She meets campaign officials at the airport and accompanies them to debates. She introduces McCain to other area supporters and stands nervously by while the media grills him at press conferences. But she most certainly does not work for the campaign. Bolin does, however, perform a rather unusual service for the McCain team. That's because success in early presidential primaries and caucuses is largely a matter of how well a candidate does relative to how the chattering classes thought he'd do.
Votes are nice, but expectations are everything.
In December, when Knight Ridder obtained a memo, apparently from inside the McCain camp, outlining plans for organizing supporters at Iowa colleges, the campaign professed total ignorance. Now, terrified that the media will accuse them of conducting a stealth campaign, staffers at McCain headquarters deny any knowledge of even unofficial supporters in the state. As it turns out, an anti- campaign requires almost as much work as a regular campaign. The morning of the January 15 Iowa debate, stacks of McCAIN 2000 signs and stickers lie scattered throughout Bolin's house. Similarly, one of the young volunteers driving the McCain vans had planned to bring other young McCain fans to the debate.