The day before Election Day

This article presents an analytical reconstruction of the day before Election Day on the Johnson for Congress Campaign. It uses an extended first-person narrative format to reconstruct the look, sound, and feel of politics-in-action. The article identifies three main dimensions along which the character and quality of political life are structured — politicos’ orientation towards being-known-in and connecting-with-the-world-out-there, the oppositional character of political life, and the practical challenge of inserting the politician’s self into the flow of daily events while maintaining control over that self — while bringing into relief the forms of know-how and skillful coping that those dimensions solicit from politicos.