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7:50 a.m., northeastern Philadelphia: As Clinton shook hands outside the Mayfair Diner, Begala marveled, "He's clearly the hardest-working man in show business. That's my rule: politics is show business for ugly people."
2:30 p.m., en route to Cleveland, Ohio: Seated in her front-row seat on the campaign plane, Hillary Clinton allowed herself to talk about victory. "I've always been certain Bill was going to win." Harking back to her first campaign as a teenager (she was a 1964 supporter of Barry Goldwater), Hillary explained, "I know enough about failed campaigns to recognize the averted eyes and the missed handshakes." For both Clintons, there is a symbolic importance in the relentless campaigning. "The image of his resilience," she said, "his fighting for change, working until the last minute, is the image he wants to leave the country with."
The Clintons had turned their reclining front seats (Bill took the window) into a lilliputian hideaway, with a blue sliding curtain for privacy and the kind of mementos a college student might use to personalize a dorm room. Clinton had decorated the crimson fabric that covers the plane's front wall with dozens of campaign buttons, almost as a way of reminding himself in private moments that the campaign was real. The small floor area was filled . with stuffed animals, the kind of cuddly objects that provide comfort at moments of stress. On the candidate's seat was his current paperback mystery, Private Eyes, in which the detective is a child psychologist and children's advocate.
When Clinton returned to the plane from his latest round of handshaking, he talked with aides about his chances of equaling George Bush's 1988 rout of Michael Dukakis. "Bush took 40 states with 54%," Clinton rattled off like a small boy recalling baseball averages. "I don't think we'll do quite that well." Asked how he was feeling, he replied, "I feel fine. Tomorrow I'll probably feel terrible."
11:30 p.m., McAllen, Texas: Bush stopped campaigning two hours ago, but Clinton still had five speeches to go. Toward the end of this one, Clinton's voice started growing so enthusiastic that he said, "I'm having a good time -- I might give another speech."
Instead Clinton wandered past the airplane's kitchen (the dividing line between the Clinton area and the press) to chat with reporters, periodically letting loose a yawn. He took the Texas results personally (he lost) as a measure of his judgment as a de facto campaign manager. His passion for Texas dates back to 1972, when he managed George McGovern's campaign in the state. "I always thought we had a chance here," Clinton said, "but the weight of opinion in my campaign was that we had a better chance in densely packed states like New Jersey."
1:15 a.m. Tuesday, Fort Worth, Texas: Clinton delighted in telling the crowd, "It will be nice for you not to have a President who has an accent. When you hear me talk and Mr. Bush talk, who's more like you?" Watching Clinton handshake his way down a rope line, an irreverent thought gathered momentum: Why does Clinton believe any voter who has come to the airport to hear a speech at 1 a.m. on Election Day requires further wooing with a handshake? If these are not sure Clinton voters, then who was? Perhaps this whole sleep-deprivation experiment said more about Clinton's need for adulation than it did for any electoral-vote strategy.