On the Road with Joe Sestak
Michael Sokolove in the NYT has a profile of Joe Sestak in their magazine this Sunday that has this smart point at the beginning:
One of the best things Sestak has going for him is the bad thing that happened to him in the spring — being dissed by just about every prominent Democrat in the land, from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on down. (Even Magic Johnson, for whatever reason, felt compelled to stand up for Arlen Specter.) The high-level opposition has allowed Sestak to cast himself as something other than his party’s man, which may prove to be particularly useful this year. Democratic elders did not mean to strengthen Sestak — they wanted to defeat him — but their opposition earlier could end up preserving a Senate seat for the party.
Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the fun stuff we've all been wondering about. How in God's name does Sestak drive back and forth and up and down all over this giant state everyday?
“Tactics are for amateurs; logistics are for professionals,” Sestak said, using one of the military phrases he likes to employ.
But I was unimpressed by the performance of our logistics unit, if we even had one. The Chevy Suburban was a rolling office — packed with briefing papers and lists of calls for Sestak to make — but there was no food or water on board. “Is there a head nearby?” Sestak asked before we climbed back in. There wasn’t, so we just hightailed it to Erie, where he immediately fell into the back of the parade and resumed his aerobic handshaking routine. From there, we drove about two hours to the Big Butler Fair, where he was to introduce pulling competitions involving diesel trucks, farm tractors and tri-axle dump trucks.
At this point, we had been going for 10 hours without stopping for food or water. (We did finally get a bathroom break at a gas station.) It turned out that Sestak doesn’t believe in eating during the day; he says it slows him down. He figured he was still operating on the entire medium pizza he had “slammed down,” as he put it, after midnight the previous night in his motel.