On the night of the first presidential debate, in a cramped hotel room near Giants Stadium, three members of the Dole campaign's advance team mix a round of gin-and-Diet-Cokes and settle in to watch their candidate. The advancemen are tired, having worked 18-hour days for most of the week preparing for Dole's bus trip across New Jersey, and they stare intently as the opening statements begin. Soon, the advancemen begin to chortle, softly at first, then with gusto at every wearily familiar phrase that passes from the candidate's lips. Shaking with laughter at the senator's asides, they pound the arms of their chairs in enthusiasm. To the advancemen watching from the hotel room, Bob Dole is positively mopping up the opposition: Take that, Bill Clinton.
Bob Dole's advancemen may be the last of the true believers on the Republican presidential campaign. While just about everybody else involved in Dole '96, including the candidate himself, appears at times to have lost faith, many advancemen still believe victory is possible. That attitude is a symptom of the self-delusion that tends to infect political campaigns -- the ability that campaign staff have to talk themselves into believing what they have to believe to get up in the morning and go cheerfully to work. And from an advanceman's narrow perspective, the Dole campaign is succeeding: Crowds turn out at events, there are enough signs to go around, the music is upbeat, the rallies look good on television. Almost every appearance begins on time. The only thing missing is an inspiring candidate to put in front of the backdrop.
If it is true that a modern political campaign is little more than a theatrical presentation, then advancemen are its roadies, gaffers, and choreographers. They attend to the thousand details that make a successful political rally possible, from finding a suitable site to hiring contractors to build the stage to making certain the local cops get to pose with the candidate before he rolls off to yet another appearance. Most of all, it is the advancemen who attempt to orchestrate The Picture -- the footage or photograph that will end up defining the event for the rest of the country. Jeffrey Weiss, the Dole advanceman who prepared much of the candidate's recent trip through New Jersey, sums up his job without hesitation or embarrassment. "The Picture," he says, "is everything."
Attention to detail makes a good picture, and advancemen labor to let no detail pass unnoticed. Moments before Dole was scheduled to conduct a live television interview last week with the nascent Fox News Channel, an advanceman determined that a pile of books stacked spine-outward on a coffee table next to the candidate's chair might distract from the day's intended message. The volumes -- The Age of Delirium, Hazardous Duty, and The Making of a Catastrophe -- promptly disappeared, replaced by a Rush Limbaugh book. Likewise, Dole's advance team takes no chances with news photographers. From the moment the press buses open their doors in front of a rally, anyone with a camera is herded by campaign staffers to specially cordoned-off areas. If advancemen have choreographed the event well -- and under the direction of legendary Dole advance chief Jim Hooley, they usually have -- a photographer's every vantage will show Dole with the sun on his face and a campaign poster behind him. To ensure the candidate plays along, advancemen frequently place maskingtape markers on the ground in places where Dole will look best in photographs.
Pitted against the advanceman in his pursuit of The Picture are members of the plainclothes Secret Service detail. As a rule, Secret Service agents couldn't be less interested in how a candidate looks, only in his safety, and they make demands accordingly. For one recent rally, advancemen show up with a box of miniature American flags (items that, along with campaign signs, pompoms, foam fingers, and other political trinkets, are known in advance parlance as "chum") for spectators to wave as Dole speaks. An hour before the event begins, an agent offhandedly declares that the flags will not be allowed. His reasoning: "People could rip the flags off and throw the sticks." It's not clear who would do the throwing, since the crowd this day consists almost exclusively of middle-aged and elderly supporters, some in wheelchairs. Nor are the sticks themselves -- flimsy softwood dowels about the diameter of a pencil -- very threatening weapons. But no matter: The flags stay in their boxes.
Unreasonable directives like this -- and security officials on the campaign trail issue many of them every day -- have caused some campaign staffers to hypothesize that the Secret Service employs a Chief Paranoid, an edgy man in a basement office somewhere whose job it is to envision every way a presidential candidate could possibly be killed, maimed, or embarrassed. "If it was up to the Secret Service," says one staffer, "Dole would be traveling in an iron box with a slit to give speeches out of." As it is, advancemen do their best to accommodate the Secret Service. It's not easy, since, in addition to a tendency to paranoia, Secret Service agents are notorious lot being rude, even threatenmgly hostile, to just about anyone below the rank of the candidate himself. At an open-air event in New Jersey not long ago, one hulking agent in a crew cut screamed in the face of a 24-year-old Dole volunteer simply for parking a car incorrectly. "They think with their guns," says a longtime campaign aide.
The average advanceman can spend hours a day wrangling with Secret Service agents -- to their grief at times; it was a Secret Service demand that a fake fence remain unsecured that led to Dole's fall from the stage in Chico, Calif. -- but this is hardly the worst part of the job. The worst part of the job is escorting senior campaign staff to events. Secret Service agents may be suspicious and surly, but at least they have a clear purpose. In the Dole campaign, senior staff often do not. Many consider their presence on the campaign trail a nuisance and a distraction, even a bad omen. "As soon as a lot of senior staff and advisers started traveling with the campaign, we started going down in the polls," says one advanceman. "Is there a connection? You tell me."
With little to do, advisers often take to pestering advancemen with questions: When is Dole coming? Where can I find a phone? Where can I sit down? Anything to avoid appearing irrelevant. It doesn't always work. At a rally at a Toms River high school in New Jersey last week, a cluster of Dole advisers stand idly next to "Asphalt II," a converted tour bus outfitted with mobile office equipment. The bus, though freshly painted, has the feeling of a relic -- and indeed it is, having served the same function in campaigns past, including Bush '92 and Forbes '96. In front of the bus a line of teenage cheerleaders enthusiastically sway to the rhythm of "Play that Funky Music, White Boy," performed in this case by a mostly black ensemble. The advisers look as road-worn as the bus. There's Charlie Black, veteran of at least six presidential campaigns, many of them losing, sharing a cigarette with Margaret Tutwiler, late of the Bush administration. Beside them in gray suit and Raybans is Martin Anderson, a onetime Reagan administration economist who now resides at the Hoover Institution when he's not traveling with Dole in his capacity as . . . as what? Senior adviser?
That may be his official title, but Anderson doesn't look like he has been doing a lot of advising lately. For the moment, he makes like the rest of the Dole brain trust and stares glumly off into space. A rally the next day finds Anderson, wearing the same suit, doing much the same thing. As Dole speaks -- "It's your money! It's your money! It's your money!" he chants to the crowd, not very convincingly-Anderson lurks alone by the side of the stage fidgeting with a small instamatic camera, the kind tourists take to Disney World. He is trying to get a shot of Dole for the photo album back home, but Secret Service agents keep getting in the way. Anderson looks faintly sad, and in this he is no different from many on the campaign. "The atmosphere is funerary," admits one staff member. "You get the feeling that to say anything hopeful would be in poor taste."
Between jumpy Secret Service agents and morose senior staff, the Dole campaign is full of distractions for advancemen. The best among them seem able to shut off their peripheral vision and focus wholly on the immediate goal, The Picture. At a red light in midtown Manhattan last week, en route to a Dole fundraiser at a nearby hotel, advanceman Damon Moley found himself with car trouble. As a rush-hour crowd of pedestrians watched, acrid smoke began to billow from under the car's hood, while pints of unidentifiable green fluid leaked from the engine into the crosswalk. The light changed and the drivers trapped behind him honked furiously, but Moley simply abandoned his car in the intersection and casually walked the remaining blocks to the fund-raiser. It was hours before he bothered to call a tow truck.
Moley's single-mindedness is common among advancemen on the Dole campaign. Yet even the most skilled advance work cannot by itself create a successful political rally. On the first day of his bus trip through New Jersey, Dole was scheduled to appear at the state's memorial to Vietnam War dead. From an advanceman's point of view, the venue was perfect, an austerely handsome open amphitheater ringed with black granite. The weather was unusually pleasant for fall, providing ample light for the 30-odd assembled cameramen. And the planned program couldn't have been better: As Dole laid a wreath at the foot of a statue depicting a fallen serviceman, a lone bugler played "Taps." A row of wizened veterans, simultaneously noble and sad, stood at attention in the background, bright flags fluttering gently behind them. Next to Dole: Christie Whitman, the state's popular governor, and her husband, a decorated Vietnam veteran.
The Perfect Picture? The advancemen certainly did their job, and the program came off with few hitches. But Dole never actually said anything: No attack on Clinton's draft dodging or foreign policy, no vision for the future of the military, not even his own experiences in the Big One. Instead he walked slowly through the crowd, saying little. "How'd it go last night?" asked a reporter, referring to the debate. "Oh, it went all right," Dole replied. Apparently unable to bear Dole's lame response, Christie Whitman jumped in. "It went great! Great!" she shouted, sounding a lot like a protective mother speaking up for a meek child.
Even a war memorial makes for dull film footage after a while, and since Dole was mostly silent, the news crews were restless. When a Dole supporter, a loud man in his 50s who appeared drunk, yelled out that Clinton was a " creep and a lowlife," he was instantly swarmed with cameras. Reporters rushed in to record his opinions, and suddenly no one was paying attention to Dole. Somehow the campaign has overlooked the most basic law of the media: News coverage gravitates toward the most stimulating point. In this case, that point was not Bob Dole. Despite the pretty backdrop, he was boring.
These days, even the most optimistic advancemen may be losing confidence in Dole's ability as a candidate. "When you're 20 points down, it's not because of logistical problems," says one. Recently, one of the senior members of the advance team, a man with years of experience orchestrating The Picture, summed it up. "We keep putting Dole into Reaganesque settings," he said. " Only problem is, he's not Reagan."
By Tucker Carlson The Meadowlands, N.J.