Pay no attention to that reporter behind the curtain! The Times Iowa caucus reporting today notes the appearance of Howard Dean's wife Judith Steinberg Dean on the campaign trail; it's the entire content of the Dean segment of the Democratic campaign snapshots offered on A15.

It was a carefully orchestrated moment, a strategic Sunday surprise for a candidate who had surged steadily for the past six months only to find himself slipping in polls on the eve of the most important election of his life.

We learn from the short but information-packed piece that Dean, "at the suggestion of Ruth Harkin, the wife of Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa," asked his wife in a Saturday call to fly out to Iowa—a state, it's for some reason important to us to know, that she'd never set foot in before. We learn the make and model of the private jet (a Lear 35) in which she flew from Burlington; we're treated to a quick account of how the Dean people stage-managed her arrival and the press's first access to her, so that she appeared not from her plane but from her husband's, "as though they had traveled together."

It's not at all a bad little report, and offers (for the Times) an unusually frank account of the relationship between a campaign and its press detail. Only one problem: with so much to be told about how Judy Dean got to Iowa, we're left a little in the dark as to the why (since I don't really think the logic of "strategic Sunday surprise" quite explains itself, however dazzled I am by the alliteration). Specifically, you can't help wondering whether the Times itself didn't provide some motivation with Jodi Wilgoren's big, caustic article of last Tuesday, headlined "Dean's Wife Shuns Politics," elaborating the apparently vexing oddness of Dr. Dean's absence from her husband's side on the campaign trail. There can't have been any sense in which the Dean operation decided that the Times, on behalf of the press as a whole, had issued them their marching orders, that the better part of valor was not to get clobbered on this one, that they'd better convince Judy Dean to get out to the Midwest ASAP, can there? I don't know, and on this question the Times is sadly unable to provide context.

And who wrote the Dean campaign snapshot? Why, look, it's Jodi Wilgoren! No relation, I guess, to the Jodi Wilgoren who wrote the "Dean's Wife Is a Problematic Weirdo" piece a week ago. Jodi doesn't have any idea whether Jodi's article might have been a player in this little drama ...

posted by michael  7:15:46 PM  
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So it shouldn't all be snark: Let me show some love to Steven Greenhouse for this worthy report on yesterday's front page, detailing Wal-Mart's widespread non-policy policy of locking in overnight employees at some of its non 24-hour stores (Wal-Mart and Sam's Club). Greenhouse is a 20-year Timesman who moved to the labor beat in the mid-90s (can that possibly be a path to career advancement at the Times?), and he's been all up in Wal-Mart's business since last summer. Part of what makes the story unusual is its emotional directness: everything else on the front page yesterday was offered in a standard event context (of the "yesterday in Baghdad" variety), but Greenhouse grabs us with character point-of-view and a daring avoidance of calendar specificity:

Looking back to that night, Michael Rodriguez still has trouble believing the situation he facaed when he was stocking shelves on the overnight shift at the Sam's Club in Corpus Christi, Tex.
   It was 3 a.m., Mr. Rodriguez recalled, some heavy machinery had just smashed into his ankle, and he had no idea how he would get to the hospital.
   The Sam's Club, a Wal-Mart subsidiary, had locked its overnight workers in, as it always did, to keep robbers out and, as some managers say, to prevent employee theft. As usual, there was no manager with a key to let Mr. Rodriguez out. The fire exit, he said, was hardly an option—management had drummed into the overnight workers that if they ever used that exit for anything but a fire, they would lose their jobs.

I'll spare you my disgust at the notion that working people could be treated this way, since (I hope) you can cook up your own without much effort. I'd rather praise Greenhouse for his sharp writing here, for the persistence he demonstrates throughout the piece in never letting the weasel statements of Wal-Mart spokespeople go without challenge from his witnesses. And there's this, an old-school bit of journalistic gotcha that I wouldn't have thought a Timesman'd have in him:

Several employees said Wal-Mart began making sure that there was someone with a key [in case of emergency] seven nights a week at the Colorado Springs store and other stores starting Jan. 1, shortly after The New York Times began making inquiries about employees' being locked in.

Hoist on their own petard. Man, that's almost like muckracking.

posted by michael  5:55:42 PM  
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