Jim Rutenberg is a political reporter for The New York Times who has covered presidential elections since 2004. He recently gave a lecture at Binghamton about the 2012 Presidential election and Pipe Dream sat down with him to discuss what it’s like to write politics on the campaign trail.

Pipe Dream: What is it like being on the campaign trail as a journalist? What kinds of relationships do you form with the people that you’re writing about, whether it be candidates or staff?

Jim Rutenberg: It’s interesting. On some level, you get to know each other really well, and you spend a lot of time with each other at the bar after work. Even if you don’t drink, that’s where everyone gathers.It’s weird, because we’re not friends at the end of the day; we’re a source and a reporter, but you can’t help it, we all get to know each other and we’re all humans. The interesting thing about it, and people say this about sports writers, but if you write something really horrible about them, you need to face them the next day, so you better be able to stand by it. If I’m in my office, they might be mad, but I don’t have to hear it directly, because a lot of the time these guys just don’t call you, and you find out that they’re mad after the fact. So to face them the next morning is pretty intense. I think that sports writers have a similar deal, but that part is really interesting.

PD: How did the campaigns differ in how they interacted with you?

Rutenberg: On the road they’re the same, but institutionally they’re quite different. With the Obama campaign, I could talk to the campaign manager any time I wanted, and I don’t think it was unique to The Times; I think it was that way with a bunch of the bigger publications, and TV people and Internet people. I would talk to Stephanie Cutter all the time, I would talk to Jim Messina all the time, I would talk to David Axelrod whenever I wanted. With the Romney campaign, I had enough people I could talk to at the time that it was okay, but sometimes I would have to beg to talk to Matt Rhodes, and he usually wouldn’t talk to me, he was their campaign manager. Their communications director never called me back. Ever. Same with their senior communications director Eric Fehrnstrom; it was so hard to get these guys to even engage with us. I think it was to their detriment, because in 2004, the Bush campaign was great with us, and talked to us all the time. The Kerry campaign was more standoffish and guarded and they didn’t trust us. I think that may be because when you’re running for reelection, you have The White House that can deal with some of the more thornier things, and the campaign might be a little freer to deal with us, so that could be one thing. The Romney campaign was feeling completely under siege; they were building the plane while they were trying to fly it, so I have to cut them a break there. There would come a time when their own big supporters would get annoyed and talk to us, and try to bring it back to him and say “why aren’t you talking to the press more? You’re not winning the communications battle,” and I think that hurt them too.

PD: What was your personal schedule like on the campaign trail?

Rutenberg: It depended on the point in the campaign, but there were times where I must have worked 80 percent of weekends and often 17 or 18 hours a day. So it was pretty hard. You’d kind of, on a big story night, get off deadline at 11:00 or 12:00, try to catch a late dinner, maybe if the bar is still open you’ll go see the campaign guys, sleep for a few hours and get up and get on top of the news or blog. So it was pretty grueling. I’m 43, so I’m still young enough to do it, but maybe only one more cycle, and the next one will be harder. It’s non-stop, seven days a week, and even if you aren’t working on a weekend, which is rare, you have to be completely plugged in and watching everything to see if you need to jump in. Summer period, when things slow down in June and July, life can be a little more tenable. The hardest parts are conventions into election day and primaries. It’s a lot of work.

PD: You talked a little bit about Super PACs, and how they didn’t come into play in this election the way most people thought they would. What was the role of Super PACs and how did it differ from your expectations?

Rutenberg: I guess I thought they would move the needle more on the Republican side. Now that I’m investigative, I have a different hat on then I did during the campaign, but it still matters because they spent all this money on behalf of the Republicans, who they can now go to the hill and try to lobby for whatever interests they have, which matters more than the effect that they had on the election, from where I sit right now. But their effect was pretty negligible, and I think some of it has to do with the fact that they are limited in what they can do. We’ve learned that they can only attack. When Romney wasn’t doing positive ads, they weren’t in a position to do positive ads; they don’t have access to the candidate. I think a lot of money got wasted. I thought, and a lot of us thought, that it was going to kill them. And what is really amazing, is that they did it. For all the money they had, Obama as a candidate got a lot more bang for his buck. If you’re a candidate and you buy your air-time earlier, you get these huge discounts. So the actual dollar amounts didn’t matter as much as how many spots they got on the air. So that was huge. I think that a lot of these billionaires are rethinking it for next time. They’re having all these analyses done so that they don’t make the same mistakes.

PD: What’s the biggest difference for you between being an investigative and a political reporter?

Rutenberg: It’s a totally different lifestyle. There’s so much more adrenaline doing politics everyday and there’s more immediate gratification. We like being on the front page period. So you can get a story on the front page that in a non-election year wouldn’t make it past page A-15, but you’re just glad to be on the front. It’s exciting, you’re in the middle of the story. For investigative, you have to sublimate your ego a little bit, like you’re going to go away for a little bit and you’re going to dig. It may not be immediate gratification; you might work on something for three months and it ends up not being like you thought it was going to be and the story doesn’t work or somebody else does it. But it’s so much more rewarding work in a deep way. If you get the story, a year later it’s something that people are going to remember and you’re going to be really proud of. You try and do every political story in a way that people will remember too. Investigative is a bit of a slower grind, but a bigger pay off, and to me it’s the highest calling of our work, although politics is fun too.

PD: What’s the competition like when you’re trying to break a story?

Rutenberg: It’s pretty fierce right now. I feel like it was worse in a way when you had the [Wall Street] Journal at full force. I think The Journal is still one of our biggest and most deadly competitors, but The Journal was even more competitive, I think, before Murdoch. The Washington Post, similarly used to be very competitive, you used to wake up every morning worried about them. I still worry about them, but their entire political team went to Politico, so The Post is in sort of a rebuilding phase I think right now, and then you have all these blogs to worry about. So day to day, the competition is crazy, there’s so much of it everywhere. The more competition the better. The LA Times, for instance, got kind of written off by people, and they had some amazing stories last year. For some reason, after all the trouble their company went through, their stories didn’t get as much play, so there was some stuff you just don’t realize they did. They’re great, and I think that they’ll be big again once they get their sea legs back. But it’s [competition] changed. I think it’s fallen off in some ways, and gotten worse on a daily, hourly basis.

PD: What is it like when you get breaking news? Can you describe the process a little bit?

Rutenberg: Can I tell it as a story? We were in South Carolina for the primary there, and Jon Huntsman had said in New Hampshire that he was going to roll on through. He had staked everything on New Hampshire and he didn’t do well there, so the question was, would he drop out? He said, “Absolutely not, on to South Carolina.” So we had all flown into South Carolina, and we were getting in on a Sunday night, and I get an “in” from a source that he’s going to drop out and it’s going to be competitive. And while we get it, there’s a Romney table in the back of the restaurant, all his senior advisers. And he’s certainly told Romney, because we were also told that he’s going to endorse him. So luckily there were two of us, so I started to just type it up on my iPhone, because it’s like 9:00 at night and we have to get it into the edition. [David] Zeleny went and started pigeon-holding the Romney guys, who wouldn’t say anything. My favorite quote was like “This steak is delicious!”, but we got it confirmed by someone closer to Huntsman, so we had two sources and we got it onto the front page and scooped everybody with it. So that’s the way, sometimes, that it works. Other times, as something breaks, you can bang your head against the wall and never find. Like when they said it would be [Paul] Ryan, they said it broke at 11:07. What broke was a rumor, and we couldn’t get it fully confirmed through our last deadline. That was calling everyone I could possibly think of, calling people at one in the morning, getting people’s home numbers through computer programs we have, pissing people off, calling, calling, calling, and we got it close enough that we really leaned into it the next day. So when he was picked, our readers really weren’t surprised, because in our story we said he was “likely to” be picked, but we didn’t have it fully nailed. Sometimes you’ll think a source owes you, and they give you nothing. Other times it’s the man or woman you least expect that gives you the information. So you never know, but its rare that someone will help you if they aren’t doing it for a reason.

PD: How do you think the GOP is going to recover from this last election cycle, and where do you think it’s going to go?

Rutenberg: They’ve been doing a lot of these analyses to reevaluate their take on social issues and guns, but certain things are principled stances of the party that they can’t change, nor should they. So they can’t bend in some ways. They do need to do a better job of outreach to Latinos, so taking immigration off the table would be a big help. I really think it’s going to be one great candidate that’s going to bring it all together, and I think that person is out there. The Democrats have been in this same wilderness, the Republicans have been in this wilderness before, so I think it’ll come together. Some of the stuff in the studies will matter, for instance an immigration reform bill, if the far right of the party doesn’t further alienate Latinos. It’s really going to be charismatic, smart leadership.

PD: You mentioned that the Obama campaign used technology far better than the Romney campaign did. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Rutenberg: I think that they took the most sophisticated corporate data-mining techniques, combined it with behavioral marketing psychology, learned as much as they could, and then innovated and used it for their own purposes. What they did was learn everything they possibly could about every single voter that they cared about, which was several million. They learned what they cared about, what they watched on TV, where they went on the Internet, who their friends were, where their friends were leaning, if their friends were also people to care about and then they put it into this giant database and used it for the traditional grass roots efforts, and they really kicked ass with it. Everything came in exactly how they predicted it would, and that never happens. Even a winning campaign can’t say that. So they really broke all kinds of new ground.