Candidates, Reporters and Ride-Alongs

“I want to ride with YOU,” the senator shouted, pointing in my direction.

Me? I mouthed in disbelief, from the driver’s seat of my aging Volvo.

He nodded enthusiastically as he crossed the street and headed straight for my car. 

It was 1994. I was the mother of a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old. And I began furiously brushing Cheerios off the passenger’s seat just as the senator flung open the door and jumped in, ready to ride shotgun to the next campaign stop about 45 minutes away.

Which is how I came to be driving Sen. John Warner between Smithfield and wherever it was we were headed during a campaign blitz a week before Election Day.

I had been new to campaign coverage that summer and the only female regularly covering the commonwealth’s craziest campaign. For a time, four candidates were running for the U.S Senate: incumbent Chuck Robb, GOP nominee Oliver North and independent candidates former Virginia Attorney General Marshall Coleman and former Gov. Doug Wilder. (Warner was campaigning with Coleman.)

Until that assignment I had no idea that reporters and politicians routinely drove together as they barnstormed the countryside. I quickly learned it was a valuable way to have candid conversations out of earshot of the rest of the reporters. It also saved time, since the candidate and the press posse were heading in the same direction.

Campaign aides generally orchestrated such coveted time with the candidates. By Election Day I’d ridden multiple times in North’s campaign van, at least once in the back seat of Doug Wilder’s Cadillac and several times in cars used by Coleman. I never rode with the introverted and weird Robb who was as uncomfortable around reporters as he was around voters.

In all that travel I was the driver only once.

And I was nervous as I chauffeured Warner, terrified that I’d miss a curve and forever be remembered as the reporter who killed the Old Dominion’s beloved senior senator.

When I wasn’t white knuckling it we had a wide-ranging chat. On the record. And off. He was talkative and amusing. By the time we arrived at our next stop I understood why women like Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Walters found Warner charming.

Why am I telling you this? Because I hadn’t thought about that morning in ages. Then I read about a Mississippi reporter who was barred from traveling with a gubernatorial candidate on a 15-hour road trip through the Magnolia State last week. Seems Robert Foster told Larrison Campbell of “Mississippi Today” that she couldn’t ride with him unless she brought along a male colleague because he and his wife avoid being alone with members of the opposite sex.

”My truck, my rules,” is his slogan.

Actually, it’s the so-called Billy Graham Rule.

According to Wikipedia: In 1948, Graham held a series of evangelistic meetings in Modesto, California...he resolved to "avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion".[2] From that time onward, Graham made a point of not traveling, meeting, or eating alone with a woman other than his wife Ruth.[5]

Some like to sneer at the religious practices of evangelicals. Not me.

Shoot, if Bill Clinton had followed the Billy Graham Rule he wouldn’t have had oral sex with a White House intern. And we would have been spared a sordid national scandal and awkward conversations with our kids.

But just because a candidate won’t be alone with women shouldn’t result in female reporters being relegated to the press van while their male colleagues hog quality time with evangelical candidates.

There’s a simple solution. I’m surprised Mr. Foster didn’t think of it. 

Why didn’t the candidate quietly invite one of his male aides along on the trip? No explanation would have been necessary.

I can only assume that Foster wanted the publicity in the walkup to the Republican primary on August 6th where he’s considered the “outsider” in a three-way race for the nomination.

Or he’s a blockhead. 

Either way, good luck, Mississippi.

Oh, one more thing about John Warner: I’ve always believed that the reason the senator wanted to ride in my car that day was to make up for what he’d done earlier that morning.

There was a media scrum at a little Smithfield restaurant where the senator and Coleman were scheduled to shake hands and have breakfast. Warner was hungry and spied a woman with a pad.

“Miss, I‘d like two eggs over easy, sausage, whole wheat toast and coffee,” he called politely.

To me.

“Senator, that’s not a waitress,” groaned one of his aides. “That’s the political reporter from The Virginian-Pilot.”

”Holy cow," Warner exclaimed. "I've been campaigning 31 years and I think that's one of the funniest things I've ever done."

“Not even close,“ his aide sighed.

An hour later, the two of us were tooling along in my crumb-encrusted car. He was chatting. I was trying not to hit a tree.