Advance

"Advance" is the most fun and most fraught job in presidential politics. Small teams of advance people create the presidential campaign events you see in the media - the rallies, town hall meetings, factory tours, round tables, town walks. Importantly, they ensure the national media's ability to amplify to the public those images and the message the campaign is sending.

Imagine being tasked with producing a 30,000-person rally in a town you've never seen before - finding a site, creating the design, visuals, logistics, staging, crowd building, media access, local participation, VIP's, public access - ensuring a seamless experience for everyone involved, and having three days to do it. Then, the fun part, managing the entire thing as it unfolds, successfully or not, with the participation and judgement of the next President of the United States and the national media.

Then imagine doing that every four or five days for months.

Theodore White, in his seminal book The Making of the President 1960, described advance people as "practitioners of one of the most complicated skills in American politics." A good advance person must combine in himself or herself "the qualities of a circus tout, a carnival organizer, an accomplished diplomat and a quarter-master general."

This memoir-in-essays lets you peek behind the curtain of the least known yet most public part of presidential politics. I take you back to preparations for the Carter-Mondale general election of 1976 and some of my first experiences as a nervous young advance man.Then I recount the saga of a dear friend, an advance woman who I assigned to do her first lead advance for the vice president.

I share with you the greatest event in presidential campaign history - an event with all of the elements: An above-average candidate, (Obama), the most opportune timing, (Labor Day, '08), incredible historic significance, (Detroit), exquisite symbolism, (Cadillac Square), compelling visuals, the biggest crowd ever, and Aretha Franklin. And it didn't happen. Miss Franklin happened, and the candidate showed up, sort of, but none of the rest of it happened. Soul crushing.

Finally, I tell the tale of my brief but magical foray into the quixotic presidential campaign of a notoriously irritable senator from the Northeast, culminating in a cantankerous curmudgeon vs.curmudgeon expression of perspectives. It was the first time in forty years of doing advance that I was kicked-out of my own rally by a candidate, or anyone.

No violence (thank goodness), no sex (darn it), no one gets trashed (too much), it's all about the journey.