An Excess of Foot-in-Mouth Is Linked to a Lack of Shut-Eye
By DIANE CARDWELL
enator Joseph I. Lieberman snapped at one of his questioners in a town hall meeting. Representative Richard A. Gephardt stumped his voice to a creak. And in a particularly run-down moment for Senator John Kerry, the Wahhabi Muslim fundamentalists he frequently mentions in speeches came out as "wasabi."
As the first voting in Iowa and New Hampshire fast approaches, the candidates for the Democratic nomination have been running themselves ragged in a blur of baggy eyes and dark circles. And at a moment when both the competition and the scrutiny have intensified, the frayed edges are beginning to show.
The candidates, working 14-, 16- or 18-hour days, often in subzero temperatures, have been snapping at voters, flubbing their well-worn lines and fighting the many maladies of the road with pills, potions and catnaps they catch any place they can.
"I want to sleep," Howard Dean said on Wednesday, declining to talk with reporters as he flew to Ankeny, Iowa, from Manchester, N.H. "It's the last chance I'll have to sleep for six days."
Indeed, Dr. Dean seemed less than his usual feisty self in the Jan. 11 Iowa debate. And he seemed rattled last week when he stumbled over his words at a few appearances.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who fell victim to laryngitis early in his campaign, has had his own fatigue-induced slips of the tongue. Even though he can fall asleep within minutes for a short nap, General Clark says he is not getting his necessary six hours of sleep a day.
In Dallas, he fumbled his signature line, calling for "high leadership" instead of a "higher standard of leadership." And, while answering questions about a videotape from 2002 that seems to diverge from his current position against the war in Iraq, he further muddled matters by saying that he did not believe Al Qaeda was involved in Sept. 11. Informed of his mistake, General Clark hastily returned to the lectern to say, "I didn't believe Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11," and then walked off, rolling his eyes in frustration.
Still, the retired general shows no signs of wanting to slow down and even wears his constant campaigning as a kind of macho badge. On Wednesday, General Clark bragged to his staff that, unlike the other candidates, he had not rested for a single day. "Everybody else has had a down day," he said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kerry has been trading illnesses with the press corps, turning his campaign bus, the Real Deal Express, into a rolling infirmary. Going 14 hours a day or more, he has been sucking lozenges, ingesting a homeopathic zinc remedy and drinking a concoction of lemon, honey and ginger root to save his voice. The secret recipe belongs to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, he said on Friday. "It's a hot toddy without the toddy."
At campaign events, he is alternately on-point or irritable, sometimes misspeaking or sniping at questioners in the audience.
And the mild-mannered Mr. Lieberman has seemed a bit cranky of late. He abruptly shot back "that's ridiculous" at a man who criticized him for attacking the other candidates. Delivering a staple anecdote, he described the behavior of a woman without health insurance who cannot afford regular medical care for her asthmatic son and relies on the emergency room as "stupid."
At an appearance near the end of a grueling week, Mr. Lieberman told his audience that he was the first in his generation, not his family, to go to college. The next morning, a Friday, Mr. Lieberman, an observant Jew, told a voter he was grateful the Sabbath was approaching so he could snag some much-needed rest.
In a recent week, Mr. Lieberman managed to bound through much of a crammed schedule, an enviable stamina he says he helps maintain with routine sessions on the treadmill and a daily regimen of canned salmon, Clif bars and carefully calibrated doses of coffee.
But he still has late-day dips in energy, something not lost on his audiences. "He looks tired, the poor guy," a woman said to her companion at a town hall in Claremont, N.H.
For Mr. Gephardt, the key to negotiating the rigors of a hard-fought contest is a combination of healthy eating and long periods of silence, anathema to any politician. A few weeks ago, after he began speeding up his pace, his voice would crack toward the end of days starting at 7:30 a.m. and ending after 11 p.m.
But recently he has been able to keep talking without a hitch. He said he has learned valuable lessons from his first campaign in 1988 when he routinely shouted his voice hoarse.
"I was drinking tea with lemons and honey and all the remedies, cough drops," Mr. Gephardt said in an interview last week. "And I finally went to a doctor and he said: `Just forget all that. There's only one way to solve this and that's to shut up.' "
"You've got to stop talking after the last event and then go to bed and try to not talk to anybody," Mr. Gephardt said. "And then by the next morning it usually comes back pretty well. That's a very big problem for everybody."
Mr. Gephardt, a devotee of the low-carb South Beach Diet, has also abandoned his habit of sampling a different pie in each Iowa city he visits.
And youth, coupled with a steady supply of caffeine, apparently has its advantages. Senator John Edwards, at 50 one of the youngest of the candidates, rarely even so much as stifles a public yawn, perhaps the natural outcome of slurping Diet Coke from morning until night.
That, and the naps he snatches outside the watchful eye of the press. It is only since he began campaigning, he said, that he has developed the ability to sleep in flight. |
