POKIN AROUND: Dutch journalist asks, then answers, questions
I wanted to know how he covered his rather large beat - the United States of America.
His paper, NRC Handelsblad, a daily with a circulation of 225,000, has two reporters here in the United States. The other covers business and the arts.What Tom does is rove our nation for stories. On July 1 he flew to Denver, rented a car and has been on the road since. He chose to focus on the Interstate 70 corridor.
"I am a man on my own," he says. "I have to figure out everything myself. The logistics are often more complicated than the writing itself."
In fact, he asks me where he should stay Wednesday night. (He had an 8 a.m. interview with Tina Meier the next day.) I suggest the Holiday Inn Select, near our office, on the other side of Interstate 70.
"Does it have high-speed Internet?" he asks.
I don't know. I only stay there during power outages caused by ice storms.
Tom needs high-speed to file his daily blog. To find it, Google "de race van 2008." It won't make much sense, unless you can read Dutch. But at least you can see what Tom looks like.
Tom, 46, chose the I-70 corridor in part because a university professor refers to it as "Main Street, USA," the unofficial dividing line between North and South in this country.
When Tom concludes his journey through the heartland next week, he will write a series of stories that, loosely, relate to the 2008 presidential campaign. And then he will be off to the national conventions: the Democrats in Denver Aug. 25-28 and the Republicans in Minneapolis-St. Paul Sept. 1-4.
Tom has a broader view of "politics" than you and I might have. In his eye, all kinds of issues - including Internet use, MySpace and the death of Megan Meier - carry the thread of politics.
"I see politics as part of society," he says. "I don't have a hard time fitting that into a series on the presidential campaigns."
When you think about it, he might be right. Gov. Matt Blunt was in O'Fallon June 30 to sign the state's new cyberspace harassment bill - a response to Megan's suicide and the MySpace hoax behind it.
But Tom doesn't focus on straightforward, breaking news stories.
"Everything is out there on the Web," he says. "People in the Netherlands can click on The New York Times."
Instead, he looks for harder-to-find nuggets. If he goes to an Obama or McCain stump speech, for example, he won't write a story on the candidate's words.
"Instead, I would look around and try to talk to some interesting people," he says.
"The Netherlands is a tiny country," he says. "People read newspapers, luckily enough. But it is a small country. The Web basically brings everything from the United States to the Netherlands.
"I try to go to whatever place a normal reader would never come to, like St. Peters, Missouri," he says.
Earlier Wednesday he had been in Blackwater, population 199, near Columbia, to talk to a woman who will shortly give birth to her third child.
"And she wants to do that with the help of a midwife," Tom says. He also interviewed the midwife.
The 2007 Missouri law that legalized midwifery was upheld in June by the state Supreme Court.
Midwifery is more common in the Netherlands, Tom says.
"My two kids were born with the help of the midwives," he says.
Earlier on his I-70 trip, Tom stopped in El Dorado, Kan., where Obama's grandfather grew up.
Also in Kansas, he interviewed two lesbian women who live in rural Kansas.
"It's part of my story on cultural wars," he says.
Tom chose to focus on the I-70 corridor instead of spending two weeks in Missouri.
Why Missouri?
He knows that Missouri is a bellwether state when it comes to U.S. presidential elections. Voters here have voted in favor of the winner of every presidential election since 1904 with one exception - 1956, when Missourians went for Democrat Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois, instead of winner Dwight Eisenhower.
On Wednesday he carried with him printouts from the Missouri chapter of the "Almanac of American Politics 2008," which some consider the bible of American politics.
"It's very good," Tom says. "Very basic. It is factual. You don't have to worry if it is inaccurate."
I ask him what he's learned on his reporter's journey. Is there wild enthusiasm for Obama?
"It was obvious in Iowa, South Carolina and in Virginia and Maryland - where people were extremely energized by him. But, you know, I don't know if it resonates when you look at the polls here in Missouri.
"I don't think Missouri is going to go for Obama," he says. And that means, if history holds, he won't win in November.
Tom first came to the United States in 2005 and his first story was Hurricane Katrina.
Tom speaks English, German, a little French and Dutch. His wife also writes for the paper. They have two children: Mats, 6, and Maria, 4. They rent a home in Washington, D.C., and own a home in the Netherlands.
"In two years we have to go back," he says. "There is no way I can stay longer."
That's why it's a struggle, he says, to make sure his daughter, an infant when the family came to the U.S., learns Dutch. She will return to the Dutch school system.
I walk him to his car in our parking lot, point out the Holiday Inn, and tell him I think he has a pretty sweet job that, by all appearances, he does very well.
