Campaign Coffee

Matt Vizer, Boston Globe
See his photo essay from campaign 2012

Reporting from political campaigns always involves coffee shops, because coffee houses have been gathering places to talk about public affairs for five hundred years. People also talk about politics in bars, of course, but the conversations in coffee shops can be easier to follow. Rarely does campaign reporting focus on the coffee itself. An exception was Melissa Block's odd comments about the preference of Virginia Representative Tom Periello for good coffee.

It turns out the Boston Globe political reporter Matt Vizer is a lover of good coffee shops who used his campaign travels to good advantage. Wherever the campaigns took him -- in the United States or abroad -- he would duck out to explore the local, independent cafes. Now that the campaign is over, he has written a brief retrospective on his cafe visits, complete with a nice photo essay. I even learned of a new shop in Boston from his reporting!