For reporters on the campaign trail, it’s hard to tell when one day ends and another begins.
As a temporary member of President Bush’s traveling press corps, Towson professor Martha Joynt Kumar slept four hours Friday night before boarding a bus to the airport at 4:30 a.m. By sunrise Saturday morning, the press plane was en route to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“One of the aspects of the campaign that you really come to appreciate, even after only a couple of days, is how arduous the travel is,” she said.
Kumar, a professor in Towson’s political science department, observes the relationship between the White House and the press on a daily basis from an office near the White House Briefing Room.
For several days last week, she observed the traveling press during the President’s visits to several swing states.
“My position is fairly unique,” she said Saturday. “I don’t know of anyone else who does what I do.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Kumar boarded a charter plane at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. By Saturday evening, she had traveled to five states and attended five “Victory 2004” rallies.
After an event in Orlando, Kumar stayed overnight in Florida, and attended an evening rally for John Kerry in Tampa Sunday night.
“It’s really been an interesting trip,” Kumar said. “I’ve talked to people about how they do their work, and how it varies from the White House.”
She met up with the press plane at 6 a.m. Friday at Andrews Air Force Base. By 7:45 a.m. the plane was en route to Manchester, New Hampshire.
“I think especially in these last days, it’s very difficult to cover the President,” Kumar said.
On Friday, Bush spoke at four campaign stops, but the traveling press was only present at two of the stops.
A small “travel pool” of reporters covered Bush’s speeches in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Toledo, Ohio on Friday. The events were open to the local press, but not the national press.
“Reporters are responsible for following everything the President does, but the logistics are such that you can’t follow every one of the stops that he has,” Kumar said.
News coverage of each rally varies – and the rallies themselves vary, too.
“The dynamic of the crowd can be quite different,” Kumar said.
On Friday, Bush held two campaign rallies at hockey rinks, first in Manchester, N.H., then in Columbus, Ohio.
At the first rally, “everything seemed to go wrong for them,” Kumar wrote in an e-mail Friday night. “[Red Sox pitcher] Curt Schilling backed out of his appearance and planned introduction of Bush. Protesters popped up with 386 TONS [signs].” Later a confetti cannon went off prematurely.
By contrast, the rally that evening in Columbus was “picture-perfect.” It was “extremely successful,” she wrote. “Bush’s speech went over well and was delivered more effectively than the one this morning.”
The trip was not Kumar’s first on the campaign trail. She traveled with candidate Gerald Ford in 1976, and Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984.
“Anytime [Ford] stopped and spoke” in 1976, “we were with him,” Kumar said.
In those days candidates did not travel by air as frequently, and the lack of wireless communication meant the pace of reporting was less rushed.
Today’s fast-paced news cycle demands constant filing by reporters.
“There’s not much down time, because people are writing throughout the day,” Kumar said.
For reporters, the cycle of plane to bus to rally is repeated several times a day.
About one hundred members of the media travel on the charter press plane.
Reporters have named the back of the plane Shantytown, and dressed it up with plastic flamingoes, balloons, and red white and blue pom poms, Kumar said.
Kumar studies presidential communications, press conferences and White House transitions, among other topics.
Last spring, in a course called White House Communications Operations, she interviewed Bush administration officials and members of the press corps about their roles. The course will be offered again next semester.
Kumar will fly to Cleveland, Ohio Monday for Kerry's final rally in the pivotal battleground state, before returning to Washington.
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