One of my earliest memories of Sen. Bob Dole is of him trying to have me arrested.
The 1996 presidential campaign was just beginning, and I was a 25-year-old producer for ABC News. Despite little interest in politics at the time, I was tasked with shadowing the GOP frontrunner as he made his way from one party dinner and state fair to the next. It was a year-long odyssey that was eye-opening and — as I look back on it — deeply exhausting.
While life on the campaign trail evokes the nostalgia of “the Boys on the Bus” and eventually a campaign plane, the early months are far less glamorous. Dole, of course, had access to a small jet that flew him just about everywhere — or tried to. But reporters were left to their own devices, which in my case meant seeing him leave one event then racing in a tiny, rented Kia to beat him to the next. And that’s what led to him joking around — I think — about my incarceration.
