Clinton Ahead In Final Rush For Votes

Journalists are simple people: they need electric power, a functioning telephone line, constant feeding, occasional alcohol and where possible, something to write about. Sleep is optional. US politicians understand all that. They give them what they need. As Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton jetted into their home towns ahead of Tuesdays election, they trailed with them a retinue of sleep-deprived, over-fed, cellularly linked reporters. A couple of hundred of them.

Doles media entourage is the more ragged, after being deprived of sleep for 96 hours, a record for candidate-induced campaign torture. When he began his non-stop campaign marathon he took away their luggage and issued them with chic blue Dole bags filled with toothbrushes and deodorants, to help them combat campaign mouth and fight off home-stretch odour.

 

But at least he did not take away their power, their phone lines, or their food although the normal high quality of Dole campaign meals deteriorated by the hour.

For once, he provided a surfeit of what is known in the trade as colour midnight gaming pit-stops in Las Vegas, and trucking jaunts through rural Michigan. Something to write about, at last.

But where there is such familiarity the hard core of Doles press retinue has travelled with him almost constantly for six months contempt cannot be far away.

Most of the press started out liking and respecting the candidate; but relations frayed, as he began to blame them for poor perceptions of his camp aign. Many expressed fury at his ill-planned, 96-hour blitz. His daily outbursts, usually against the New York Times, won him no friends in the nether compartments of his aircraft, where the journalists were quartered. In the last hours of his campaign Dole took to visiting the back of the aircraft to prove that he was still alive. But before then, he had seldom ventured from his luxury first-class cabin, complete with separate exit.

Most journalists recognised immediately that this was no ordinary aircraft. The air hostesses constantly ply passengers with food; the fasten seat belt signs come on normally at take-off, but no-one is ever asked to sit down; no disembodied voice warns sternly of the need to turn off cellphones, so phone conversations go on throughout the flight. It is one of the few places in America where smoking is not a federal offence.

The hostesses did their best to serve up passable fast food in the final hours of the campaign. But the one thing they could not deliver was sleep. And after the longest, dreariest campaign in modern memory, the journalists -simple people that they are - can think of nothing else.