Opinion: Hillary Clinton, running late again, helps hot dog sales in Indiana

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All political campaigns have schedules, meticulously designed about two weeks out and refined day by day. These printed booklets are each workday’s bible. They are helpful and valid until the first event of the morning. When everything starts running behind.

No candidate seeking votes, obviously, can pass up 20 more eager hands in the rope line waiting to be shaken. And autographs to be signed. And photos to be taken so someone can prove someday they were once, however briefly, in the presence of fame.

Every candidate also has a designated ‘bad cop,’ a staff person whose job it is to tear the candidate away, seemingly reluctantly, from yet another group of supporters so that it’s not the candidate walking away to keep the campaign caravan at least within shouting distance of the day’s planned timetable.

As a candidate, George W. Bush was so strict about punctuality for every event that his caravan many times left behind his staffers who were even two minutes tardy. They were on their own to catch up somehow. Other campaigns have been known to run hours late.

Today, Sen. Hillary Clinton, like her husband in campaign days of....

yore, was running at least an hour late for her Hoosier “economic town hall” at the Hammond Civic Center in Indiana.

Trying to placate the 1,500 people who’d arrived early to clear security and already had been waiting for hours, various musical acts and local officials took the stage to implore the increasingly impatient people to hang on for her arrival any minute, they were sure. The wise political advance crew, knowing their candidate’s proclivities well, will have such entertainment standing by to fill the seemingly endless void.

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott, who’s among seven northwest Indiana mayors backing Clinton, pleaded with the people over the loudspeaker system to eschew the civic center’s hot dogs and please return to their seats for the senator’s suspected arrival any minute now. The crowd apparently questioned the mayor’s credibility.

“I know those hot dogs are good,” McDermott said at one point, “but Sen. Clinton is 20 times better than that.”

You want mustard with that?

--Andrew Malcolm and Rick Pearson

Rick Pearson writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune’s Washington Bureau.