Matt Bai (LA '90) is a Yankees fan. He is a Tufts alumnus, a husband and a father whose two-year-old son has his own head-to-toe Yankees uniform.
As a guest lecturer for EPIIC last week - just one of the many hats he wore when he visited campus last Thursday - this fact, and his corresponding displeasure at the Red Sox' resurgence in the playoffs, was made clear to the class before he mentioned a single one of his personal achievements or shared any facet of his impressive understanding of American politics.
Bai has just released his first book, "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics," and has a job writing political cover stories for the New York Times Magazine. But though many consider him to be among the nation's best political journalists, the class received an unconventional introduction to Bai's life as well as his job.
Over the past 10 years, Bai has made himself one of the nation's foremost political journalists by approaching his work with the same level of unconventionality: examining the people and the stories behind policy and political machinery.
Bai speaks with the humble confidence of a successful individual known more by his byline than by his face, and regularly breaks into self-deprecating laughter. He said he knew that he wanted to be a journalist since his days as a child in Trumbull, Conn.
"I didn't have a wealth of talents," he said. "I couldn't dance, or sing, or juggle. But I could write, and I always wanted to write."
Bai fell in love with Tufts on a cold winter day, and was admitted despite a failing grade in his senior year physics class that caused him to enter his freshman year on academic probation. He laughed as he recalled his fears of having his admission revoked.
Bai went on to become the editor-in-chief of the Tufts Observer and graduated with a degree in English.
After college, he spent three years as a speechwriter for UNICEF, one year of which was spent as Audrey Hepburn's personal speechwriter. After traveling to Liberia with the organization and publishing a written piece of journalism through a Tufts contact at the Dallas Morning News, he realized that journalism remained his passion.
Upon his return to the United States, he failed to get hired even as an obituary writer for the smallest of daily newspapers. He headed to graduate school, enrolling in the Columbia graduate program for journalism, where he was named Outstanding Student in Journalism for his class.
As a journalism student, he spent the year covering the Bronx, venturing through the dangerous neighborhoods and parks that had once adorned his walk to Yankee Stadium in search of the stories they might hold.
"That was a real time of exploration for me," he said, "I felt invincible, and I really wanted to test the boundaries because I was young."
He carried that attitude with him to a post-graduation internship at Newsweek, and then to a two-year stint as a writer for the Boston Globe. It was there that Bai gained an understanding of the delicate nature of facts, and the humility with which a journalist must approach them.
"You find that you think you know a lot of things that turn out not to be true because the strange truths of daily news are completely unpredictable and beyond the imaginings of a human being," he said.
"Too often, as an industry, we think we know everything. I try not to let that happen," he added.
Bai was drawn to political journalism after his friend Heather Barry, who is the associate director for Tufts' Institute for Global Leadership, gave him the book "What it Takes," Richard Ben Cramer's chronicle of the 1988 presidential nominations.
"It blew my mind that politics could be that interesting, and important, and engaging," Bai said. "The writing was so vibrant."
And so when Newsweek offered Bai a job as a national correspondent in 1997, he took it knowing that it would be his segue to political journalism. He was a member of the press corps in the 2000 presidential election, where he met his wife, a television producer.
After a brief stint at Rolling Stone, which eliminated its politics section the day after he was hired, the New York Times magazine offered to keep him busy. Bai had written several pieces for the magazine as a freelancer, and quickly took the offer.
After a year on the job, Bai became the magazine's main political writer. He said the job was a perfect fit for his writing.
"I care about the craft of writing, and about the craft of storytelling," he said. According to him, the magazine is "really a publication about ideas."
In combining these two ideologies, he gives readers stories that, he hopes, will leave them anything but bored.
"There's going to be a person you can invest in, and a narrative arc, but hopefully you're also going to understand something about policy and politics that you didn't understand, and you're going to hear some kind of argument," Bai said.
He said he is especially proud of the cover story on John Kerry that he wrote in this vein during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Unlike most political writers, Bai said he rarely reports directly from Capitol Hill. Instead, he writes three-dimensional portraits of politicians and presidential candidates, and examines political trends and policy effects that exert themselves over the whole country.
His foremost political interests lie in local politics, and he writes, he said, for readers like him - people who read novels in their spare time and check baseball scores rather than political blogs.
"I want [my readers] to understand politics in a way that they didn't before, and to start to think about it, and to talk about it, and to think about how things can change," he said. "We need a lot of change in this country."
After reporting from nearly every state in the country, Bai has witnessed some of the harsher realities of politics. But nonetheless, he said he's optimistic about the country's political landscape.
"I believe in the power of the American experiment. I think it's staggeringly innovative, and it's going to adapt like it has adapted before," he said. "We are not going to be the first successive generations in U.S. history to fail to adapt to the challenges of our time."
Bai said that by engaging and informing audiences, political journalism can play a role in that adaptation.
"People need to be engaged by politics, they need to be interested, they need to feel like they're in the know," he said. "This is vital to a democracy."
And to that end, Bai intends to stay active in journalism. Though he is currently promoting his book, he will continue to cover the 2008 presidential campaigns. Between stories he is already contemplating his next book and is expecting the birth of his second child - who, of course, will be a Yankees fan.
