by John Kerry
I did try to think broadly and cast a wide net. I thought of leaders from the business world and former military leaders. But I came back to people I thought could help govern on day one, people who had a broad understanding of government, politics and the issues.
There was one idea I considered but knew would become impossible if it ever leaked to the media, so I kept it quiet. At the highest level of my campaign we had been approached by one of the people closest to John McCain. He suggested that John might be open to joining me. It was at least interesting—super-complicated, but interesting. I thought it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. John and I had successfully navigated turbulent periods as copilots before; the scrutiny we faced on the Vietnam POW/MIA investigation had been politically intense, and the emotions swirling around the issue demanded a certain level of judgment and maturity.
In that experience, I had seen that John and I made a great team when we shared a sense of purpose. I thought his ability to be the maverick, his independence, could be a critical ingredient for a country that was increasingly suspicious of government. He had helped define the insidious impact of money in politics. We shared a passion for reform.
I knew John felt, viscerally, that President Bush had squandered the unity of 9/11 and was dividing the country in ways that were simply wrong. On a number of issues, from campaign finance reform to climate change to standing up to HMOs on behalf of patients, John McCain had very publicly broken with the White House. There was a point where John’s independence and annoyance was so palpable that Tom Daschle believed John might leave the Republican Party and join our caucus as an independent.
Politically, 2004 is an eternity ago. John went in some very different political directions over the years after my race with President Bush. But back then, in that campaign, there were compelling reasons a Kerry-McCain ticket might have been powerful and at least merited examination. It would certainly have underscored unity when the country needed it. While obviously we had differences on some social issues, including choice, I knew those weren’t issues that animated John McCain’s political journey. Of course, we would have had to reach an understanding there. But I knew John was committed to moving the Senate, to making institutions of government work, to restoring people’s faith that government could put the average person’s interest ahead of big money. And I knew he had no patience for the lies about my military service. In fact, he had already defended me against the first attacks in the late spring, before the GOP made “Swift Boating” a big strategy and put huge money behind it. John could potentially have changed the electoral map, I believe, putting Arizona and Colorado in play. He was tested. He was tough. There were people around John who thought he would want the job, and they pressed me to consider him, in a way that made me think John was very interested.
But in the end, despite the two of us sitting together a couple of times one-on-one and “talking about it without talking about it,” John couldn’t get over the hurdle of tearing up what had for him been a bumpy but lifetime association with the Republican Party. In essence, we flirted but we never went on a date.
In the end, all the what-ifs and what-may-have-beens in the world are largely a waste of time when you’re in the thick of a campaign and you have to make a decision.
There were three to four leading choices to consider, good ones our entire senior campaign staff and senior party figures all agreed could make sense for August, October and January as well. No matter how much I looked out of the box at various unconventional possibilities, the list narrowed down to Dick Gephardt, Bob Graham and John Edwards.
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DICK GEPHARDT CAME with a wealth of experience. He was steady and popular with organized labor. Many people have suggested he could have made the difference in Ohio and they may well have been right.
Bob Graham had been governor of Florida. He had chaired the Intelligence Committee, brought southern credentials to the table as well as a commonsense approach to public life. He and his wife, Adele, had become good friends of Teresa’s and mine.
John Edwards was the potential choice who campaigned hardest for the job and who had captured the excitement of the party. John had both fans and detractors in the Senate. Ted Kennedy had worked with him on health care and thought he was gifted. Something about Edwards reminded him of his brother Bobby. Other senators, though, warned me there was something about John that didn’t quite add up. They thought he was too ambitious, in too much of a hurry, and several expressed concerns he couldn’t be counted on to be a team player under the heat of governing.
I had gotten to know John pretty well in the lead-up to the primaries. I liked him. I had seen him campaign effectively, with discipline, and I watched as he gained some traction in the final weeks before the caucuses in Iowa, around the same time my campaign was taking off. John had not been able to stop my momentum anywhere except in the state where he had been born, South Carolina, but I’d come away impressed by his ability. He had run a good race, and we had never clashed on any big issues.
Teresa and I had always been impressed by John’s wife. Elizabeth Edwards was smart and funny and had gone through hell to have two beautiful children late in life, after their son Wade had been tragically killed.
John, Teresa and I had first gotten together for dinner in 2000 after we had both gone through the crucible of Gore’s vice presidential vetting. After talking about the Senate, politics, raising kids and our collective journeys, John and Elizabeth talked about why they had gotten into public service. Losing their son had changed their lives. John spoke movingly about getting that phone call every parent dreads and learning that their beloved son had been killed. He described something he said they hadn’t talked about before: the horror of seeing his son’s lifeless body and of holding him in his arms. They’d been through so much and somehow come out stronger for it as a family, with a sense of public purpose, a sense that they were together, living for their son Wade. It struck a chord. I heard John tell that story at the Senate Prayer Breakfast afterward, and I could see just how much he and Elizabeth had wrestled with their loss and its place in their lives.
As I considered John as my running mate, I did wonder about his ambition. I wondered whether he could remain committed to a joint venture if everything got hard, as politics and governing always, inevitably does. I thought back to Bill Clinton’s first couple years of the presidency. After losing Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton had been at an all-time low. Gore’s loyalty at that moment was critical. Could I count on the same from John Edwards? Something made me uncertain whether I could count on him for an eight-year partnership, which, in turn, would set him up for a presidency of his own.
I think in an effort to reassure me, John recounted a story he told me he hadn’t shared with anyone before. It was the story of Wade’s death and that moment alone with his body. Something unsettled me. It seemed too familiar. It was the exact same memory he had shared four years before at dinner.
I slept on the decision. I thought about how people find all kinds of ways to deal with grief; perhaps John recounted that same story the same way because it was the only way he could get through the pain of the memory. I wasn’t going to judge or put myself in his shoes when, thank God, I’d never lost a child.
I asked to meet with him again. We talked about the kind of partnership I was looking for in a running mate. John assured me he would never run against me. We would be a team for the long run. He used the word “family.”
I offered him the place on the ticket. Our families shared a wonderful cookout at the farm in Pittsburgh and stayed up late talking about the future. Teresa and I instantly took to their kids, Jack and Emma Claire, and their elder daughter, Cate. Cate was my daughters’ age, and the three of them clicked instantly. It felt good. The next morning, at a big rally in downtown Pittsburgh, I introduced John Edwards to America as my running mate.
Just as I had completed the vice presidential selection, I had another dra
matic decision to wrestle with, one with far-reaching implications that would end up looming larger even than choosing Edwards.
In a presidential campaign, some of the biggest tactical decisions about money and resources wholly alter strategy, because they can so easily restrain a candidate’s freedom of action.
After Watergate, with the best intentions of ridding presidential campaigns of the possibility that powerful donors could decide elections, Congress passed a law establishing the public finance system. The idea was simple: after each political party selects a nominee at its convention, the nominees would receive a check from the federal government to last through Election Day. The goal was parity between the campaigns, so elections would be decided by issues, policies and political skill, not money.
As campaigns grew more expensive and people found creative ways to dump more money into the system, the presidential public finance structure sprang leaks. The political parties’ national committees—the DNC and the RNC—could accept large-dollar contributions to spend on what were supposed to be “party-building activities.” The spirit of the law was meant to protect grassroots activity—getting out the vote. Skillful campaign lawyers on both sides reinterpreted that provision to include issues advertising. It grew into a huge loophole. So long as the television and radio advertisements didn’t say “Vote for president,” and so long as the advertising spending hadn’t been ordered by the candidates, ads were allowed. Finally, we passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation to close the “soft-money loophole.” Unfortunately, the bill would do nothing to stop shadowy groups funded by anonymous individuals from bankrolling advertising.
Still, as we planned our campaign, I had to conclude that, despite hiccups here and there, overall the public financing of general elections was better than the alternative. Since 1976, Democratic and Republican nominees had spent essentially the same amount of resources for the general election. The big decisions were centered on how to spend those roughly equal resources in the three-month slog from convention to Election Day.
Many on my team had been through the Gore campaign. They remembered bitterly how in October, just a month before the election, Gore confronted a dreadful choice about resources: Should he go all out in Ohio or in Florida? He couldn’t do both. No Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio. No Democrat who has won Florida has ever been denied the presidency. Gore didn’t have enough money left to fight in both states, so Al bet the house on Florida, where I am convinced he would have been declared the victor if all the votes had been counted.
Making a choice like that is a lousy situation to be stuck in when you’re talking about finding paths to winning the presidency. The electoral map in 2000 and 2004 wasn’t especially kind to a Democrat. There was little room for error. If you have only one path to victory and your opponent has many, that’s a tough hand to play.
I knew from the very start of my campaign that, come October, we did not want to be in the position Gore had found himself in. We wanted to be able to compete in both Ohio and Florida and, with John Edwards on the ticket, possibly make a run in North Carolina. Edwards promised to deliver his home state.
I knew that as soon as I said the words “I accept the nomination,” my campaign would be wired $75 million for the general election—money that had to last through Election Day.
But years before, Karl Rove figured out something just novel enough to roll a tactical hand grenade into the 2004 election. Rove is smart. The party in control of the White House chooses its nominating convention date after the other party announces its selection. For fifty years, the conventions were held roughly a week apart, sometimes two. Rove saw an opportunity to do something that had never been done before. He turned convention scheduling into a political IED. After Chairman Terry McAuliffe announced that our convention would be held from July 26 to July 29, the Republican National Committee announced its convention would happen five weeks later, during the week before Labor Day weekend.
I can’t blame Rove. After all, if the trigger to receive public financing is pulled the moment a candidate becomes the nominee, and you’re an incumbent Republican president awash in private campaign donations, why not schedule your convention much later in the summer? Why not force your Democratic opponent to spend every dime on a thirteen-week general election, while you could spend the same amount of money over just nine weeks?
That’s exactly what Rove and the Republicans did.
The overwhelming conclusion inside our campaign was that there was little we could do about it. Most everyone argued for conserving resources in August, so that after Labor Day, as we entered into the next season, we would be well positioned to compete with the Bush campaign down to the wire.
A few of my closest friends had a bold idea. They believed we did have an appropriate response to what the Republicans had done to weaponize the political calendar. David Thorne and Ron Rosenblith argued that with the unprecedented amount of money I was raising on the internet, we could opt out of the public finance system and control our own destiny in the general election.
After Iowa, I’d raised close to $180 million and I had about two million Americans signed up at JohnKerry.com. At the time, it was the largest email list in progressive politics. Our small-dollar fund-raising had soared in scale far beyond anything even Howard Dean’s netroots campaign had achieved. Now, millions more Americans were just about to tune in to the campaign. What if they were asked to fund a grassroots campaign?
Looking at it today the answer seems simple. But in the summer of 2004, it was an idea full of risks and unknowns. What if we hit a rough patch and raising money got harder? What if the grassroots donations slowed, as they had a long time ago for Howard Dean when his campaign cooled off? What if we ended up flat broke in October? What if a national tragedy—an earthquake, hurricane or, God forbid, a terrorist event—made political fund-raising unseemly and untenable one week or month when we were dependent on bringing in donations? What if this meant I had to take time away from places like Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan to go fund-raise in blue bastions like New York and California?
Besides, in politics, as in science, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. What if I stayed inside the public finance system but Bush opted out of it? It was the same dilemma I’d faced against Howard Dean, only worse: Dean had jumped first, opting out of public finance, making my decision easier. On the flip side, what if I opted out and Bush followed suit, which he almost certainly would have?
After four years in the White House, the Bush campaign had mastered data mining and direct small-donor fund-raising. Bush had about six million email addresses. We believed that grassroots momentum was with us—the agent of change running against the incumbent—but that was an awfully big bet to make. If Bush could match our small-donor, low-dollar fund-raising, then we were better off staying within the system.
The biggest hurdle for me, however, was that campaign finance reform was part of my DNA, and I had spent decades advocating for the public financing of campaigns. I knew that everything Rove and Bush were doing to tilt the calendar in their favor violated the spirit of campaign finance reform, but I also knew that everything I had fought for on the issue would be twisted if I were the first candidate to reject public financing for a general election. I faced a lousy choice between staying inside a broken campaign finance system to prove a point of principle or breaking out of that system and being attacked as a flip-flopper. The irony of Rove and the Republicans possibly attacking me on campaign finance reform was rich. It would have been the ultimate example of the arsonist riding a fire truck to the scene of the very house they had set ablaze. They had broken the system, but they stood ready to blame me. That’s politics. Furthermore, I was already being attacked for flip-flopping where I hadn’t, which prevented me from flip-flopping where I should have, because then I could have answered the charges effectively. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I decided it just was
n’t the right environment to make a big, complicated bet like this one. We didn’t need another distraction. I owned the decision. I was going to accept the nomination in Boston, stay within the campaign finance system and conserve our money in August.
The first night of the Democratic convention in Boston, I was in Philadelphia. The irony is, when you’re the nominee, you’re barely at your own convention: you are on the hustings, campaigning in swing states, taking advantage of the added voter and media interest that the convention attracts. I raced through a picturesque rally, speaking from the famous “Rocky steps” outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a magical rally at dusk, with crowds reaching far back into the setting sun. I remember seeing fireflies in the air. But we had to hurry: I wanted to be back at the hotel in time to watch on television as Teresa addressed the convention. I caught her by phone in my motorcade to wish her luck. It was strange to hear in the background the convention buzz in my hometown, when I was hundreds of miles away.
Back at the Hyatt, I leaned forward as the convention programming continued. The skinny state senator I had met in April took to the podium, keynote speaker Barack Obama. The speech absolutely soared. I was feeling the moment. Halfway through it, I walked quickly across the hallway into Marvin Nicholson’s room to share in the moment. I pushed open the door and stepped into a haze: Marvin had blocked the smoke alarm and was smoking in the hotel. I had to laugh at him. But despite the smoke, I stayed there, and together we watched the emergence of a political shooting star: Barack Obama had blown the roof off the Boston Garden.