Palin keeps busy, sometimes hectic, schedule

PALMER — Traveling with the McCain-Palin campaign requires a great deal of flexibility. If a reporter doesn’t have it when upon arrival, he or she better learn fast.

With a daily schedule chock full of back-to-back campaign stops, reporters — often running — have to keep up for the chance to get a story or photo.

It’s a tiny glimpse into the world Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, has been living since blasting onto the national scene a little more than two months ago.

The job of Palin’s press aides is to find the best possible shot to put her in or the best set-up for a story. They take their jobs very seriously and it made for a somewhat arduous day Friday as the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman spent the day on the campaign trail with Palin.

During the course of the rural Pennsylvania tour, the press pool traveling with the campaign was pulled and pushed, hustled and corralled by whoever was in charge of that event. To a small town reporter from Alaska — one who’s used to just knocking on someone’s front door, or calling a cell phone — the whole experience was a shock.

The tight control, though, sometimes made it hard for many of the press to get clear photographs or hear what Palin was saying at the various stops.

During a stop at Leiss Tool and Die in Somerset, Penn., the press was grouped into an area and told it would be the best place to get photographs. Just before Palin came close, the campaign aides moved the reporters away. This happened multiple times before the press was allowed to get close.

Reporters are also often not told where the campaign is heading next, and it’s a guessing game until the press bus or vans arrive at a destination.

This happened Friday evening when the Straight Talk Express campaign bus drove an hour on Pennsylvania highways with the press on tow. Not even the driver knew where we were going.

The destination ended up being a tiny town called Dauphin, where the Palins, Sarah and Todd, were taking their daughter, Piper, to trick-or-treat. The unscheduled, impromptu stop had the press sprinting up the street to capture the moment.

And so it went on the campaign trail.

Palin granted the Frontiersman an interview on her Straight Talk Express bus.

The conversation we had went just like it would have if I’d run into her at Wal-Mart in Wasilla. Palin didn’t push politics and she seemed as comfortable as she would be in her living room.

Of course, it’s not just the press that keeps a hectic life on the trail.

Palin also keeps a full, non-stop event schedule, and like her politics or not, stumping on the trail seems like it would be extremely stressful and nerve-racking.

Not only does Palin have a gaggle of advisers throwing suggestions at her, a traveling press corps watching and scrutinizing her every move, but she also has to keep up her energetic speeches at rallies day after day.

In the 13 or so hours I spent with Palin, we stopped in five small Pennsylvania towns, visited a tool and dye shop and an apple orchard, and drove down long, windy country roads to every destination.

The Secret Service keeps a close eye on everything, and there are enough agents to fully surround anyone on the campaign if need be. They also check reporters for bombs every morning.

Seeing the candidates on television, no matter which one you’re pulling for, doesn’t do justice to the insane schedule they keep while trying to earn votes.

But watching Palin talk to locals of the small towns we stopped in it’s easy to see why people like her. Politics aside, people seemed genuinely smitten with her personality.

Even though most everyone in the country knows who Palin is now, she still humbly introduces herself: “HI, I’m Sarah Palin.”

And it doesn’t look like her star power has worn with supporters. During a stop at Boyer Orchards, an apple farm in New Paris, Penn., almost the whole town came out to see Palin.

The last I saw of the Palin family, they were sitting in their campaign plane on the tarmac of the Harrisburg, Penn., International Airport, ready to fly to Florida for yet another set of rallies. The campaign would fly all night and be right back at it in the morning.

And Palin will continue to stump almost right up until Election Day on Tuesday.

The governor will be back in Alaska early Tuesday morning to cast her vote at Wasilla City Hall. Then it’s a waiting game, for her and everyone else in the country, to see who our next leader is.