No more spin rooms? Say it ain't so!

The persuasion of postdebate spin rooms is going undercover.

By Jerry Lanson

from the October 2, 2007 edition

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Hanover, N.H. - Just past the intersection of I-89 and Route 120, a few miles southeast of where the Democratic presidential candidates were gathering to debate last Wednesday night, someone had built a two-story-high tower of campaign posters promoting the presidential nomination of front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On the steamy green of Dartmouth College, as a political coxswain of sorts urged them on, supporters of the New York senator chanted "Hil-la-ry, Hil-la-ry," easily outshouting representatives of her rivals.

The Clinton campaign ticked with Swiss-watch precision. Which is why it was somewhat surprising, but surely no accident, when the candidate shunned the postdebate "spin room" – that sticky, and some would say deceitful, space where political aides work to make their candidate appear the winner. Barack Obama, a distant second in a poll of New Hampshire voters released the same day, stayed away, too. And so did the No. 3 candidate, John Edwards.

Four years earlier, I had watched a post-debate crowd of reporters, photographers, and camera crews mob then-front-runner Howard Dean after a debate in Durham, N.H., piling on as though Mr. Dean were dead center in a rugby scrum.

This time, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, running in the fumes of Democratic polls and fundraising, waxed political for a handful of young reporters. Aides to candidates stood by stoically, holding signs to identify themselves in hopes a few journalists might approach.

It was an awfully muted affair, most striking for what wasn't going on.

I wondered: Is it possible that more than 25 years after Michael Deaver brought the modern era of spin to the Reagan White House, that this postdebate dance could soon join the steam engine, the Edsel, and the electric typewriter on the ash heap of American history? And would anyone but Washington politicos much care?

"It was once a novelty," muses Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist who has written widely on his state's primary. "My guess is it's becoming more of a relic, more of a ritual than a place to go for news."

Not every spinner, I should caution, is ready to call it quits. One, who fittingly insisted that I identify him as "an observer close to the campaign process" – a term that could include the shuttle-bus driver – predicted a spin room resurgence as the primaries approach. Dartmouth, he pointed out, is far from major media centers. The debate ended late, and, hey, it was still September.

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