The Advance Man

Game day. Jeffrey Weiss has his surveillance kit. The cell phone goes in his pocket, the pager on his right hip, the radio transmitter on his left hip, a wire running up his back to an earpiece and another down his right sleeve to his wrist microphone.

“This is Weiss, go,” he keeps telling his wrist.

It’s a Tuesday morning in New Jersey, and at this point the Bob Dole advance man has been on the road 61 consecutive days. The closest thing he has to a home is his pager; instead of a mailing address, he has an 800 number. He’s pumped. Doesn’t care about the polls. Doesn’t even think about losing.

“We’re swinging. We’re still swinging. The fight’s still going on. Nobody’s giving up out here at all.”

Somewhere in Washington he has a home, an apartment, but he was never there and had to draft his sister to pay his bills for him.

A girlfriend? Had one. Got hosed.

“The girlfriend got rid of me somewhere on the road. It was after I spent 43 days straight on the road in Iowa.”

Couldn’t blame her. He had barely even talked to her over the phone. Even then it wasn’t really what you’d call a conversation. An advance man doesn’t converse. He doesn’t “chat.” He makes contacts, orders supplies, checks routes and times, touches base with headquarters. Any phone call lasting more than a minute is interminable.

“People don’t understand that.”

One day he came home from the road, finally, and she lowered the boom. Broke his heart?

“Sure.”

But the schedule had him flying out 18 hours later. Had to go back on the road. Had to keep moving. On Monday he worked rallies in San Diego and Anaheim. That’s the business. That’s advance.

Here’s a passage from the 1971 book “The Advance Man” (Morrow), by Jeff Greenfield and Jerry Bruno, who did advance for the Kennedys: “I think sometimes it’s what fighting a war or playing a pro football game is like: You’ve got one chance to win votes in this town at this time. If you make one slip, one mistake, it can ruin a day, a week, of campaigning; it can make enough difference to turn an election, and if you want to get really dramatic about it, it can determine who leads this country.”

Advance is everything. A running back goes nowhere without blockers, and the same is true for a politician. Every time you turn on the evening news and see a politician giving a stump speech, or flipping hot cakes in a diner, or driving a tank, or hurling an ax in a lumberjack outfit, or pulling some other sort of visually grabby campaign stunt that makes the politician look like a dynamic yet down-to-earth human being instead of a megalomaniac, you are looking at the end product of the invisible art of advance.

An experienced advance team will parachute into a town three or four days before an event and, working like demons, create a political organization so elaborate and sophisticated it will appear to have been in the works for three or four months--all this so that the candidate will look good on television for three or four seconds.

Good advance is when the crowd is so thick it brings to mind one of those soccer stadium tragedies. The advance team knows: If you got a thousand people, you hold the event in a hall that fits 750; if you have 40 people you hold it in a living room; a dozen people, you start looking for a phone booth.

Good advance work: When Dole flew into San Diego for the Republican National Convention, there was a stunning aerial shot of his plane swooping low over the water, taken from a helicopter overhead. When Elizabeth Dole’s microphone failed during her big convention moment, there was a spare handy, several in fact--backup sound is straight out of Advance 101.

Bad advance: In 1984 Walter Mondale showed up one day at a factory at 5:30 in the morning to shake hands as the shifts changed. “No one came,” remembers Michael Berman, who oversaw the Mondale advance teams. It seems they had the wrong factory gate. A groggy national press corps is prone to viciousness in such circumstances.

The ultimate nightmare: Chico, Calif. The name will live forever in advance mythology. A short ceremonial railing hadn’t been bolted down to the stage on Sept. 18, and Dole leaned on it as he shook hands with the crowd. He dived 4 1/2 feet, headfirst, his fall broken by photographers. Keith Nahigian, director of advance for Dole, says he’s never quite figured out how the accident happened, but says the buck ultimately stops with his shop. The job of the advance team is to think of everything that might go wrong. “It was our fault, certainly, for having a rail that’s not a rail.”

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Advance used to be a guy thing; now there are lots of women doing it too. And in the old days the advance man landed in a city and worked autonomously. Now the headquarters beeps the advance person constantly; faxes fly; everyone carries a laptop computer to download and upload schedules, lists of names, invoices.

Some things never change, though. Shoes. An advance person wants dry, comfortable feet, and powerful shoes that can stomp through crowds, plowing the way like cow catchers on a locomotive. (Jim King, a legendary Democratic advance man and now the head of the federal Office of Personnel Management, mastered the technique of linking arms with two other advance people and walking backward, stooped over, ramming people with his rear end as the candidate glided along and reached over his back and shook hands.)

Another constant: over-planning. Redundancy. The presumption of possible disaster. Nothing can be left to chance or luck.

An advance man has to make sure the little American flags passed out at a rally aren’t stamped “Made in Taiwan.” The wheels-up party is another tradition lovingly nurtured. When an event is over, the advance team goes back to the hotel bar, the party beginning as soon as the candidate is “wheels-up” at the airport.

“You just have a blow-out drunk party to talk about how great you were,” says Chris Doherty, a Washington lawyer and longtime advance man for Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Doherty has the key characteristic of an advance man: intensity. Doherty thinks nothing of calling total strangers in an unfamiliar town at 2 a.m. to round up volunteers for a dawn rally.

“You have to be both frantic on the inside and calm on the outside,” Doherty says. “You never let up until wheels-up.”

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If Dole wins, Weiss might get a job in the White House. If Dole loses he’s unemployed. He doesn’t think about Dole losing, though. He thinks about the details--the motorcade, the hotel, the sites, the crowds, the food, everything from where the bathroom is to which local official will get a handshake to what camera angle the media have to how long it takes to drive from one site to another.

Details. Does the sun reflect blindingly off a building at precisely the hour the candidate will be on the podium? Is there a backup site in case of rain? (An advance person often carries a heavy-duty garbage bag folded up in one pocket for use as an emergency poncho.) Will a volunteer actually work, or turn out to be just a clutcher? (A clutcher is someone who wants to glom onto the candidate.)

Protesters and hecklers are always a problem. You need people in the crowd ready to block nasty signs with their own banners. Jim King once advanced Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, when rioting had started in cities across the country. Instead of a stage, King used a flatbed truck for Kennedy’s speech, with a driver standing a few feet away, keys in the ignition. Any trouble, they’d just slowly roll away.

This summer at the Democratic convention, Ted Kennedy spoke at the Human Rights Campaign rally and some antiabortion folks sneaked in and caused a disruption--a woman shouted, “What about the babies?” and a man got onstage and grabbed the mike and started to talk about abortion, all while the cameras were rolling.

Doherty, Kennedy’s advance man, jumped onstage and wrestled with the protester, but couldn’t move him, until finally Kennedy himself came up, grabbed the mike--which instantly enervated the intruder.

“Yes, you have every right to say what you want to say, but we have every right not to listen,” Doherty remembers Kennedy saying. The crowd cheered. Afterward the senator ribbed Doherty mercilessly, said Doherty was supposed to be the A-team, the big strong advance man, didn’t see it coming.

“I had to save the day!” Kennedy crowed. The advance man always gets the blame.

But the politicians know good advance from bad advance. In Doherty’s office is a picture of Ted, John and Robert Kennedy, signed by Ted: “To Chris: The one person I’d always share a foxhole with.”