Hillary's press corps "Privy Council"
Posted by mofembot Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:38:00 GMT
DailyKos’s Kagro X’s frontpage coverage about reporters assigned to cover the Clinton campaign in Austin being relegated to using a men’s room as their press headquarters inspired me to waste a dkos diary take on the persona of intrepid reporter Belle LaTrine, a stringer working on rotation for Reuters (in other words, a “roto-Reuter”). Here is her report.
All of the obvious jokes and puns had been swirling around for quite a while by the time I arrived at the Men’s Press Room in Austin. Everyone seemed wiped out, and none of the formerly-pampered reporters wanted to talk to me. I was finally able to persuade the no. 2 man, whom I’ll call “John,” to open up. He was clear about the terms, however: “One more joke about how my career has gone down the toilet, and I’m outta here.”
I promised to be good. I asked John about the most annoying aspects of working in a lavatory. The question seemed to unblock something inside, and he replied somewhat on the loud side, “It echoes in here (here here). I mean, it’s floor-to-ceiling tile (tile tile) and it really stinks (stinks stinks) trying to talk to people (people people) without going nuts (nuts nuts).”
He lowered his voice. “Another thing is, they didn’t tell the cleaning staff that we’d be in here. So every hour on the hour, these guys come in with mops and buckets and clean everything again. The fumes from the bleach and cleansers are awful. When I tried to stop one of them from spraying the sink nearest to me, she said, ‘No one told me about this, mister, and I’ll get fired if I don’t do my job. And by the way, you misspelled ‘constipated.’”
Asked if he thought the Clinton campaign might be negatively impacted by having put the press in the restroom, John pooh-poohed the idea, but admitted that Hillary’s press liaison was in deep doo-doo. “I mean, treating us like sh*t is not the way to get Hillary good press.” Did he have any idea why the decision was made? “No, but I’m sure there must be reasons to which we are not privy.”
As I looked around the commodious restroom-turned-press room, I was pretty bowled over about how nice the non-porcelain furniture seemed to be. John almost cheerfully agreed: “Yeah, they let us pick what we wanted after showing us a bunch of chairs and stool samples and stuff.” But when I asked John who the Head reporter was, he just gave me an ugly look. And then a cleaning lady came in and looked over John’s shoulder at his laptop screen. “You spelled ‘flatulence’ wrong,” she said.
It was clear that it was time for me to go, but I stalled a little.
“One last question: What happens when you need to take a leak?”
He flushed unhappily. “Just Depends®.”