See How They Run : Why Do Candidates Dash Madly Across the Map? Blame It on a Special Breed Called the Scheduler

By GARRY ABRAMS

Sept. 29, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Speaking to high school students in the Northern California town of Concord the other day, Republican presidential candidate George Bush joked that he was “glad to be here in Connecticut.”

Bush was explaining how he had flubbed the date for the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he probably wasn’t just kidding. Especially when he admitted to the students, “You get a little tired from time to time.”

In the previous three days, Bush had hopscotched across the country from his base in Washington, campaigning in Union City, N.J., Alton, Ill., Chicago, Jefferson City, Mo., Los Angeles, Fresno and San Francisco. From Concord, he was scheduled to stump at a steel mill in Columbus, Ohio, the next day at what would be 5:30 a.m. California time.

Welcome to the presidential campaign trail, a road paved with mind-bending itineraries.

Harried Jugglers

On this highway, invisible traffic cops calibrate every stop against the fickleness of public opinion and the finicky eye of television. Harried people far from the spotlight, they juggle polls, local politicians, rich supporters, pressure groups, camera angles, campaign strategy and aircraft capabilities in the all-out effort to land their man in the White House.

They are the schedule makers, the people who plan the candidates’ time, the ones who can construct four-state, three-time-zone days and then say it all makes sense.

“It’s a big country. . . . There is pressure to be everywhere at once, and you can’t.” Mindy Lubber, head of scheduling for Democratic ticket leader Michael Dukakis, says this as if she might have tried a time or two.

“There’s rhyme and reason to all this,” she added. “You choose your states based on where you ought to be.”

Commented Bush campaign spokeswoman Sheila Tate: “It’s always easy to say yes to one more fund-raiser or one more photo opportunity with 37 supporters.”

Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster with an opinion research firm in Washington, echoed Tate and Lubber. “There are an infinite number of demands (on a campaign) and the question is, where do you schedule them?” he said, half-seriously. “. . .You work on a 30-day schedule and you’re making changes until the last five minutes.”

According to veterans of campaign time wars, the twin imperatives of political scheduling are: Go where the polls say an appearance by the candidate can make a difference. Make it look good on television.

“We are doing some polling daily,” said Robert Teeter, the Bush campaign pollster who meets regularly with Bush’s top managers to help draw up the vice president’s schedule. “I think I am it, largely, from a strategic standpoint. I say we’ve got to go to this state or that state.”

Polls are “the only quasi-objective data a scheduler has to go on,” said Eliot Cutler, a veteran Democratic scheduler who worked for presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and Walter Mondale.

“What you’re playing for is television,” said Michael Berman, who helped schedule Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale and is now working with the Dukakis campaign. The “creativity” of scheduling, he said, is in finding “the visual setting that most plays into what you’re saying.”

That’s why Dukakis and Bush delivered speeches on drugs and crime at the Los Angeles Police Academy, a perfect stage to give a candidate a law-and-order veneer.

The same goes for Bush’s trip to a New Jersey flag factory last week, a vivid red-white-and-blue backdrop for his patriotic theme. If the picture looks good enough, it doesn’t really matter whether the audience hears the candidate.

“They’re always seeing the picture even if they’re talking about something else,” Berman said.

One sign of television’s power is that candidates these days don’t just visit cities. They campaign in “media markets”--multiple urban clusters that often sprawl across state lines but are linked by common television channels.

Said Hart: “If you go into Illinois, you’re guaranteed that you’re going to be the lead on the (local) evening news.” He added: “Your big burst will be for 24 hours and you probably get some lingering effects for a week.”

Both candidates geared down to a virtual halt last week as they prepared for Sunday’s debate, the mega-television event of the campaign so far. But the headline ink was barely dry Monday morning before the candidates were off again. Dukakis headed for Ohio, New Jersey and Illinois while Bush worked Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio and Illinois.

Before the full flowering of television’s dominance--around 1968--candidates hit as many as five cities a day with an event or two in each town. While a 1988 campaign day may involve multiple events, it usually is keyed around the single event--or theme--designed for television.

Relatively Easy Schedules

As a result, Bush and Dukakis lead relatively sedate lives for presidential candidates. Their campaign days average 12 to 14 hours, instead of 18 or 20. They frequently spend nights and weekends at their homes in Washington and Brookline, Mass.

But in the final days before Nov. 8, the tempo may well quicken as the candidates rush to places where the outcome is in doubt.

“If (public opinion) doesn’t firm up, you’re going to see candidates in 20 places in the last four days,” pollster Hart predicted.

A presidential campaign boils down, very roughly, to about 80 days for campaigning with perhaps four events a day, or a total of “320 units,” Hart said.

Where to Use Them?

“Do you use them with the groups who scream the loudest or with your strategic targets?” he asked, noting that a large electoral state like California might get 10% of a candidate’s time, or 32 units.

The front line of campaign scheduling, despite clear-cut objectives and rules-of-thumb that seem to impose order on chaos, is a labyrinthine exercise in protocol and timing.

Consider Dukakis’ recent trip to Southern California.

There were decisions to be made about “who rides in the car (with Dukakis)” and who could be squeezed in for a brief private conversation with the Democratic standard bearer, a campaign worker, who asked not to be identified, said.

Minute Details Included

Scheduling considerations even included “who is the person who notifies the people who get notified” that they will have time with the candidate, the worker explained. Schedulers also made sure Dukakis had time to read briefing papers before every event, papers studded with local lore such as the rivalry between Garfield High School and Roosevelt High School, where Dukakis made an appearance.

“You estimate as carefully as you can the minutes it’s going to take to drive from one place to another, the time it takes to board an airplane,” the Dukakis worker said. (Minute-by-minute itineraries are the fine print of any political campaign. When he visited Fresno for part of a day last month, Bush’s itinerary reportedly covered 25 pages.)

Indeed, one of the most frequent phrases on any campaign schedule is “wheels up,” meaning the exact time--to the minute--the campaign plane is supposed to be airborne, provided it isn’t bumped by a truck or in need of repairs, as has happened frequently this year.

Time aloft is precious, for work and privacy. Bush usually has breakfast on Air Force 2. He also gives four or five airborne interviews a week, makes phone calls and autographs note cards to hand out at the next stops, Tate said.

The candidates and their entourages, in fact, spend so much time in the air that their bodies and minds sometimes rebel. Dukakis has complained of back pain caused by countless hours of sitting at high altitude. The thrifty New Englander’s campaign plane, a 20-year-old 737-200 jet with few amenities, is so loathed by reporters that it has been nicknamed “Sky Pig.”

Nonetheless, jet travel has made possible the crazy days and nights of presidential campaigning--and the grand schemes of those back in campaign headquarters.

Not in All States

On the other hand, nobody tries to campaign in all 50 states as Richard Nixon did in 1960. If there is a tribal memory among schedulers, it is that of Nixon wasting precious time traveling to Hawaii and Alaska when he could have been stumping in Illinois, which went for John F. Kennedy and cost Nixon the election.

(Alaska, land of few voters, fewer roads and great distances, is a dangerous place to campaign. Two workers for a gubernatorial candidate were killed in 1986 when their floatplane went down. The husband of another gubernatorial candidate was killed in a 1968 crash. U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was injured in a crash that killed his wife 10 years ago. And Rep. Nick Begich, campaigning for reelection, was killed in a 1972 crash, along with Rep. Hale Boggs of Louisiana, who had gone north to support his colleague.)

So far this fall, Dan Quayle, the Republican vice presidential candidate, is the apparent leader in the number of states visited. As of last week, he had been in 32.

Over Miles Uncounted

Nobody seems to be keeping count of how far the presidential candidates--survivors of the multi-state primary season--have traveled, but George Bush logged 96,000 miles a decade ago just testing the waters for his first White House try in 1980. Four years ago, Bush racked up more than 35,000 miles campaigning for President Reagan.

Sometimes a candidate can’t spend too much time in a state.

In 1976, when Mondale was President Jimmy Carter’s running mate, Democratic scheduler Cutler said he was convinced that “we were going to win or lose the election in Ohio.” Based on his analysis, Cutler proposed that Mondale spend 65% of the last two weeks of the campaign in Ohio.

It was an idea that raised eyebrows above hairlines, Cutler recalled. But he “went into a sort of a fit and screamed and yelled and said I’d walk” if not.

Mondale Did It Anyway

So Mondale spent a lot of time in Ohio, although he had his doubts.

“I would have him in Cleveland one day and in Cleveland again three days later,” Cutler said. “He (Mondale) would look at you like you were nuts. . . . He didn’t understand it.”

Carter and Mondale won Ohio by about 8,000 votes, a cliffhanger margin that could have been determined by the assault on the Buckeye State, Cutler said.

Strategy aside, almost everybody in the scheduling business agrees that what schedulers do most often is say no.

Cutler remembers turning down requests from people who thought “if we didn’t have Mondale to a bean supper in East Cupcake, we’d lose the nomination.”

Joseph Cerrell, a Los Angeles political consultant who scheduled California appearances by Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and John Glenn, said: “People are always trying to insert something (into the schedule). They tell you, ‘I only need five minutes.’ ” Well, forget it, Cerrell advised. “There is no such thing as five minutes.”

Given the complexities of modern campaigning, “everything is a production,” he said.

Those riding herd on a campaign calendar share a fear--that they haven’t said no enough, that they will give their candidate such a case of fatigue that he really doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing.

“When you’re tired, that’s when you make mistakes,” the Bush campaign’s Tate said.

“One false statement 24 hours before the election and Bingo,” Berman said.

It also is simply an act of kindness not to turn a candidate into a zombie, some say.

“We’re very definitely aware that this person is only human,” the Dukakis worker said, noting that in California the candidate spent a night in San Diego--rather than going on to Orange County--in order to get a little more rest.

An Exhausted Humphrey

Cerrell, who is chairman of the American and international associations of political consultants, recalled that after Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in 1968, Humphrey, a frenetic campaigner, looked back on his overstuffed days with disbelief. According to Cerrell, Humphrey put it this way: “There were days in the campaign that I not only didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know who I was.”

Among schedulers, there’s general agreement that when a politician moves into the presidential arena, the logistics of campaigning increase at a nightmare rate.

Dukakis scheduler Lubber referred fondly to the good old days of the primaries when scheduling meant putting her man and a few aides on a small airplane. Now it’s two jets and 150 people--including the press--and motorcades at almost every touchdown, she said. Since June the Dukakis scheduling staff has grown from 10 to about 40 with more than 250 others hired to handle press and advance travel.

And while the job of filling in the blanks of a candidate’s schedule may seem rather pedestrian, it can involve passion.

Cutler remembers another tumultuous argument with Mondale, this one on the telephone. When the conversation ended, the candidate was still adamant and Cutler was still mad. To cool off, Cutler left his room to get a cup of coffee at the hotel’s restaurant. Preoccupied with how he was going to change Mondale’s mind, he walked through a plate glass door.

“I was in the hospital most of the day getting stitched up,” he recalled with a laugh.

Nine Days on the Campaign Trail

September 12

Bush: Union City, NJ; Alton, IL; Chicago, IL

Dukakis:

Philadelphia, PA, Cincinnati, OH; Chicago, IL.

September 13

Bush: Chicago; Jefferson City, Mo and Los Angeles.

Dukakis:

Chicago; Sterling Heights, Mich. and Washington, DC

September, 14

Bush: Fresno and San Francisco.