When You’re on the Road to Victory, You Can Put On the Ritz

When Bob Dole and Patrick J. Buchanan go on the road in search of votes, it’s like watching the Ship of State race a raft from the Mariel boat lift. Like the Roadrunner taking on Wile E. Coyote. Quite literally, like the Ritz-Carlton versus, if you’re lucky, the Holiday Inn.

Dole the candidate flies aboard Leader’s Ship, a chartered 727 with a patriotic paint job: Stars and stripes on the tail, “Dole for President 1996” on the side. Traveling staffers number more than a dozen, and they will fly for 18 minutes to save driving 45.

The Dole plane offers free wine and abundant food, fruit baskets and crudites; individual cups of seedless grapes are sprinkled attractively with chips of ice so that no one campaigning with the Senate majority leader need suffer the discomfort of warm fruit.

Days now can start at around 11, while nights are spent in hotels where room service is generally 24-hour and, sometimes, macrobiotic to boot.

This is what it’s like when you’re wealthy and winning in the waning days of Primary ‘96, when your road show verges on the presidential, when you’ve finally acknowledged that you are now The Nominee.

And what if you’re not?

Well, then you board the Go-Pat-Go Express, which dumped its plane 11 days ago for lack of money and just limped into the Golden State for a high-pitch, last-ditch battle over the soul of the Republican Party.

The food? Seldom and largely served by Ronald McDonald. The digs? What’s it matter--you’ll be sleeping only 90 minutes a night anyway and generally hitting the road before dawn. Be glad these hotels don’t offer hourly rates, although that couldn’t hurt the diminishing bankbook of Buchanan’s hard-driving, low-flying guerrilla campaign.

And the scent?

Well, it ain’t victory.

For the shrinking entourage of reporters following Pat and his supporters--the passionate conservatives he affectionately calls “the peasants from over the hill”--clean laundry is luxury, rare and expensive.

Both Dole and Buchanan will be campaigning in California this weekend, the last big push of the primary season. Depending on who you listen to, Dole may have already sewn up the Republican nomination for president with the necessary 996 delegates. At the very least, Tuesday’s winner-take-all California contest should clinch it for the wary Kansan.

Not that he’s going around bragging these days. At his victory party here earlier this week, a fete filled with Coach bags and polished shoes convened to celebrate Tuesday’s sweep of four Midwestern primaries, most media outlets handed him the whole hog, crowning him the king of the Republican party.

Dole would barely accept the honor. “California will be the big one,” he told the cheering crowd. “It’ll take us over the top, way over the top in only one week.” More talk, more message, more chants of “Dole! Dole! Dole!” At long last, the laconic legislator spat it out, qualified but unmistakable: “I think it’s safe to say that now I will be the nominee.”

A recent trek through the chilly Midwest offered an early indication or two of Dole’s increasing comfort level with the idea of his impending victory. The well-choreographed and always stately pace of the Leader’s Ship slowed a little more. Campaign days, rarely grueling, started even later than usual.

And the candidate--with his reputation for few words, usually acerbic--began to warm up. He was funnier as the days went by, more on point, tougher on President Clinton and slowly, slowly dribbling out crumbs of insight into his darkest days--the 39 months of rehabilitation after a crippling injury in World War II.

Here he is on St. Patrick’s Day afternoon at an ethnic festival in suburban Chicago, listening to Slovenian accordions, watching young Croatian dancers twirl across a banquet-room floor, smiling and waving at heavy-set men clutching signs that boast of pride in hyphenated American lives: “Italian-Polish Americans for Dole.” “Romanian-Americans for Dole.”

Dole is a man who “defended America in World War II and almost gave the supreme sacrifice,” says Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar by way of introduction as he squires the candidate through this crucial election battleground.

Dole has an introduction of his own: Ovsanna Kelikian. “Mrs. Kelikian, come on up here,” he says, motioning to a steely-haired woman in a flowered dress. “Her husband operated on me seven times in Chicago a long, long time ago and never let me pay one dime. He was a good Armenian orthopedic surgeon. His son has followed in his footsteps. I came to Chicago as a young veteran and all the good doctors had left the hospital and I was looking for a miracle, and I found one in Dr. Kelikian.”

Talk of dark days and purple hearts, hospital rooms and recovery is part of the highly polished Bob Dole bio riff, a touching and increasingly important part of his current campaign persona. It plays great in the heartland and it starts like this:

“I grew up in Russell, Kan., and I’m very proud of it,” he tells a Lincoln Day luncheon in DePere, Wis. “It’s not very big, but it’s home. My father wore his overalls to work every day for 42 years and was proud of it. My mother sold sewing machines and vacuum cleaners. We grew up living in a basement apartment in Russell, Kan. We learned a lot about honesty and decency and integrity and responsibility and work. We learned how to work.”

He fast-forwards through high school and World War II and the Mountain Division, where he ends up getting shot a couple days after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945. FDR’s life ended on April 12; Bob Dole’s youth ended April 14.

And now he’s telling his audience about a trip last week to Battle Creek, Mich., a pilgrimage to the hospital where he healed all those years ago. “They took me up to the same room I was in 40 some years ago,” he says. “I remember precisely where I spent a little over two years of my life learning how to feed myself . . . learning how to walk, feed myself, go to the bathroom, things you don’t think about normally when you’re 19, 20 years of age.”

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The danger of highlighting your World War II sacrifice is that it reminds your listeners that you were born at a time when fast women were called flappers, when alcohol was illegal and cars were cranked by hand.

But sometimes on the campaign trail, your listeners beat you to it, reminding you that you are 72 years old and, if elected, you’d be the oldest person ever sworn in as a first-term president.

Not that they mean anything by it.

Consider the letter from an encouraging supporter read aloud at a Republican dinner in Milwaukee, a sort of awkward paean to experience, punctuated with Naval allusions: “Dear Sen. Dole: When it comes to electing our next president, we must hope that the electorate will pick the ship with the heaviest keel . . . the older wood.”

Dole may be letting the electorate closer; the press, however, is another story. His tight-lipped staff is reminiscent of the security team at a finer department store, deft at keeping customers close enough to see the merchandise but too far away to touch.

Not that the nation’s political reporters are enduring all that much hardship here on the road with the Dole campaign, which houses the press corps at the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City when the candidate is home and doing his day job.

Soft classical music plays in each bedroom. There’s an in-room fax and a two-line phone, complete with data port. There is a concierge here and a full gym. Dole’s press travel director calls at 9:45 p.m. one recent Friday to tell reporters of the day to come: Luggage should be in the graceful Ritz lobby no later than 9 a.m. At 10:30 a.m., the Leader’s Ship will take off for a swing through Wisconsin.

For reporters, this is civilization on the campaign trail. For the campaign staff, the price is rather high. One, for example, has been married but four months and hasn’t seen his bride in weeks.

His new wife “may have gotten used to it,” he jokes. “She may not want me back. To calm her down I told her to buy a house. Just keep it under a quarter of a million.”

After all, he says, “You can’t elect a president between 9 and 5.”

* Staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this report.