Nothing is easy on the Huckabee campaign these days. As if the inevitability of the McCain nomination wasn’t enough for the traveling press corps to sometimes feel a little forgotten, the road (and skies) traveled haven’t exactly been smooth.
First, the press plane made an emergency landing last week in New Jersey after the controls went dead, forcing the two pilots to muscle the small craft safely down through thousands of feet of turbulence. Then on Sunday, with high winds causing delays to many commercial flights across Virginia, the campaign endured two harrowing plane rides (DC to Lynchburg; Lynchburg to Richmond) with enough bumps and drops and wind-blown landings to raise a round of applause upon touchdown. Finally, on the way to the Dulles Airport to catch a plane to Little Rock this morning, the press van ran out of gas and had to pull over to the side of the Dulles Toll Road.
We all looked at each other, still bleary and starting to laugh. As the driver tried the ignition again and again, a feisty campaign staffer shouted from the front seat: “We’re out of gas, dude! Call your dispatcher!” We were 13 miles from Dulles, stalled on the side of the road directly opposite the USA Today building at 9:25 a.m.–and the plane was leaving in five minutes. The staffer called a colleague. “We have a big problem,” he said. “The van ran out of gas. No, I’m not kidding.”
But then… a miracle. A second van, this one carrying staffers, reporters and campaign strategist Chip Saltsman, pulled up behind us on the side of the road. Suddenly, Huckabee’s bodyman Drake Jarman was standing outside the window. “I’m your knight in shining armor,” he said, herding us onto the second van and assuring us that our bags would follow us to the next stop. They did, after yet another van was dispatched to retrieve them. Unfortunately, it took another 90 minutes our stuff to show up. The reason for the delay: the luggage vehicle also ran out of gas.
One campaign, it seems, only gets so many miracles.
