CAMPAIGN ’96 : Now, It’s New Hampshire’s Turn for Quadrennial Crush

The line from the Hertz counter stretched to the baggage carousel at Manchester International Airport.

Hertz’s Mike Sullivan, shipped up from Boston to help rental agents here deal with the quadrennial crush, stood behind the counter rustling papers and muttering a sort of manic mantra: “Every four years. Every four years.”

In the space of a few hours, Sullivan and his colleagues would rent out 140 cars, many, many multiples of their normal load. Eleven hundred miles away, more than 800 filthy, trash-filled cars would come back to the tiny rental lot on this single working day at Iowa’s biggest airport.

This is not your normal Tuesday, but the day that the campaign and media horde hits the road for the first en masse trip of the electoral season, as the hub of the national political universe shifts east--at least for a week.

Like a giant hourglass, Iowa empties as New Hampshire fills. As the politicians move across America, the reporters follow.

The Hawkeye State’s caucuses are over; the Granite State primary is a week away. And a stampede of Type-A personalities is trying to catch the next act in American political theater. Bags over their shoulders and under their eyes, these travelers are unaccustomed to waiting and in a big hurry.

Check out the Sun Country charter flight from Des Moines, arranged by the Republican Party of Iowa to ship the nation’s sleep-deprived political reporters on to New Hampshire. At gate A5 at 8:30 a.m., beefy television crews heft video cameras. There are enough pagers, laptop computers and cellular phones to fill a mid-sized appliance store.

“Now boarding rows 14 to 34,” the flight attendant intones, as all 180 passengers rise and head for the plane. “I can’t believe they’re boarding by rows,” mutters one. “This is a press charter. I’m gonna make like she called my number and see if that works.” It doesn’t.

Inside the plane is worse. “I asked for the emergency row, and they were off by one row,” sniffs one particularly stuffy oxford-cloth shirt. “And now the people in the emergency row won’t move.”

A glare from the airline employee: “They won’t move, because they were assigned those seats. We have to all act like adults and just sit down now.”

The flight takes off, the safety instructions are ignored and the talk begins in this planeful of pushiness and prognostication about GOP candidates Bob Dole, Steve Forbes, and Patrick J. Buchanan:

* This is gonna be a nasty week for Dole.

* I was hoping for a stroke or an indictment and I didn’t care who had what. But then Forbes made this for us and everyone else.

* This is statistically insignificant, but Buchanan got 2 percentage points more among women than men.

The plane lands in Manchester. Its passengers file out. Nearly 200 journalists walk past a 1 p.m. press conference by Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar. The event has been planned for precisely this time and place to attract the freshly arrived press corps. Its members do not stop. Only three television cameras--in place before the plane arrive--are trained on the presidential candidate. Other cameras, lenses capped, trail by, and scores more pour out of the baggage carousel firmly packed.

What is left behind in empty Iowa? A lot of quiet. The special concierge desk at the Marriott Hotel is gone. The leases on candidates’ campaign offices are expiring. The 801 Steak & Chop House is again closed on Sundays and political science professor Steffen Schmidt’s phone has cooled off considerably.

Just a few hours before, Iowa State University’s Schmidt was briefing reporters from Scandinavia, breakfasting with a Tokyo newspaper reporter, filming a live stand-up for Dutch TV.

After a night of official commentary, bourbon and 7-Up, Schmidt wrapped up his weekly radio talk show, “Dr. Politics,” with a Tuesday morning post-mortem on the Iowa caucuses. Then he resumed his normal life.

“It was the most intense week or 10 days of my professional career,” he said. “We’re used to reverting to the tranquil, backwater, comfortable, low-key place we normally are.”

At the downtown Marriott Hotel, formerly home to hundreds of journalists, scores of political operatives and several Republican candidates registered under assumed names, the lobby was empty on Tuesday. The doubled crew of round-the-clock switchboard operators has disbanded, and the Skywalk bar is back to normal hours.

And how were the journalists as guests?

“I wouldn’t say rude,” said Gina Demona, who works at the Marriott’s front desk. “They needed things, and they needed to have it then.”

Times staff writers Henry Chu and Nancy Hill-Holtzman contributed to this story from Des Moines.