The rabbit hole called 'Spin Alley'
ST. LOUIS — The presidential debate was still going on upstairs in the basketball arena on the campus of Washington University when actor-Bush advocate Ron Silver and New York Gov. George E. Pataki arrived to spin the media housed in a downstairs gym.
"I think the president really did a great job convincing a lot of people that we need him for four more years," Pataki said as President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, continued to go after each other on TV monitors. "The American people can see the president I know, someone who cares deeply about the American people."
Pataki, a tall man with an owlish grin, was asked whether it felt odd to be talking about the debate while it was still occurring.
"Yes," he said. "Yes."
On TV, spin plays like the mostly vacant media ritual it's become, the Ebert and Roeper of political engagement. In person, it involves many, many more people, thousands in fact -- campaign staffers in gray suits, segment producers, TV anchors in pancake makeup. "Spin Alley," as the media have come to dub it in each debate location, is where all these subgroups mingle all day. Then, as the debate ends, they converge in a mad dash to define the event for the TV cameras. The other journalists, the ones who use notepads, are also in the room, but they don't need what TV needs -- the constant, self-fulfilling, infomercial-making machine that every now and then accidentally runs into the truth.
It was easy to forget which came first, the debate or this. The spinning, after all, had been playing for the cameras all day and now into the night. The debate was only 90 minutes long.
"This is a whole cultural phenomenon," said Mark McKinnon, who designs TV ads for the Bush campaign. "People understand that how this gets framed and filtered through the press is often as important as the debate itself."
Maybe because it was all happening in a gym with folded-up basketball hoops, the whole thing felt like a school dance. Each spinner stood next to a volunteer holding a giant Bush or Kerry poster on a stick, with the name of the spinner at the bottom. So you could go stand under the Terry McAuliffe stick and listen to the Democratic National Committee chairman say to microphones of various sizes: "The president of the United States lost control tonight. I've never seen anything like it. You know, called Sen. Kerry by the wrong name, kept referring to the Internets. I mean it was just one mistake after another. The man was totally flummoxed."
