Never again would Bill Clinton's horizons be this constricted. For the final two days of the campaign, Clinton's life was reduced to the bare essentials -- takeoffs, landings, speeches and the near absolute certainty (though he would never publicly admit it) that he would be the next President of the United States.
Presidential candidates had pushed themselves to the brink before, but almost always in quest of a narrow victory or fleeing from the ghosts of humiliation. Clinton was different; he did it, regardless of the buoyant polls, largely because he wanted to. Few political odysseys could rival Clinton's 48-hour, sleep-defying, time zone-girdling, voice-croaking campaign climax. From Cincinnati last Sunday morning to Little Rock at 10:30 a.m. on Election Day, the Clinton Exhaustion Tour covered 5,000 miles and 14 cities. An hour-by-hour chronicle:
11:50 a.m. Sunday, Cincinnati, Ohio: The final gauntlet began in the drizzle outside Riverfront Stadium a few hours before a Bengals game. The previous night, the Clinton camp had lost an almost irreplaceable resource: the candidate's voice. By early Sunday morning Clinton was, as issues director Bruce Reed put it, "the real candidate of the Silent Majority." Taking the stage, he sounded like Marlon Brando in The Godfather and spoke for 21 seconds, a personal record for brevity. "Bad. It's bad," he gasped. "I'm going to let Hillary say something." She delivered a brief speech filled with the pronoun "we." Afterward a reporter cracked to a Clinton aide, "I thought Mrs. Wilson's speech was fine," a snide reference to the last year of Woodrow Wilson's second term when the invalid President ceded much official power to his wife.
2:50 p.m., en route to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: Campaign director Bruce Lindsey explained what the near mute Clinton did when he was alone with aides. "He talks," Lindsey said with bemused resignation. "He can't, but that's what he does. He talks anyway."
9:15 p.m., East Rutherford, New Jersey: Before Clinton spoke at a star- studded rally at the Meadowlands, aides told the press Hillary would go by herself to the final rally of the evening at the Garden State Racetrack in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Strategist Paul Begala had tried to lay down the law: "Governor," he told Clinton, "your voice is gone. Hillary can do it." But no one could dissuade Clinton. Pumped up after giving an eight-minute speech, with his voice hoarse but not cracking, Clinton told Begala, "I want to go to the racetrack thing. I won't talk. I'll only shake hands."
12:15 a.m. Monday, Cherry Hill, New Jersey: Clinton's bus brigade crossed the finish line at the Garden State Racetrack as they drove into an exuberant fireworks-and-fanfare rally. As promised, the candidate shook hands -- hundreds of them -- and played a four-bar break on the saxophone with the Dovells, a local 1960s group. But Clinton could not resist speaking for five minutes. Before leaving the raceway, Clinton posed in the cold rain with a two-year-old trotter named Bubba Clinton, who had won a race earlier that week at the long-shot odds of 37 to 1. Asked what the horse had told him, Clinton said, "Just run hard."
2 a.m., Philadelphia: Bliss, rapture. Four (count them) hours in the Warwick Hotel to indulge in exotic luxuries like taking a shower or sleeping on a bed.