As Hillary Clinton's Challenger 600 jet streaks west across Iowa toward the city of Council Bluffs, Justin Schall, her staffer on the scene, trades his gray T-shirt, Red Sox hat, and jeans for a dark suit, the battle dress uniform of a presidential advance man. The 34-year-old Schall—a veteran of John Kerry's 2004 campaign—is about to lead the Democratic front-runner to meet the next 1,000 voters on her two-year trek toward the White House. As a nomadic warrior for one of the Oval Office hopefuls, Schall has been shaping this Iowa stop day and night—working the politics, designing the event, walking through security details with the Secret Service—since landing here from San Francisco four days ago. In advance parlance, it's Game Day. Advance Rule No. 1: On Game Day, details left to chance will turn ugly. Just ask Bob Dole, who in 1996 craned over a railing onstage in Chico, California, and upheld the law of gravity, planting his face in a well of cameramen. The next day's headlines interred his campaign in grave metaphor.
The shoddily built stage. The cantankerous protester. The dead microphone. These snafus strike fear in every advance man. Schall keeps fear at bay with one more lap around his site—today, the Iowa School for the Deaf—and dashes to the airport to greet his candidate, her political aspirations resting fleetingly in his hands. From buildup to aftermath, the event is a textbook in the basic rules of campaign stagecraft. Advance Rule No. 2: Once you pick your site, you own it, so choose with care. With Clinton staffers predicting a high turnout, a 22,000-square-foot gymnasium got the nod. Instinctively, Schall shrunk the space by half. Advance Rule No. 3: The camera should never show empty seats. Now, with one basketball court curtained off, more than 1,000 guests squeeze into a space set up for 700. As the heat spikes, the giddy crowd fan themselves with the Clinton campaign's glossy handouts while they wait for the show to start. Every one of them, Schall knows, is a potential contributor, volunteer, voter. "Nobody gets by us without them signing in and giving us their information," a staffer instructs his sentries at the door.
Candidates who are in it to win it, and financed as such, never leave home without an advance team on the ground, ready to produce a camera-ready show in varied genres: a boisterous rally, a sober policy speech, or a shift with a nurse in a Henderson, Nevada, hospital, as Clinton did just prior to Council Bluffs. (Call it Take Hillary to Work Day.) Political advance—art, science, or irritant, depending on whom you ask—is where strategy meets stagecraft, with methods passing from one generation to the next at invitation-only schools staged by each campaign. To the outsider, the pirouette of politician, people, and press is an exercise in logistics. To the insider, it's more like making movies. The work is invisible if done well, a spontaneous welcome to an honored visitor. Done poorly, it's a disaster in waiting, from a motorcade holding the L.A. freeways hostage to a backdrop ruinously worded in a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED kind of way.
