George W. on camera, off guard

[Photo: HBO] Apparently, then-candidate George W. Bush and his advisers considered Alexandra Pelosi and her ordinary handheld camera a friendly and charming intrusion on the campaign trail, giving her remarkable access.

By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published November 4, 2002

Ask Alexandra Pelosi why George W. Bush would let her stick a camcorder in his face nearly every day for 18 months while he campaigned for the highest office in the land, and she offers a curious answer.

He identified with her. Sorta.

"He saw people (in the press corps) laughing at me the way they laughed at him, and I think he sort of identified with that in a weird way," said Pelosi, who eventually cobbled her camcorder footage together into a documentary the candidate himself named: Journeys With George.

At the time, Pelosi was a producer for NBC News, helping on-camera faces such as David Bloom and Campbell Brown serve up sound bites and footage from the campaign trail. But in her spare time, the twentysomething daughter of Democratic House minority whip Nancy Pelosi lugged around a $1,000 camcorder, capturing Dubya's behind-the-scenes interactions with a press corps that didn't believe he would actually win the election.

"We were both sort of a laughingstock in our own way," said Pelosi, who admits she probably ticked off some of her fellow journalists by being loud, wearing lots of purple and asking Bush simplistic questions such as, "What are you eating?"

"He knew 'the pack' didn't take me seriously in the same way they didn't take him seriously," she added. "But I guess we both proved them all wrong."

What's most remarkable about Journeys With George: even though it's a movie centered on the press corps covering a candidate for president, it features very little politics or journalism. Instead, Pelosi offers a collection of backstage antics from Bush's candidacy that exposes both the process and the candidate.

Along the way, viewers get a singular look at the often artificial process of continuously covering a presidential campaign that is little more than a succession of similar stump speeches and contrived photo opportunities.

[Photo: HBO] The Bush camp now says it thought Pelosi’s footage was for personal use only. But other journalists traveling with the campaign scoff at that notion.

"One of my colleagues once advised me that the worst place to know what's going on in any presidential campaign is traveling with the candidate," said R.G. Ratcliffe, state political reporter for the Houston Chronicle and one of a handful of journalists featured extensively in Journeys With George.

"The people who travel with the candidate are prisoners of the candidate," Ratcliffe said (in the film, Pelosi calls it "the bubble," echoing longtime reporter slang for that unique, closed-off social environment). "There's this uneasy relationship going on that's half Stockholm Syndrome and half a bunch of bandits in the house waiting to steal everything you've got. This movie captured that."

The movie illustrates this best after Bush loses the New Hampshire primary and the campaign shifts from traveling in a plane separate from the press corps to flying with journalists -- allowing the candidate to schmooze reporters into more favorable coverage.

Here, Journeys With George starts to feel like a summer camp for political junkies, with shots of Bush mugging for the camera and asking Pelosi, "Did you have too much to drink last night?" and jokingly protesting, "Stop filming me. You're like a head cold."

With no footage of journalists actually writing or voicing stories, the viewer winds up with the impression that no one really worked much during these trips (Pelosi said such footage was omitted because it was mostly boring). Also, it raises another question.

How did she pull this off in the first place?

"There were lots of times when Bush wouldn't come to the back of the plane (where journalists sit) unless it was all off the record," said Ratcliffe. "They would not allow anyone else with a hand camera or still photographers to shoot. But, particularly when other TV people would complain about Alexandra and her camera, Bush would say, 'No. That's okay, she can do it.' It's hard to fathom."

Pelosi has a simple explanation for her access: the Bush camp underestimated her.

"Politics is crisis management. . . . There are about 100 things you need to worry about, and I wasn't anything they ever needed to worry about," she said. "The images I was shooting never ended up on Nightly News . . . (and) I don't think they ever took the camera seriously. All I know is, they never told me to stop."

Since then, of course, White House officials have complained that Pelosi told them her footage was "for personal use." But even other journalists covering the campaign scoff at the notion that Bush's advisers were unaware that she eventually decided to craft a documentary from the images she was collecting.

"I think Bush never thought she would be successful in taking this and doing anything with it commercially," said Wayne Slater, Austin bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News and another journalist featured regularly in the movie.

"The secret of this movie is that she had this little unobtrusive camera that looks like the camera you use at Christmas. The technology put you at ease . . . (and) Alexandra clearly charmed the guy."

Sometimes that connection could backfire, as illustrated in the movie when Bush stops speaking to her for a while after she asks a tough question on Texas' capital punishment record. "You came after me the other day," he says on camera. "You went below the belt." The film makes it seem as if Bush treated all reporters that way, but Slater said the then-candidate may have felt particularly betrayed by Pelosi, with whom he seemed to have a particular bond.

"I think he reacted badly," added Slater, who is writing his own book about Bush including behind-the-scenes material from the press trips. "I don't think he ever thought she was harmless . . . (but) she may have represented some aspect of Bush's earlier personality: coming from a famous political family with a wacky personality."

And though some critics have made much of Pelosi's flirtatious relationship with the commander in chief-to-be, reporters who shared those moments caution against reading too much into their playful give-and-take.

"Bush flirts with everybody . . . men and women," Ratcliffe said. "He can look at you for a second and do a flirtatious thing that says, 'This is just a joke between us.' That's why people that don't even like his policies, when they know him, like him. I think that's what's been missing from his presidency . . . and captured in this movie."

Over the telephone, Pelosi is energetically self-deprecating, the child of a famous political family (Mom is the first woman ever to become a whip in the U.S. House of Representatives; her grandfather, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., was also an influential congressman) who swears she has never been invited to an A-list New York party in her life.

Driven to quit her NBC News job just to get Journeys With George completed, she is unconventional enough to take a gamble on a film assembled in her living room and smart enough to make it pay off.

That unconventional approach includes her method of building Journeys With George by asking seemingly innocuous questions that, somehow, encourage subjects to reveal themselves -- piling the absurdities on top of each other in a style reminiscent of Roger and Me creator Michael Moore.

"There was a method to my madness," Pelosi said. "I used the Bush playbook. He would play the dumb guy. That was always his genius . . . the ability to lower the expectations."

Pelosi is also smart enough to know that her movie couldn't have appeared at a better time: America's infatuation with reality TV and willingness to accept indie production values has intersected with some of the biggest crises Bush has faced as president.

No wonder the White House initially tried to disavow this film: Just as they're trying to convince allies and the American people that Bush has the leadership skills to handle war with Iraq, the global hunt for terrorists and the Arab-Israeli conflict, along comes a film with footage of Dubya guzzling beer (nonalcoholic, of course) and showing off his Western-style belt buckle.

The filmmaker -- a term Pelosi hates, by the way -- has called Journeys With George a political "Rorschach test": How you feel about the film may depend on how you feel about George Bush.

"(Bush adviser) Karl Rove thinks this movie is going to get George Bush re-elected . . . because it makes him look human, and that's the best thing you can ask for in politics," said Pelosi, who has sold the international rights to the movie and brought it to film festivals such as Sundance and South by Southwest. "I showed this movie in Tribeca, in the shadows of ground zero, and people said, 'How can you release this movie? You're making our president look silly.'

"Here's my definition of irony: The House Democratic whip's daughter goes to Europe to defend George Bush while her mom is on the floor of the House railing against the war on Iraq," said Pelosi, a longtime liberal who often winds up defending the way her movie exposes the sly charm behind Bush's public persona.

"The administration thinks it shows what vultures the reporters are, and the reporters think it shows how manipulative the campaign is," she said. "Everybody feels it's making the case for the other side."

Get past her overcaffeinated, hyperplayful side, and Pelosi will cop to a serious goal: opening people's eyes about the absurdity of the entire campaign process.

It's why she says she had to quit NBC News to finish the film, working as a freelance producer while assembling the movie with a laptop-based editing suite in her apartment.

"I hope the next time people watch a presidential election, they'll be a little more cynical and a little more critical," said Pelosi, who already has sent letters asking expected Democratic candidates for president in 2004 if she can tag along, camcorder in hand. "I think this movie is an indictment of the process. And everybody knows you can't make those kinds of statements when you're working for the Man."

Subtle indictment of the political process or a gussied-up valentine from one political insider to another? Yet another Rorschach test viewers will tackle when they sit down with this film.

-- To reach Eric Deggans, call (727) 893-8521, e-mail deggans@sptimes.com.

AT A GLANCE: Journeys With George airs at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday on HBO. Grade: A-

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