The Campaign Article That Never Was

Brian Huddleston, senior reference librarian at Loyola University College of Law Library in New Orleans, contacted me this morning to say, "I guess one useful thing about a blog is that you can publish stuff that are only half-formed ideas because the campaign staff of certain big politicians never return your calls." He was letting me know that he had posted to his blog an article (well, really a non-article) about the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain that he tried to write for American Libraries. Huddleston pitched the idea to me months ago, saying, the basic question he would like to answer was, "Who does research for presidential campaigns?" A quick literature search had confirmed that nothing much had been written on this topic. "The hook for the article would be a scene from the 1992 documentary The War Room," Huddleston said, "and if I could get a brief phone interview with someone in each campaign who did that sort of work, it would be a decent article." I loved the idea and thought readers would too. "But both campaigns blew me off," Huddleston finally told me, "preferring to only deal with more 'mainstream' and 'serious' media outlets like Blender magazine." Reading Huddleston's "The Research and Information Needs of Presidential Campaigns; or, The Article that was Never to be Published" is an interesting look at how our profession is regarded by those who run the presidential election campaigns.