John Kerry came up to West Virginia on Labor Day to give a speech. I've gone into the Kerry-Edwards 04 (KE04) headquarters and charmed a couple of the staff. So I got to volunteer for the speech.

I got a ride with a couple of children of the sixties who have gracefully made the transition to liberal suburban soccer moms. So we were driving an SUV, but at least there were a half-dozen of us carpooling in it. It was a painfully early hour in the day. I had to get up at four-thirty, something that did not please my roomates one little bit. Worst of all, no coffee.

We got to the site at six-fifteen. It was a Labor Day festival held every year by the local mine workers union. The sheriff's deputies doing security had never had a presidential candidate speak, so they were being a bit overzealous. They kept us there for twenty minutes, running us around to see if we could park or if we had clearance, calling KE04 HQ and generally being dumb hickville sheriffs. Meanwhile, every five minutes they'd let a large truck through without searching it, because these were vendors that came every year.

Yuck. Well, when we finally got in and met the volunteer coordinators, I got assigned to the press advance team. This is the important group, the people making sure that everything is set up for the traveling reporters that are accompanying the candidate to his speeches. What the press needs is the most important consideration in any campaign stop, and I soon discovered that every single other aspect of the campaign stop—the audience, the speakers, even the security arrangements—are of less importance than making sure the press has a good time.

We designed a special “chute” of fences around the event that would allow the reporters to travel from the buses to the main riser and cut risers (the two platforms the press watch the speech from) and then to the press tent where they eat expensive catering and file their stories. We put up dozens of signs to keep the reporters where they were supposed to be and strategically placed volunteers where we could make sure the press was kept in the right place. The general idea I got was that the reporters were to be treated in much the same way you would treat a drunken Gorbachev or very expensive cattle: the utmost respect must be given, but under no circumstances can they be allowed to exercise their own judgment.

The preparations took most of the morning. I was assigned to be a fax runner. A nearby daycare had been taken over as a staff holding room, and fax machine was to be monitored at all times for incoming press releases, which I would then make quite a few copies of and distribute to the press tent. Two other volunteers were on fax duty, and for them the day went something like this. First they tried to get the fax machine working. It was broken. They found another fax and plugged it in, to try and get it working. A friend in Charleston faxed them a test sheet and they informed the advance staff that the machine was working. KE04 staff in D.C. tried to fax us a press release. The fax wasn’t working. They found a third fax and plugged it in. The friend in Charleston faxed them another test sheet. They told the advance staff the fax was working. D.C. tried again. No luck. Finally, someone who worked at the daycare showed up and told them that the phone lines did have long distance service. So they had to find somewhere else. They got a working fax machine in a county library across the street. They got someone in Philly to send a test page and, lo and behold, a working fax machine. When they went to inform the advance staff, the event was over and everyone was cleaning up.

Fortunately, I extricated myself from that debacle very early on and attached myself to a member of the advance staff who greatly needed an assistant. So I spent most of my day running messages back and forth between people of importance. This is how I pissed off the secret service. There were several checkpoint where anyone without a clearance pin had to empty their pockets and get frisked and gone over with one of those wands. Because I was running messages between areas on either side of one checkpoint, I had to get searched dozens of times. One of the agents on Kerry’s detail knows me by name now. Well, he knows my by the nickname ‘Utah,’ anyway.

Unfortunately, I pissed off far more secret service agents then I got to like me. At one point, we had to move something called Soapbox™, a piece of wireless internet technology used by reporters to file their stories. There were some last minute changes in the plan (in fact, the entire day was pretty much nothing but last minute changes in the plan, assuming we had one in the first place) and I ended up driving a campaign car backwards through the motorcade, where I wasn’t cleared to be in the first place. The suits got tetchy.

“Why were you driving backwards?” one asked me. My response wasn’t all it could have been.

“Did I drive alright? I haven’t driven a car since January.”

At one point, I found out that part of the daycare center was going to be a staging area for the SWAT team. I decided to be considerate and left the following note:

“The SWAT team is using the next room. Please do not be alarmed when several heavily armed men barge through. This is normal, apparently.”

There was a last minute change in plans and Kerry ended up using the daycare center as a hole. A place to make phone calls, do a little work before moving on to the next stop. I like to think he read my note.

That, unfortunately, would be as close as I got to the candidate I was working for. I was a hundred feet away in the audience while he was up on the platform, but only at a couple of points when I was running from the press tent to the staff hold and back. From a hundred feet away, the only impression you can get is that he’s tall. (Fortunately, that may be enough. We all know the old chestnut about the taller candidate.)

While Kerry was giving his speech, I was in a nearby building watching the speech he was giving at the same time I was making photocopies of the speech he was giving to give to the reporters he was giving it to.

That’s probably a good metaphor for something.


Here I am watching Kerry on TV, when he was just outside the door...

Some of my old pictures are down. I'll try and get them back up, though it's not my number one priority.