Awaiting the President's arrival, Peter ponders the space between.

by Peter Coyote

From: coyote@motherjones.com
To: mojowire@motherjones.com

Exhaustion is cumulative. Each day I wake up feeling as if I've lost ten I.Q. points, which, granting myself even average numbers, would make me about as smart as a two-by-four when I come down from my room for breakfast.

I find my table. Jack and Kay Theimer are there as usual, merry and unperturbed. Jack seems to find a different sporting event each day -- today he's attending a baseball game. After I gulp tepid coffee and take two bites of gelatinous eggs, I return to my room to begin typing yesterday's notes.

I work for a while and then it is time to attend the James Carville luncheon at the Hyatt Plaza, but by the time I arrive and confront the crowds of people clotting in the lobby to the grand ballroom, my nervous system shreds. I have Martha Whetstone give my ticket to Rachel Burstein, the young reporter from the Washington bureau of Mother Jones, and return to my hotel room.

I post my report amidst countless interruptions from the phone and try to nap. My son calls and we have an argument that becomes corrosive and I say things that I don't mean. I call to apologize and he hangs up on me. I am lost. Confused. What am I doing here? I am writing and thinking about the big picture, and the lives of people closest to me are shot through with pain and disintegrating. I feel like a fraud and pace my room in a kind of desperation fueled by exhaustion. I am struck with a panic that I am in the wrong place and call the airport to find the nearest flight home. I pack my bags, conscious of the fact that I have blundered terribly, that I do not belong here, that politics is like athletics -- people choose sides and fight to cross the goal line together, reveling in the victory of the group as if it was an individual win. I am not like that; I'm as critically distanced as the wandering Jew. I receive what amounts to a perpetual banishment, never totally trusted by others who can sense my previous commitment and detachment from what they seem to hold most high and dear.

Who am I, I wonder to myself, to criticize the Clintons? I realize that hind-sighting and second-guessing are national sports; the cheapest spectator sport offering ready balm to the ego. But no one, and I really mean no one but the President and the First Lady fully understand the pressures and conflicts of the office, and the benefit of the doubt would be to grant them an intelligence and good will equal to my own and assume that whatever decision they make, they are doing the best they can with the forces constellating around them.

Somewhere in the process of preparing to go and sorting out these thoughts, I recover my balance. I have made a commitment to others to be here. My return home will solve nothing. I've played my card here, and for better or worse, will finish the hand.

At 5 p.m. I join Martha Whetstone and her sister Ruth and husband Bill to go to the baseball field at the University of Illinois to greet the Presidential helicopter. We have received the perks of perks, permanent credentials and a car and driver, and are whisked in comfort to the stadium where the inevitable panoply of cameras are established to record the President's arrival. We are ushered into a cordoned-off VIP area, and watch a small crowd of loyalists assemble and pass out their CLINTON/GORE '96 placards. My friend Paul Berry greets me, attaching himself to Lucia Wyman, who is special assistant to the President for legislative affairs. She is a slender Texan with a pixie cut whose soft southern accent and vaguely distracted air seem at minor odds with her responsibility to track and trail legislation for the President. Crosby, Stills, and Nash are playing on loudspeakers.

Time passes, the crowd swells. The President is late. "Stopped for a burger", Berry confides. The crowd is festive, waving placards, sipping coffee, and elated at his pending arrival. Dusk arrives, and the President is still not there.

It's a few moments before I feel rather than hear the thrumming thump of helicopters. "It doesn't get any closer than this," Paul Berry chuckles, as three helicopters circle the field. Suddenly one peels off from the pack, and flashes the lights on its underbelly. It's enormous, like an aircraft carrier settling out of the sky, and its presence in the sky is awesome. I hear remarks in the crowd: "Starship Enterprise," "Close Encounters." A woman grabs my arm, "It's E.T." she says.

The helicopter settles down in the parking lot. "That's the decoy," someone says. Another one circles with the lights out. The ships circle like sharks in deep water, illuminated only by tiny red running lights, and then from the center of the ballet, the Presidential helicopter, olive drab and white, descends to the pavement, wind from the blades whipping leaves and grass, flapping the signs the people hold overhead as they whistle and cheer their President. I watch the crowd cheering him, and remember my perception about politics and sports. This is Clinton's team. They love him. I wonder to myself what it must feel like to be part of such a group; partisan with such commitment; family to an abstract idea like an Administration. Many of the people around me are the deepest inner circle, friends who go back to grade school with the President, and I can understand their loyalty and pride that one of their own has reached the pinnacle of power and prestige in the United States. As for the others, standing and waving as ardently and passionately, well I guess that it is Clinton's gift: to make them too feel that he is one of their own, and in the final analysis that is the mark of a great politician.

It is late by the time the President has left and the Secret Service allow us to leave. Our small party forgoes the last half hour of the convention and Gore's moving speech (seen later, more clearly and powerfully on television in my hotel room) for a quiet dinner. We are joined by an old Clinton operative from the political wing, and I eavesdrop on the slash-and-burn policies of the young financial hustlers to whom a $25,000 donor is small potatoes, barely worth any effort to protect from insult.

Stories about struggles between various loci of power are bandied about like small change, and like every other realm, the President's office is a universe with its own heaven and hell, dictators, angels, traitors and saints. Some of the names are familiar to me and some are not, but the dynamics are familiar to anyone who has ever tasted human nature.

We polish off the last bottle of wine and leave. The others are going to the California bash, but I am not in the mood to party, and return to my room to calibrate the distance between my personal life and the public life I am chronicling, and ponder what manner of creatures and demons inhabit the space between.