Campaign Headquarters

AS I WRITE this, they're probably still cleaning up from the Bob Ehrlich victory party, yet already I've got a monster case of campaign withdrawal. God help me, I even miss all the negative commercials that polluted the airwaves in recent weeks: "Bob Ehrlich: Do we really need a governor who favors tire-dumping in the Chesapeake Bay?" "Isn't it time Kathleen Kennedy Townsend comes clean about her plan to release Maryland's inmates?" I miss the candidates waving at me with their big, toothy grins from busy intersections at rush hour, and the frisson of fear I get when, attempting to wave back, my car drifts into the other lane and the guy behind me lays on his horn.

It's almost time for the political conventions, which means that millions of concerned U.S. voters will be glued to their TV sets, watching the last few episodes of "Survivor." Some TV viewers will also watch the conventions, but the majority of these will be Labrador retrievers who turned on the TV by biting the remote control and cannot figure out how to change the channel. Very few actual people watch the political conventions anymore. Al Gore could accept the Democratic nomination buck naked, and nobody would notice except maybe Tipper.

POTCHEFSTROOM, South Africa -- Sometimes a simple act can define a place and its people.In this case it was a handshake, or more accurately one that was refused in this conservative enclave that pushed South Africa into today's all-important referendum on political reform.It happened at Conservative Party headquarters, a beehive of white right-wing activity before a special election last month that the CP subsequently won, driving President F. W. de Klerk's more progressive white National Party government to call the referendum.

WASHINGTON -- If anyone ever doubted the corrupting influence of money in American politics, the latest Ross Perot caper should be the ultimate answer.Perot's ability to force both President Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton to kowtow to him is clearly related to the fact that the Texas businessman has some $2 billion in his kick and threatens to spend large amounts of it on television advancing his political candidacy. Surely no one imagines the candidates would have dispatched their leading operatives -- and in the president's case, even the national security adviser -- to Dallas except for craven fear about what Perot might do in the final five weeks of the campaign.

Two brief vignettes capture the rival styles in this fall's campaign between Minnesota's Republican Sen. Rudy Boschwitz and Democratic challenger Paul Wellstone, a 46-year-old college professor.Senator Boschwitz, in his campaign headquarters, leads a visitor to a room where a young woman is busily tallying personal checks on an adding machine. The senator leans over her shoulder and extends the tape, indicating nearly three feet of printed figures marking the day's mail contributions."Look at that," he says proudly.

WASHINGTON - For the third time, Al Gore's campaign has a new manager. Commerce Secretary William M. Daley was named campaign chairman yesterday after Tony Coelho resigned, citing health reasons. News of the shuffle overshadowed Gore's latest attempt to reposition his presidential candidacy and claim a measure of credit for the booming national economy. It also highlighted the vice president's repeated struggles to keep his campaign on track against a resilient Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The balding guy with a shy way about him would always sit in the back of the church, usually by himself, and silently slip out after Communion and before the final hymn. Congregants at Old St. Paul's in downtown Baltimore recalled one-time vestryman William Donald Schaefer on a glorious Easter Sunday, just three days before the former mayor and governor will return to his old church one last time. Services for Schaefer, who died at 89 a week ago, will be held at the historic church Wednesday after he lies in state at the State House and in City Hall Monday and Tuesday.

JIM BROCHIN HAS the face of a choirboy, the smooth patter of a born politician and the shoes of a man who has walked, say, from here to Argentina, which might not be far off the mark. Brochin, you see, is a conservative Democrat - he insists this is not an oxymoron - running for state senator in the 7th District, which consists of Towson, Timonium, Cockeysville and portions of northeastern Baltimore County and southwestern Harford County, including Fallston, Abingdon and Joppa. In his campaign to unseat Republican incumbent Andrew P. Harris, Brochin says he's knocked on some 8,000 doors in his heavily GOP district in the past 2 1/2 years, which accounts for his marathon-runner's physique and the god-awful shape of those black wingtips.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- This, John McCain's campaign aides excitedly insist, is what political campaigns are supposed to look like: phones ringing off the hook, volunteers walking in off the street eager to do anything, staffers working round the clock fueled by hot dogs, doughnuts and the adrenalin that comes from backing the candidate of the moment. And this is exactly what the red-hot McCain campaign has looked like since last week's New Hampshire primary, since the insurgent Republican candidate knocked George W. Bush off what was once assumed to be an immovable front-runner perch, since everything has changed.

They didn't think it could happen again. The candidates, the lawyers, the newspaper reporters. Veteran New Jersey politician and lawyer Jim Florio had an inkling it might be otherwise while watching presidential returns last week, he says, but he didn't have time to reminisce before "a whole bunch of people started calling me." People from his first campaign for governor. Democrats who still regard themselves as "veterans of The Recount." Across the state, his Republican opponent in that race, Tom Kean, now president of Drew University, stayed up until 4 a.m. hoping to discover the fate of old family friend George W. Bush - their grandfathers went to college together.