EMAIL DETAILS

Handling Cows by Day, Ever-Growing Clinton Rallies by Night - NYTimes.com

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/us/politics/hillary-clinton-advance-man.html?hpw&rref=politics&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=2&referer=https://t.co/HBc8o84m7A

Handling Cows by Day, Ever-Growing Clinton Rallies by Night

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
•October 12, 2016

DE QUEEN, Ark. — The lighting was perfect, the sun bouncing off the
dampened grass at the farmland’s edge.

The acoustics? Impeccable, from the barnyard whinnying to a pickup’s faint
growl: a whistling medley of Americana, ready-made for a campaign ad.

And when the hour arrived here for the main event, Hillary Clinton’s
director of production — the one “in charge of how things look and feel”
wherever the candidate appears in public — settled in to brief essential
personnel.
The Run-UpThe podcast that makes sense of the most delirious stretch of the
2016 campaign.

“Come here, giiiiiiiiirls!” he shouted, sloshing through manure in
shin-high grass, hauling a bag of feed. “Come on, cat-hoooooooooooooo.”

By day, this is Greg Hale, third-generation cattle farmer. Mr. Hale, 41,
raises Angus and tiger-stripe cows branded with the family “H” in this town
of 6,700, sharing the road with a general store that promises “SANDWICHES”
and, less plausibly, “clean bathrooms” on its overhead marquee.

By night, some 12 hours later and two time zones west, Mr. Hale was
surveying a community college atrium in Reno, Nev., counting flags,
concealing possible blight and herding a team of workers tasked with
building a camera-ready backdrop for Mrs. Clinton’s address
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/us/politics/hillary-clinton-speech.html>
the next day on the hard-right turn of Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Hale’s campaign apex, though, arrived on Monday. Amid near-daily taunts
from Mr. Trump’s team that Mrs. Clinton’s crowd sizes tend to pale in
comparison, Mr. Hale carried off Mrs. Clinton’s largest campaign event to
date: a more-than-10,000-person evening rally in Columbus, Ohio, that
surrounded her with well-lit college students across a sprawling university
lawn.

“Debate-mentum,” Mr. Hale said, explaining the attendance.

Mrs. Clinton and her husband have come a long way since Arkansas. They fly
privately and seldom encounter cattle manure. They vacation in the Hamptons
and are plotting a return to a more exclusive address.

But for a campaign stocked with Washington veterans and millennial
organizers, headquartered in a Brooklyn neighborhood where Mr. Hale’s beard
might register as ironic but for his Southern lilt, Mrs. Clinton has
retained at least one ambassador to the family’s political roots.

“Every now and then, somebody might confuse me for a hipster,” Mr. Hale
said of his time in the new Clinton orbit, “until they hear me talk.”

For almost all of his life, Mr. Hale has been talking about the Clintons.
His mother was a county chairwoman during Bill Clinton’s 1980 run for
governor here, fielding a call from Mr. Clinton after midnight on the
evening of his defeat as he agonized over what went wrong. Mr. Hale had
been dispatched, in vain, as a 5-year-old to hand out stickers to seniors
for the cause.

In 1996, he left college to work on the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign,
gravitating toward the advance team, the group responsible for the planning
and execution of events and trips.

Mr. Hale first accompanied Mrs. Clinton during a trip to Portland, Me.,
wearing a suit and standing watch all night in the hotel lobby because a
practical joker had insisted that protocol required it.

Two decades later, after stints on Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency team in
New York, John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and Mrs. Clinton’s primary run in
2008, Mr. Hale has cobbled together his own set of rules.

He knows which cities have superior “balloon capabilities” and how a
plaque’s reflection can upend lighting plans. He knows where to position
carpets to improve sound quality and how many chairs to place onstage
depending on the tone of Mrs. Clinton’s planned remarks. (For more formal
gatherings, he often keeps voters out of the main camera shot.)

“Our goal is to not matter,” Mr. Hale said of his work. “If we matter,
usually something’s gone wrong.”

The job has sealed Mr. Hale’s status as the most conspicuous campaign link
to the Clintons’ past life. Mr. Clinton peppers him with questions about
Arkansas politics, seeking updates on former aides now running for local
office themselves, and tells acquaintances — gleefully, if incorrectly, Mr.
Hale says — that he held Mr. Hale as a baby.

Mrs. Clinton, now accustomed to speaking to Mr. Hale for a final logistical
briefing moments before taking the stage at a major event, faux apologizes
to those who cannot make out his Sevier County drawl: Mr. Hale’s
pronunciation of Chuck Schumer’s surname as “Schu-*mare*” during a
pre-event meeting once compelled the New York senator to wonder aloud where
Mrs. Clinton found her people.

She replied, with a smile, that she had imported this one from home.

“That’s part of the role he plays,” said David Morehouse, a former White
House and campaign aide and longtime friend to the Clintons, and a former
advance man himself, who is now president and chief executive of the
National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins. “He’s a living embodiment of
where they came from.”

De Queen is not exactly where the Clintons came from. Traversing his 500
acres in an off-road vehicle on a late August morning, Mr. Hale wore a
straw cowboy hat, ostrich boots and a Wrangler denim shirt.

He surveyed his stock, each tagged on the ears with numbers indicating
pregnancy length, and held forth on the majesty of “calving.”

“That one’ll calve soon. That one’ll calve soon,” he said flatly, pointing
at the cows’ undersides as one flapped her ears to repel flies and another
relieved herself. “She’s building her bag right here.”

If a member of the Clinton family is not running for president, Mr. Hale’s
professional focus vacillates between the cattle farm, which is otherwise
tended by local workers, and a Little Rock-based consulting firm
<http://markhamgroup.com/team/greg-hale/> that has helped stage events for
U2’s Bono and for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Mrs. Clinton is the one client who always takes precedence.

“He has this utter reverence for her: her status and all she’s
accomplished,” Capricia Marshall, a family friend who was White House
social secretary during Mr. Clinton’s second term, said of Mr. Hale’s bond
with Mrs. Clinton. “She sees him, and she kind of lights up — ‘Hey, Greg!’
— but then he blends away.”

Interactive Feature | Get the Morning Briefing by Email What you need to
know to start your day, delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday.
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/07/dining/100000003164898.embedded.html>

Occasionally, Mr. Hale said, he has blended poorly. There was the time in
2004, with Mr. Kerry, when he lost power during an event with Bruce
Springsteen.

And at a 2008 speech in South Carolina, a bleacher stage began crashing,
prompting a precautionary evacuation of Clinton supporters.

“Secretary Clinton was literally consoling me and telling me it was going
to be O.K. because I was having a panic attack,” Mr. Hale said. “When the
candidate is trying to calm you down, then things are not in great shape.”

This election season has been smoother, save for a handful of losing
fights. Mr. Hale said he became stir crazy at times during Mrs. Clinton’s
low-key “listening tour” last year, pining for splashier events to
organize. He also made the case, unsuccessfully, to announce Senator Tim
Kaine as Mrs. Clinton’s running mate at twilight, for aesthetics’ sake.

More often, though, Mr. Hale has reveled in the advance team
decision-making of Mrs. Clinton’s opponent, noting that Mr. Trump once made
a speech in front of a trash heap.

“Literally a pile of garbage,” he said. “I had a fun day.”

Yet if Mr. Hale has strained to project an agrarian nonchalance, he has by
now amassed a wealth of his own political connections, aided by his wife,
Mica Strother, who has worked for Mike Beebe, a former governor of Arkansas.

Mr. Hale has been approached about running for Congress, with Craig Smith,
Mr. Clinton’s former political director, helping to lead the chorus.

He weighed a bid in 2012, he said, but insisted there was “no chance” he
would reconsider. Mr. Hale’s only previous experience as a candidate came
in a fifth-grade student council race.

He lost to a girl, he said. He remembers her governing effectively.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

Sent from my iPhon