December 7, 2023 Dispatch In the Spin Room: At the Republican Debate By Antonia Hitchens Photograph by Antonia Hitchens. Last night, the fourth Republican debate took place in Alabama; Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis took the stage. Immediately thereafter, news outlets started publishing “takeaways” and declaring winners. (Notably absent was the frontrunner in the polls, Donald Trump.) We were curious, in the lead-up to this debate, about what goes on behind the scenes of this staged media event, so we asked Antonia Hitchens, who’s been reporting on the presidential campaign, to write a dispatch from the “spin room,” where she spent one of the previous debates, in September, in Simi Valley. I drove from my apartment in LA to Simi Valley to attend the second Republican presidential debate, and when I arrived, at 1 P.M., the media lot was already so full that I had to park on grass, like at a music festival. Three women from a national newspaper got out of the rental car next to me, carrying their blazers over their arms to put on later, talking about trying the twenty-dollar smoothie at Erewhon while they were in town. I waited in line to board a bus that brought us to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a mission-style building on a mountaintop, overlooking the valley below. I followed streams of people from the bus into a huge white tent, like at a wedding, for journalists to file their stories. Read More