The Reporter Who Made Us Love Politics—or Tried

One was his hilarious, mordant debut Washington Monthly piece—the one that convinced Charlie Peters to hire him. This story was about how close he had come in that congressional primary, and what he had learned from actually being a candidate, something practically no other “political analysts” have done. Sample, with the background that “Stempien” is the opponent who edged him out:

At the Monroe County Fair I encountered a mother and her four- year-old son, happily holding aloft a red “Stempien To Congress” balloon.

Discreetly ignoring the balloon, I introduced myself as a candidate for Congress. The boy looked up, pointed to the balloon and asked, “Is that yours?” As I shook my head “no,” the little boy let go of the string of his red, helium-filled balloon and said, “I like you better.”

The other was Walter’s wonderful 2004 book, One-Car Caravan, about what politics is like in the early stages of a primary cycle—before the first votes are cast, before contenders and pretenders are sorted out, and while the eager, earnest candidates are face-to-face with voters and a handful of the press. I have always thought that this book deserves a place in the campaign canon alongside better-known works like Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes or Timothy Crouse’s Boys on the Bus. Or even the Theodore White genre-creating Making of the President series.

What distinguishes Walter’s voice, in this book and so many other places, is his bighearted but non-sappy love—for the candidates and how hard they are trying, for the process with all its absurdities and defects, for the electorate (most of them) as they try to figure out the right path, for the press with all its foibles, for the whole operating-level panorama of American democracy. For America itself.