Related story: Taking the race to the streets

By Liz Anderson
Journal Staff Writer

Sometimes politics is strategy. Sometimes it's hand-to-hand combat. But quite often, when you're lucky, it's pure theater.

Such was the case when Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Myrth York held an early-afternoon news conference on a Providence sidewalk to bash home the point of her brand-new attack ad against rival Don Carcieri.

The ad had begun airing on Friday night, and fellow Journal reporter Scott MacKay had done a nice job summing up its highlights in a Monday story. So my job on Monday was simply to appear at York's podium and hope (against hope) something fresh revealed itself.

York's team was there for the equivalent of a surgical strike, armed with a number of experts ready to rail about lead poisoning and make connections to the actions of Carcieri's former company, Cookson America.

Then Carcieri showed up. I wandered over to the white SUV where he was sitting while waiting for the news conference to begin. He was clearly taking the advertisement kind of personally, but holding his tongue until after York was done talking. His press secretary hovered, clutching a stack of rebuttal news releases tightly.

I figured York would do her thing, and then Carcieri would hop out of his car across the street and denounce her, separately, to the press.

But suddenly Democrat York was in full swing and there was her Republican rival, glaring at her from just feet away. Down the hill, their political support staff were engaged in skirmishes of their own. Richard Oster, Carcieri's former boss at Cookson, wandered by and was drawn into the audience.

My job was just to embrace and chronicle all this weirdness. York stuck to her script -- the profits-over-people schtick -- ignored Carcieri and beat feet out of there when she was done. Carcieri held court, sounding hurt and offended but also managing to generally answer the charges that had been leveled against him.

Back at the office, I called a couple of well-known political watchers to help me process the whole thing. Their comments gave context -- especially Mark Genest's observation that voters might see York as desperate and be reluctant to accept nasty stories about the affable Carcieri. As we know now, it proved true.

The writing came fairly easily. The scenes basically set themselves, and the back-and-forth provided ready rhythm. My only task was to resist getting bogged down in quotes; as a result, York's experts barely got mentioned.

Of course, my words were helped immensely by the photographs of Frieda Squires, who helped illustrate just how bizarre the whole thing was.