By David Gewirtz
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FIGURE A
Al Gore, Palm device-wielding presidential candidate (click for larger image)
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Presidential candidate Al Gore is known to be an active Palm device user, wearing it most days on his belt. PalmPower Editor-in-Chief, David Gewirtz, had the opportunity to ask Mr. Gore a few short questions. We're proud to bring you the results of this exclusive interview with the candidate.</TR>
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Setting up an interview with a presidential candidate is both more and less work than you'd expect. Generally, you set up an industry interview by calling a facilitator, basically a public relations person who has the job of managing press interactions. When we decided we wanted to interview the candidates, we started the same way we would for any industry interview and called a press relations person in each of the campaigns.
Of course, when setting up an industry interview, most people are familiar with our publication. But when setting up interviews with the men who would be king, you've got to go through their staff, not all of whom are experts on the Palm economy. However, they are responsive to audience. When they realized just how many readers we have (and our incredibly valuable demographics), we started to get taken seriously--at least by the Gore campaign.
When you call the Gore campaign's pressroom, you get to talk to a real person, who then shunts the call off to the right handler. When you call the Bush campaign's pressroom, you get an answering machine. So far, the sum total of our contact with the Bush campaign has been with their answering machine. As answering machine messages go, it's pleasant. But about all we can tell you about Bush's techno-savvy is that he's got an answering machine.
By contrast, Al Gore wears his Palm device on his belt. His press team was excellent at qualifying us as potential interviewers and at making arrangements with the Vice President. (Although, at one point, it sank in that we were dealing with the actual Vice President of the United States and we started to wonder if black vans would show up outside the office.)
A presidential candidate is perhaps the busiest guy in the world. He's got to somehow talk to 200 million or so people in about two months and get them to buy into his vision. This means he's always talking, and pretty much never sleeping. So when the Gore campaign granted us a one-on-one interview with their candidate, they were very specific: we would get a very thin block of his insane schedule. We would have time for exactly four questions, and while we really wanted to know what Al's favorite third-party applications were, we decided to get serious and ask "the important questions."
