"Get me a latte and a Howard Dean quote, please"....kind of cute article from Ohio.

[madfloridian]

An accidental interview with notes on the back of an envelope.

A latte and a quote

Get me a latte and a Howard Dean quote, please

The head of the national Democratic party was in town yesterday, as you may have read in today's Enquirer.

But did you know the story behind the story? Read it on Gregory Korte's blog.
posted by Carl Weiser at 1/11/2007 03:24:00 PM

http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/footnotes/default.asp

Editors always counsel reporters to tell a story like they were telling it to their mothers. Alas, the story I filed for today's paper missed all the elements that people seemed really curious about: How did you bump into Howard Dean? Who was he with? And what kind of coffee was he drinking?

Carl Weiser, the paper's public affairs editor, was off Wednesday and wanted to know what I kept out of the report. An out-of-town writer friend e-mailed to say, "Did you really just run into him at the coffeeshop? Weren't you tempted to include that in the story?" And co-worker complained to me today that she couldn't find the story in the paper. She was looking for a headline that said, "Howard Dean Spotted at Downtown Starbucks," not "Gov. Fletcher a Key Target of Democrats."

So here's the part of the story I would tell my mother:

I had seen Dean from across the street earlier in the day, getting out of a rental car with Tennessee plates. But I wasn't sure it was him until I walked into the Fourth and Vine Starbucks and saw him talking to John King, a national correspondent for CNN who also just happened to be in town to get reaction from Cincinnati to Bush's speech on Iraq. Dean had high praise for King's interviews with parents of Lima Company Marines killed in Iraq, which aired earlier in the day.

I borrowed Dean's pen, which was laying on top of a USA Today Sudoku puzzle. ("I'm addicted to these things," he said.) I took notes on the back of an envelope. He agreed to talk on the record.

One interesting part...Dean had not heard about Hackett's incident.

Dean hadn't heard of it, but picked up a copy of the Enquirer and read the first paragraph or so of the story. Dean suggested that in some parts of the country, including Cincinnati, chasing down a couple of possible vandals with a rifle wouldn't necessarily be a liability.

I get the impression the reporters were surprised to see a Democratic leader just walking around Cincinnati. I wrote some about this yesterday, but did not have all this background. I think it's interesting.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/918