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Subject: On the Clinton Plane<By David Maraniss=Washington Post Staff Writer=
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 04:35:15 EST
Message-ID: <55.1992Nov2.043515@AmeriCast.com>

On the Clinton Plane<By David Maraniss=Washington Post Staff
Writer=

 ABOARD THE CLINTON PLANE SOMEWHERE OVER THE BATTLEGROUND STATES,
Nov. 1>Now that November is here at last, now that everything has
been exhausted except the bottomless pit of campaign cliches, now
that flight attendants roam the aisle with the demeanor of Civil
War nurses administering to amputees ("Advil?  Bayer? Maalox?"
they inquire soothingly), now that the weary press posse would
gladly trade lean and bright leads for clean and white underwear,
now that Bill Clinton has lost his voice for the last time - now
finally it is obvious: Win or lose, the bubble will soon burst.

 "The bubble" is what surrounds the traveling road show of any
presidential campaign. It includes the candidate, the staff, the
press, the plane, the bus and all the electronic gear of the
20th-century hustle - after all, even in  the

  television era, someone's still got to get out there and do the
job - yet it is not so much a tangible phenomenon as a metaphysi-
cal one, a way of looking at things, at once cynical and cozy,
but mostly just weird. It is where you find both the real story
and yet an utterly false one, a speed-blurred picture of a very
large country.  The bubble is addictive yet debilitating. "Camp
Pain" is what those in the Clinton version have chosen to call
their particular experience. But as they count down the days and
hours to go, dog-tired and brain-numb, flu-struck, limping and,
in one case, partially paralyzed, they do so with a certain wist-
fulness. Because even though people inside the bubble often drive
each other nuts, they have lived side by side like a huge,
clamoring family - one that is about to break up. Forget the
stump speech talk about mustering the courage to change. Change
is coming on Election Day whatever the outcome, and its imminent
arrival is filling the bubble dwellers with feelings of anxiety
and fear as much as relief.



Clinton aide Paul Begala lamented as

 he was trudging across an airport tarmac yesterday that as much
as he misses his wife and newborn son, and as much as he wants
his boss to reach the Oval Office, he expects to free fall into a
deep depression Wednesday morning simply because a way of life he
has grown accustomed to will end.

 "That's if Clinton wins," Begala said. "If he loses, I won't be
depressed because I'll be dead - I'll shoot myself."

 Wendy Smith,

  Clinton's trip director, said she was depressed for two months
after the end of the 1988 Dukakis campaign and expects to suffer
again. "You don't spend this much time with people even in col-
lege," Smith said. "You're together almost 24 hours a day for a
year, and then you don't see them at all - it's separation
shock." There are anxieties of all sorts inside the bubble. CNN's
Gene Randall is worried about finding a place to live: He's gone
through the campaign as a fairly wealthy homeless person, lodging
in an endless string of hotel rooms.  USA Today's Adam Nagourney

  worries about how to cover the White House from his beloved
isle of Manhattan if Clinton wins: It is inconceivable that this
quick-witted New Yorker could reside anywhere else. Karen Ball

  of the Associated Press worries in her gently ironic way how
she will fill "the dramatic void" in her life.

Steve Cohen,

  the kid of Clinton's traveling staff, known affectionately as
"Scoop," sat outside an event in Pittsburgh the other day trying
to sort out his ambivalent feelings about the impending bubble
burst. It reminded him, he said, of his years as a camp counselor
when four days before the end the trunks would appear on the
front porch of the lodge. "First I'd get happy about the thought
of going home," he said, "and then I'd think about the reality of
leaving that special place and going back to real life and, I
don't know how to describe it, it was a kind of a funny mix of
sadness and loss."

Dogs' Days<

If a moment marked the beginning of the Death March this campaign
year, the political equivalent of trunks on the bunkhouse porch,
it might have come in Louisville Wednesday night when Larry King
asked Bill Clinton, "Aren't you whipped?" by the grueling pace,
and the Big Guy, as the press has come to call him, responded,
"No, I'm pumped!" As Clinton recited states still to visit - five
one day, eight or 10 another - and boasted that he only needed
four hours of sleep a day and could  afford to be tired when the
election was over, the press corps reacted in a fashion that has
become rather routine this year: by hissing and muttering at the
television monitors.

 Back in February, when his candidacy was almost out of the hunt,
Clinton vowed to stay tough until "the last dog dies." By Louis-
ville on the Wednesday of the final week, some of the dogs were
on their last legs.  CNN's Randall said when he arrived at an
arena  he thought was  the Meadowlands in New Jersey, he  won-
dered why all the speakers had Southern accents - then he real-
ized he was in Kentucky. That night ended at 1:45 a.m.  at a
hotel in downtown Toledo, where the 140-member press corps was
chewed out by a desk clerk for failing to form straight waiting
lines.

 As Susan Feeney of the Dallas Morning News waited she could not
help thinking about her fiance, Steve Hirsh, a producer for ABC
News, who was traveling in the other bubble with President Bush.
They communicate mostly by sky-page beepers,

and Hirsh had beeped her hours earlier, meaning that as usual he
and the regal presidential traveling party were resting comfort-
ably in some four-star hotel while she was still out there hack-
ing around with Clinton with miles to go before she slept. Lest
she feel too sorry for herself, however, he would be quick to
remind her that he had to arise at 4:30 to prepare for a spot on
the morning show.

 Nagourney reentered the bubble the next day in New Jersey after
dropping off for 12 hours to write a long story, and he came back
with the stunned look of a man who had just emerged from a year-
long coma. "It was terrible to realize how cut off from reality
we are on the plane," he said.  "When I got off the plane I had a
totally different perception of what was going on. It was scary."

 The bubble that night was at city hall in Jersey City, where
Clinton gave a speech on AIDS. The candidate was in one room
speaking, the press corps was in another, listening over a
loudspeaker.  Priscilla Painton

  of Time was on the floor, using her raincoat as a pillow, note-
book in her lap. Radio reporters carefully hooked their tape
recorders into the common sound box, while  daily print reporters
placed theirs at the foot of a giant loudspeaker as though making
votive offerings at a Druid shrine.

 And there sat Nagourney at a desk in the middle of the room,
rocking back and forth in his inimitable Jewish-prayer typing
style, transcribing Clinton's speech as it was being delivered,
the quiet tap-a-thwop-a-tic-a-pop-a-tap of his keyboard pounding
in rhythm with his bob and sway, his face aglow with the joy and
energy of being tuned into a great story. Even as the dogs are
dying, it is not all pain.

 On Friday the bubble moved to Pittsburgh and Susan Feeney got
what is known as a Mom-Op, which is traveling lingo for a chance
to see your mother. Theresa Kachinko was waiting for the youngest
of her five children in the lobby of the Pittsburgh Hilton, and
when she saw Susan moving toward her with her

 computer and note bag slung over her shoulder, she said what a
mother should say: "You're always so loaded down!"

 She brought her daughter flowers, and though the batteries on
Feeney's Toshiba laptop computer were low and needed to be
drained and recharged, the batteries in her peripatetic journal-
istic soul were recharged by the first hug from mother Kachinko
since June.

 Upstairs, in the hallway outside the press filing center, more
dogs were dying. Photo dogs this time, as the still photographers
are called. They were sprawled on the rug, lights out, literally
and figuratively. And there were eight more hours to go before
they would reach a bed at 3:30 in the morning in suburban Atlan-
ta.

The Big Blur<

Chuck and Bruce are never too tired to do their press-corps hus-
tle, and on Death March Saturday they had some more merchandise
to push. Chuck Stewart and Bruce Bernstein are the inseparable
sound-and-camera team for NBC News, two Miami-based network pros
who have refined the art of turning out quality work, having a
good time and making a little pocket change on the side.

 It was Chuck and Bruce who christened the Clinton bubble "Camp
Pain" and capitalized on their inspiration by marketing a line of
T-shirts and sweats, complete with a red-nosed caricature  of the
candidate on the back. No truer words were ever spoken on a cam-
paign plane than when Stewart uttered of his colleagues Friday
morning: "The press guys will buy anything."

 The camp lived up to its name late Saturday afternoon when the
bubble moved north from Atlanta to Iowa. It was a rainy, cold,
miserable afternoon, so lousy that Clinton, never at a loss for
words, ditched his speech and told everyone to go home so they
would not get sick. Of course he had been shaking hands with peo-
ple behind a security rope for an hour before that, with Nagour-
ney, as the designated pool reporter for the press corps, trail-
ing behind. His pool report was titled "The Rope Line From Elm
Street." It began:

 "The failed governor of a small state worked a quarter-mile-long
rope line, for about 45 minutes, on East 11th St. in Davenport -
actually, the historic village of East Davenport. It was lined
with quaint, nauseatingly picturesque storefronts (get me back to
Manhattan, please God) with names like: Nana's College and
Grandma's Marketplace. Clinton advance people said there were
10,000 people there. Right. This was without question the longest
rope line in the history of rope lines; it was renamed ROPE LINE
FROM HELL about halfway through when it started to rain."

 Nagourney typed out his pool report on the flight from Davenport
to Milwaukee. It was a bumpy flight, and the little guy from
Manhattan has a fear of flying, which he has worked feverishly to
overcome this year. Flying almost every day for nine months tends
to help, but one bad moment can push Nagourney deep into the
depths of phobia. In any case, his pool report, rated by his col-
leagues as the best of the year, came to an end with the words
"the plane is crashing and I want to get this done ..."

 The plane did not crash. The bubble moved on to Milwaukee, for a
town meeting, Clinton's favorite form of entertainment, and some
bowling and then a red-eye trip to Cincinnati for another
ragged-line check-in at another hotel in the middle of the night.

 And then it all started to blur: the bubble, the Death March,
Camp Pain, the Big Guy's high, soft, rasping, pleading voice
echoing from tape recorders in the darkened bus, the flashing
lights of the motorcades, Halloween masks, battleground states,
tracking polls, skipping Louisiana, going back to Texas,
Clinton's lucky, no he's smart, born with a horsehoe, where are
we going? thump in the plane, President Gore jokes, rope lines,
three more days, two more days, Dana Carvey, another rumor,
trickle down, Bozo the clown ...

 Wisconsin's up in the air, Karen lost her recorder, Lorraine
thinks we landed too fast, Walter Shapiro's

  vocabulary is down to 500 words, another dog dying, poor
Walter, oh Time, never on time, time is running out, what time is
it? it's time for us to go, not yet, not until 4,100 miles, not
until Philadelphia and Cleveland and Detroit and Paducah and St.
Louis and McAllen and Fort Worth and Albuquerque and Denver and,
and, and ... Little Rock.

 In a darkened hallway, somewhere in a battleground state, Cath-
leen Decker

  of the Los Angeles Times turned to her bubbled colleagues, the
Camp Painers, and muttered: "I wonder when the last time was when
we had it?"

 "Had what?" she was asked by two women colleagues, smirking at
the possibilities.

 "Our minds," she said.  02:47 11-02

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)