's going on in the world."
Myers is the director, Edwards the actor, and Lott, Thayer, and Bedford the cinematographers. On a sidewalk in Perry, Edwards tossed Myers's football to his wife, Elizabeth, while the shooters, angled up from the pavement, framed the candidate, his arm cocked, the ball spiraling against the blue Iowa sky. Watch it on YouTube, courtesy of the Edwards campaign.
Later, approaching a work area on Highway 141, en route to Jefferson, signalman Don McKinney flagged down the bus to let eastbound traffic rumble through. Another indelible image in the offing. Edwards dismounted to offer greetings; just the candidate, the worker, and corn, for miles around. And Lott and Thayer, as always, their lenses fixed on the scene. Editing and shipping their day's work via mobile cards from a vinyl-covered booth at Rancho Grande, a Mexican joint next to the dusty Union Pacific rail bed in Carroll, Lott and Thayer were flush with new content, the telltale metric of a good day.
