In My Time - Dick Cheney [150]
Lynne, Liz and Phil, Mary, granddaughter Kate, and my sister, Susan, all came up onstage as soon as the debate was done. Al and Ann Simpson were also there, along with our dear friends Dan and Gayle Cook from Dallas, John and Mary Kay Turner, and Dick and Maggie Scarlett from Jackson, and many others. There were lots of hugs all around. After a stop at a very enthusiastic victory rally where I was able to thank everyone who’d worked so hard on all the debate arrangements, we spent the rest of the evening eating takeout pizza, watching reruns of the debate, and enjoying the postdebate analysis—much of which suggested I’d won.
In the next three weeks, we hit most battleground states numerous times and even made it out to California for a bus tour the last weekend of the campaign. I campaigned with an Elvis impersonator in Reno, acquired a purple inflatable space alien in Roswell, New Mexico, and completely lost my train of thought in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when I looked out into the audience and saw Mary standing in the staff section wearing a large foam-rubber cheese head. I grew used to life on a campaign plane, though it did have its trials, and the ride hadn’t been without some bumps. Our campaign plane had oozed blue gunk from the latrines all over the luggage hold, been grounded in Maine when Austin forgot to pay the monthly lease, and been the site of more than a few apple and orange bowling contests as well as at least one competition that involved staff members sliding down the aisles on food trays during takeoff.
One characteristic of life aboard a chartered campaign plane is that no one pays much attention to the rules about buckling seat belts and stowing carry-on luggage. Lynne particularly appreciated this since her own campaign-issued cell phone was usually missing. Whenever we came in for a landing cell phones would slip out of purses and bags and it wasn’t unusual for one or two to wind up at our feet at the front of the plane. Lynne got used to picking up whichever phone was there and using it for the day. It worked for her, but caused real confusion among campaign staff, who thought they were calling the press secretary or the luggage advance guy and instead got Lynne on the phone.
In the final days of the campaign, with the race uncomfortably close, time became our most precious commodity, and all our attention was concentrated on blanketing the battleground states. We no longer had the luxury of driving from an airport to an event, and by late October nearly every event was a massive airport rally. These were great theater, directed and staged to achieve the maximum impact with each audience. The plane would land and taxi in slowly to a stop right in front of the hangar. Sometimes the advance team would have it timed so the hangar doors would open on cue, and we would walk from the plane into the hangar with the theme from Rocky or something equally triumphant blasting over the huge speakers. We did a lot of these events in a lot of different places. In order to avoid the obvious disaster, a staff member was assigned to tape a piece of paper just inside the airplane door, so as I disembarked I would see “Portland, Oregon” or “Everett, Washington” or “Las Vegas, Nevada” and know for sure where we had landed and where I could say I was so glad to be.
Even though the polls were still neck and neck, as the campaign entered the final stretch, I was feeling good about things. I sensed that we had the momentum. Then on Thursday, November 2, five days before the election, we were at a rally in Chicago when we learned a story was breaking that in Maine in 1976, Bush had been cited for driving