By Laura Umbrecht

When Matt Bai graduated from high school, he made a critical decision. It was the mid-80s, Wall Street was booming, and a generation of kids raised on “Top Gun” and “Bright Lights, Big City” was enrolling in law school or migrating to New York City in search of the most lucrative career. But journalism had an appeal to the young graduate that Wall Street did not. An inquisitive teenager, Bai had always been captivated by the worlds of politics and writing, by the subtlety and surprise of events. While his peers were choosing more stable routes, Bai followed his passion for the news. And he doesn’t regret it: reflecting on his career, Bai says, “I never wonder what else I might have been.”   

From reporting daily news at the Boston Globe to covering politics at the New York Times Magazine, his career has been a distinguished one. Bai’s work has been featured in the 2005 and 2006 editions of “America’s Best Political Writing,” an annual anthology published by PublicAffairs Books. His first book, “The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics”, published in 2007, was the only political book of the year to receive a New York TimesNotable Book Award.

These accomplishments illustrate the natural talents of a man suited to his trade: Born in 1968 in Trumbull, Conn., Bai has always had a reverent appreciation for the news.  He graduated from Tufts University in 1990 and spent three years as a speechwriter for the U.S. Committee for UNICEF before going on to receive his master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1994. Upon completing his degree, he received the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, an award reserved for the school’s top students. After a brief stint as a Newsweek intern, Bai started full time with the Boston Globe as a city desk reporter. “I was just enthralled with the paper,” he said. “It just made my heart skip. I think big city newspapers are just about the coolest, most breathtaking things in the world.”

Bai covered crime and breaking news in Boston, where he reported on murders, fires, freak accidents, and shootings. He quickly learned to detach himself from these tragedies. “Very rarely did it weigh on me at all,” he says. “That’s not real life, that’s the news.”

That experience, however, exposed Bai to the underbelly of America, a gritty interior transformed by the decline of big industry. Writing his master’s thesis in the South Bronx and reporting on crime in Boston brought him close to the edges of a city whose economic and demographic shifts have exacerbated the plight of the poor. “It informs everything I write,” Bai says. “Understanding the complex story of industrial decline in America is to understand the moment we’re living in.”
 
Bai returned to Newsweek in 1997 as a national correspondent, where he spent five years traveling the country and honing his craft. He earned a national reputation for his political writing, and the New York Times Magazine hired him in 2002 as a contributing writer for the magazine, notably covering national campaigns such as the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.  Known for his acute and unmitigated style that explores the complexity of politics and parties, Bai is one of America’s go-to political writers. An avid Yankees fan, Bai, 40, lives in Washington with his wife, Ellen, and two young children.

Bai discusses his craft in the following Question and Answer:

Q: What experiences inform the subjects you write about?
A: There was a housing project near where I lived in Bridgeport. It was called Father Panik Village—really aptly named. When you drove by Father Panik Village, you had to put your latches down, and speed through. And then we would take the train to New York. You would go through the Bronx and through Harlem, but you were never supposed to get out—everyone always told you never to get out at 125th Street. That was a dangerous place. And so I had a very clear sense, growing up, as I think most people in urban areas do, that there had been a real shift that left a lot of people poor and deprived of opportunity. But I also had this very human sense that government had failed in its efforts to do something about it. Father Panik Village was a failure. So was every major urban housing project I had ever seen. That’s not to say I wouldn’t have supported the idea at the time, but we need to admit that some things failed—and warehousing the poor was one of them. That experience left me with this real deep suspicion of doctrines. The Left believed in housing projects. The Right believed that everyone should help themselves. No one who was actually paying attention where I grew up could have thought that either of those in and of itself was a winning strategy.

Q: Do you think you’ve taken some of that perspective into the things that you write today?
A: It informs everything I write, and I think it’s very clear. The underpinning of a lot of my work is about economic transformation and generational change. The generation that came before mine—the baby boomers—failed to grasp those changes and failed to deal with them. And that’s an animating theme of my work, and why Barack Obama is a real interesting moment for me. Because I have long made the case that this previous generation of leaders is simply unable to recognize or deal with the challenges it was handed.

Q: Tell me about an experience as a reporter that has stuck with you.
A: I remember a murder outside of Boston. A nanny was killed, and the police spent days questioning the father of the family. He set a fire and he burned a bunch of photographs he had taken, and there was a presumption that he was guilty. I was pretty certain he committed the murder and so was everybody else. And while we didn’t write that, we obviously made it clear he was the chief suspect. It turned out he actually didn’t commit the murder. The reason that sticks with me is because I think if you do daily news for a while, there’s a humility that you learn. You cannot do daily news for any period of time without coming to understand in some visceral way that you cannot have all the answers to things you think you have the answers to. Sometimes, you think you understand events or motives. But you have to leave room for doubt because oftentimes events will prove you wrong. They’re stranger, less predictable and more bizarre than you could have imagined.

Q: Why did that stick with you?

A: Because it’s what I find missing in Washington, in journalism. My problem is with the New Republic, American Prospect, Weekly Standard school of journalism. There’s this whole class of mostly very young reporters who pontificate for a living—and the emergence of online journalism has made this more prevalent—and have never learned what it is to be wrong. They assume that to have a thought is to be right, and if someone proves it wrong they just move on. And I think that creates a more cynical, less trustworthy kind of journalism. I think readers pick up on that—the idea of an unearned self-certainty in the world. That’s why I think political journalists are much better journalists when they’ve covered something else—namely, the heartbreak of regular daily news. Because I think you need to learn what it is to not be omniscient.

Q: Do you think journalism has taken a turn for the worse with the “blogosphere” and the Internet or is this not necessarily a phenomenon of today?

A: I think it’s a very complicated moment. It’s engaging more people in different ways, it’s giving more people a voice, and it’s more interactive—all of that is great. But it’s also more confirmational in nature. We have a lot of journalists and commentators who hear the applause of what a group of people wants to hear, and it’s very tempting to keep telling that story over. You can go out and write a book and make money off it. So there are a lot of journalists out there who are abdicating their responsibilities by just telling people what they want to hear instead of telling them what’s true with greater complexity. Our job is to add complexity, it’s not to drain it away, right? So I think there’s good and bad in the current year. But I do have a sense of optimism—I think we get better overall. And I think this gets lost. I can’t tell you how many people told me, a couple of years ago when Iraq was really blowing up, that “this is the darkest hour of the American press. You led us into war, you have not told the truth,” and every where I went I heard about Judith Miller, and how “this is the worst thing the press has ever done.”

Q: But you don’t think so?
A: No, not really. There’s a long history in America of the press having difficulties with the competing demands of wartime and coverage. The sinking of the Maine in, whatever it was, 1898? That was a terrible debacle of the press. Vietnam was—except for a tiny handful of reporters—a very undistinguished period for the media, and in fact, the reporters we think of as the heroes of Vietnam didn’t emerge until they’d been writing for years that the government accounts weren’t true and nobody believed them! My wife’s family was locked up as potential traitors in internment camps for five years during World War II, while my father-in-law wracked up a couple of Purple Hearts fighting in Europe. Five years, and the American media said not a word about civil liberties for Japanese Americans. This is not actually some horrible turn on behalf of the media, this is a point in a long history of difficulty. Overall, I think this is a better media than it was in the so-called Golden Age, when we could lock away a hundred thousand Japanese American citizens and nobody gave a damn.  I think if there’s one crime committed over and over again in the dialogue around Washington—and I think the Internet has completely exacerbated this—it’s this self-absorbed idea that every moment we are living in is the worst, the most promising, the best, the most horrible. There’s a complete lack of historical consciousness in so much of our governship.

Q: What has the Internet done to exacerbate this lack of historical consciousness?
A: I think the Internet worsens it because everything is so fleeting. You can throw something up online, and you can throw up something different ten minutes later. The news cycle is down to fifteen-minute increments, so who can afford to think fifty years back? People have been very complimentary of our coverage and have talked about the perspective it brings to the magazine. But I’m not a historian—all I’m doing is thinking about where things fit in a larger context. You don’t have to have a PhD to do that, you just have to have some intellectual curiosity about how we got where we are. And that is almost completely lacking on the Internet. You would just think the world began in 1999.

Q: So as a political journalist, do you vote?
A: Yes. Absolutely. I do not understand people who think that a journalist should be required to relinquish civic responsibility—I fundamentally reject the notion that we are not part of the community life or that we do not have civic responsibility beyond our journalism. We do. Everyone does. And second, I just cannot fathom how the act of not voting is supposed to make you less biased. It’s actually kind of dishonest to not vote, and by not voting expect people to believe you have no opinion. The point isn’t your opinion, the point is what you do with it, what is your ability to work beyond it. Or the point is really to form your opinion based on a complex worldview that takes a lot of different facts into account rather than just a blind party loyalty. But if you show me a journalist with a blind party loyalty, I’ll show you a journalist who can’t really do his job effectively because that kind of reactionary thinking is just antithetical to the process of good journalism. Having opinions isn’t the problem; it’s how you arrive at your opinions and what you do with them that matters. I think people who say that they don’t vote have just not really thought this through.

Q: Do you ever find yourself injecting your political opinion into your journalism?
A: I do have opinions. Sometimes I’m agnostic, and sometimes my opinions are very strong. But I’m very secure about this, because I know that I’m an honest broker. I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat, I’m not ideologically aligned with any group – and that’s not out of journalistic responsibility. If someone wants to belong to a Party, that’s okay. For example, since John McCain picked Sarah Palin, I’ve been pretty critical of that decision and of her. I don’t think she knew enough to be the heir-apparent to the commander-in-chief. Worse yet, she showed a contempt for intellect and a contempt for accountability that I found as a journalist to be very offensive. I don’t have a problem sharing that opinion. First of all, I’m a magazine journalist, so my stories are full of my opinions. I don’t feel like I’m letting anyone down in that respect. And I wasn’t disturbed by Sarah Palin because I’m a Democrat and she offends my sense of what Democratic policy should look like. I was disturbed by Sarah Palin because she exhibited a fundamental disdain for values of the political process I think are very important.

Q: What role do you think that journalists should have in that debate, in providing that analysis of the qualification of the candidate?
A: It depends what we mean by journalist and what form of journalism they’re engaging in. If we’re talking about people covering Sarah Palin during the election, then I think they did exactly what they were supposed to do. They presented the information as they found it and made a very strong stand for her to answer questions she didn’t want to answer. And she exhibited herself to be less than ready for the presidency. I’ve noticed that journalists go out of their way to quote Sarah Palin at length. With most politicians, reporters paraphrase sentences that don’t make sense so that it doesn’t confuse the reader. With Sarah Palin, there’s this tendency to have these big block quotes that make no grammatical or intellectual sense—it’s almost like they’re showcasing how incomprehensible she is. But I don’t really have a problem with it, because I think that’s part of our function as public watchdogs. This person came rather close to being the Vice President of the United States, and she seems very frequently incapable of expressing a thought in an intelligible fashion. And it may be that voters would decide that that’s not a critical trait in a president, and I’m fine with that. I’m of the school of thought that there’s no wrong vote. But it’s absolutely our responsibility to make that clear.

Q: How do you approach writing a piece?
A: I’m pretty neurotic and overly organized, so I don’t believe in stream of consciousness or sudden inspiration. I think you either get control of information or information gets control of you. I catalogue and highlight my notes pretty meticulously. I’ll make a legal pad full of lists when I’m writing a piece. And I try to organize it as specifically as I can. When I sit down and I write at a keyboard I only want to think about words, I don’t want to think about what comes next. If you’re thinking on the page, you’ve got a problem. When I find myself thinking on the page, I stop and regroup, because then I’m just flailing around. I also, by the way, don’t drink and write. I have no romance about the process. This isn’t Hemingway. I don’t think you, like, down a shot of Whiskey and the words come any easier. I think romance is just a killer for writers. Writing is like a business, you’ve got to be businesslike about it.

Q: Do you have a specific place you like to work?

A: During the week I work at home in my office. I don’t wander around—I’m pretty disciplined about that. But I hate working at my desk at night or on the weekends. There’s something about it, there’s like a dividing line there that I can’t really cross. So if I’m writing on the weekends – which I do less and less now with children – I write here in our living room. I do not write in coffee shops, I do not write in cars. The other day I was driving to the studio with Adam Nagourney, the chief political correspondent for the Times, and he was writing his daily piece in the car. That amazed me. We’re stopping and starting in traffic, and he’s banging out punctuation. I don’t do that.            

Q: What does an ordinary day look like for you?

A: It depends on if I’m writing or not. I have meetings most days, so I go out a lot. But if I’m writing I generally have sugar in the house. I come out in the afternoon and walk around, munching on candy and thinking. (I like those yogurt-covered pretzels). If I’m in a general reporting mode, I’ll sit at my desk most of the day. Frequently I’ll come out of my office and all the lights are off and it’s dark because I haven’t come out all day. I spend a lot of time in that office.

Q: When you’re going through your notes, how do you decide what material stays and what you have to leave out?
A: I try to be very ruthless about weeding out information because I don’t want to give myself extra work to do. Over-reporting and over-writing is just a fundamental part of the process if you do it well. So I always write more than I need in a piece. If I’m 2,000 words over and I can’t find a way to cut it on my first draft, then I know I’m writing a good piece. I know I’m writing long and I know it’s wasting my time, but I have to see the whole thing in front of me before I make cuts. Because cutting isn’t just about the lines that don’t work as well, cutting is also about the fact every story has a proportion. You may have great stuff in one part of a story, but it just isn’t a big enough part of the piece to warrant all of those quotes. So part of what I need to do is to see 10,000 words in front of me in order to get it down to 8,500. I need to see which parts of the piece are taking up more room than they deserve, and I can only do that when I’m done.

Q: Your book, “The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics”, was published in paperback recently. How was writing a book different from writing a magazine article?

A: It’s awful. Every time you expand your format, there’s a whole new range of challenges. I started out doing newspaper, and then I did news weekly, which is a little bit different, and then I did feature magazine, and then I moved to books. And every step along the way you have to adjust to bigger space. Writing a book was like the process of writing ten or fifteen cover stories, and figuring out how all that fits together. And I’d like to think the first book was a learning process. I thought it came out pretty well—the New York Times gave it the notable book of the year award, it was the only political book of the year to get that—but there are things I would like to do differently. I’m never thrilled with anything I do, but I think next time I’ll do better. In other words, I hope I didn’t write my best book my first time out. I know I didn’t write my best magazine story the first time out—I hope I still haven’t written my best magazine story. So I think you have to keep getting comfortable with new formats.

Q: Did you like it?

A: I did. I like the writing part the best. Writing never scares me very much. If I have the material and I’ve seen the events myself, then I can bring it alive for people. The writing was really intense—I wrote it in six months—but I felt like I had a command of it. What was stressful for me was going to bed every night wondering if I’d have enough to write with. The gathering of material is always more stressful for me than the presentation of it. So I enjoyed most of the book. Except the constant angst of whether I would get the content I needed to write it.
(Interviewed, edited and condensed by Laura Umbrecht)

Matt’s Top Five Tips on Covering Politics in Today’s America: 

1. Suspect doctrines.

“The Left believed in housing projects. The Right believed that everyone should help     themselves. No one who was actually paying attention where I grew up could have thought that either of those in and of itself was a winning strategy.”

2. Be a reporter first.

“I think political journalists are much better journalists when they’ve covered something else—namely, the heartbreak of regular daily news. Because I think you need to learn what it is to not be omniscient.”

3. Leave your party at home.

“If you show me a journalist with a blind party loyalty, I’ll show you a journalist who can’t really do his job effectively, because that kind of reactionary thinking is just antithetical to the process of good journalism.”

4. Use your head.

“Having the opinion isn’t the crime. The crime is in having an unthinking, uncritical opinion. Or so injecting your opinion into your reporting that you’re unable to hear what people are telling you. Those are journalistic sins. The act of being human – weighing facts and arriving at conclusions about the world – is not antithetical to journalism; it’s called having a brain.”

5. Be the public watchdog.

“Our job is to add complexity; it’s not to drain it away.”