One-Car Caravan
On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In
Walter Shapiro
Author's Note
When I was a boy back in the 1950s, movie theaters were tolerant places that allowed patrons to come and go as they pleased without this multiplex fandango about having to buy a ticket specifically for the 5:30 show. My grandmother was comically lax about bureaucratic details like starting times, so on my visits to New York we would invariably slip into a darkened upper Broadway movie house halfway into the performance. This, of course, meant that we would also leave in the middle of the next showing, stumbling down the aisle, blocking views, tripping over sprawled feet and upending popcorn containers with my grandmother apologetically murmuring, "This is where we came in."
As I write these introductory words during the summer of 2003, I feel peculiar elbowing my way toward the exit at a time when most Democratic voters are just beginning to follow the plot lines and the character arcs of the 2004 Democratic race. The difference is that this time—unlike my early movie-going adventures—I depart with only the haziest suspicions about how the story is going to end. It is tempting to stick around to chronicle what promises to be a spine-tingling drama about the lust for fame and power against the backdrop of the Great Game of democracy. Not since the 1970s can I recall a year in which the nomination fight was bathed in so much uncertainty as five, maybe six, candidates headed into the fall before the primaries with plausible scenarios for victory.
So why then have I chosen to conclude this presidential campaign saga before the end of the first reel?
Campaign chronicles, which traditionally appear after the election is over, have sadly become a dying genre. No matter how beautifully crafted and meticulously researched, these now-it-can-be-told political narratives suffer from a built-in flaw—readers know the inevitable conclusion before they get to the first page. Even as a card-carrying political junkie, I would find it hard to curl up right now with a backward-looking recap of, say, the 2000 race filled with passages that begin, "Bill Bradley was nervous..."
That's why I thought that it would be glorious fun to publish at the precise moment when Americans are becoming transfixed with the battle for the 2004 Democratic nomination. At the risk of sounding as earnest and self-congratulatory as a public-television station during a pledge drive, I also preferred to deliver my insights about the candidates and the process to Democratic voters before, rather than after, they cast their primary ballots. Moreover, as someone whose normal idea of adventure travel is crossing my Manhattan block against the light, I uncharacteristically succumbed to the daredevil factor. There was an irresistible challenge to clambering out on the high wire to describe the early phases of a presidential contest while the political ground kept shifting beneath my feet.
There were advantages to starting early. The most telling glimpses of the candidates came when they were just beginning to step into the cauldron of ambition. This was the time when their lines were still unscripted and their public veneers hung loosely like a suit that they had not yet grown into. Yet most of the stories from this period were buried in the back pages of the newspapers. With a war in Iraq and other breaking news stories, who can blame editors for decreeing that full-tilt coverage of the presidential campaign could wait until the hurly-burly leading up to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary? But what this means, in practice, is that most Americans tune in to the campaign at the point when the Democratic contenders have thrown off the last vestiges of spontaneity—and virtually every syllable they utter is an echo of an earlier speech, question-and-answer session or interview. Journalistic convention, with its emphasis on what happened yesterday, does not often allow reporters to backtrack in order to explain the roots of a candidacy. So in the normal course of political coverage, the meaningful material from the initial stages of the campaign ends up consigned to the memory hole.
It was also liberating to cover a presidential campaign before the living-room wars of dueling television commercials. I find it frightening to contemplate how much time I have squandered over the years sitting passively in hotel rooms with the TV set turned on so that I could monitor campaign spots. It is a strange calling that requires hours of viewing soporific programming in order to see the ads as voters do. (My vision of hell involves being damned to eternally watch the last half hour of celebrity fodder and happy-talk cooking tips on the network morning shows.) Campaigning is far more revealing when the candidates are still making all their pitches to Iowa and New Hampshire voters in person rather than merely using public appearances to reinforce the imagery of their thirty-second commercials.
There is a famous Twilight Zone episode about a man who is given a pocket watch with the miraculous ability to stop time dead in its tracks. Everything is frozen except the person who controls the watch. This being Rod Serling's universe, our hero decides to rob a bank and, of course, drops the watch as he is wheeling out the cash—and is thereby doomed to spend eternity in a lifeless place where the clocks never move. Even though I am a law-abiding sort, I confess that I craved that freeze-frame power in my headlong rush to write this book. How I longed for the candidates to go into the Witness Protection Program for a few months—or at least refrain from committing news—so I could catch up with everything I had missed. Here I was just adjusting to John Edwards's prowess as a fund-raiser in the first three months of 2003 when suddenly Howard Dean blew by him with his Internet-powered rocket pack. A presidential campaign waits for no man—not even, alas, a frenzied reporter with a looming book deadline.
As a result, I decided not to attempt to be comprehensive. I lavished my attention on those aspects of the pre-primary cavalcade that I found to be revealing, riveting or risible. Rather than filling in gaps in the chronology by calling on the work of my peers in the press pack, I have almost completely limited this narrative to events that I witnessed personally or reconstructed through my own interviews. (A major exception is the reporting by my research assistant, Yael Kohen, which provides much of the non-East Coast detail on political fund-raising.) Aside from public speeches, virtually all quotes from the candidates, their aides and other political players have been drawn from my own interviews.
My approach is also premised on an abiding belief in the present tense. As much as I admire books such as Richard Ben Cramer's magisterial What It Takes about the 1988 presidential race, I consciously chose to leave the task of delving into the life histories of the candidates to others. So there are no cameo appearances by college roommates, no tales from bygone political campaigns and no gotcha efforts to sift through birth certificates, arrest records or marital histories. What I have mined instead is the rich vein of political life from mid-2002 until mid-2003, that under-appreciated period when the candidates decided to run, first organized their campaigns, raised the early money and made their initial forays into Iowa and New Hampshire.
Alert readers may notice that a character named George W. Bush hovers in the background of this narrative without ever striding onto center stage. This neglect is intentional, since I didn't think that the world needs more bromides about the White House's message discipline, the president's fund-raising prowess or Karl Rove's purported genius. For all the claims by the Democratic contenders about their electability, the validity of these premises will only be tested after the primaries. Some things in politics are unknowable—and I saw no reason to camouflage my de
ficiencies as a seer with evanescent survey data, theoretical discussions of swing states and self-serving quotes from Republican operatives.
Contemporary political coverage revolves around the Poll-ish Corridor, that seemingly empirical outlet into the seas of public opinion. But too often polls foster a false sense of certainty and mask the volatility of the popular mood. This was especially true during the early days of the Democratic race and, as a consequence, there is minimal discussion of survey data in this book. Part of the reason is aesthetic—it is nearly impossible to compose interesting sentences built around percentage points and margins of error. Also, national polling about Democratic candidate preferences is virtually worthless months before the primaries, since it measures little more than name recognition and dimly felt and easily changeable impressions of the candidates. Iowa is a pollster's nightmare; it is nearly impossible to predict with precision which Democrats will make the major commitment to leave their warm homes on a blustery winter's night to attend the caucuses. New Hampshire polls are notoriously fickle, and placing too much weight on them in the early going minimized the potential for the late-breaking surges of Gary Hart in 1984 and John McCain in 2000.
Now for the true confession that undergirds my skepticism about polls. In 1984, covering my first campaign for Newsweek, I became bored with writing if-clauses and employing flaccid conditional verbs to describe the contest for the Democratic nomination. So in the issue of the magazine that hit the newsstands the day before the New Hampshire primary and arrived in many mailboxes after the votes were counted, I embraced the seemingly unequivocal polls and flatly declared that Walter Mondale's "lead in New Hampshire appeared unassailable." Flying to New Hampshire on primary day—and thereby missing the exit poll numbers—I arrived at the Sheraton Wayfarer Hotel, the press corps' favorite watering hole, blithely unaware of Mondale's stunning defeat. But I got no further than the hotel lobby before Michael Kramer, then the political columnist for New York magazine, stopped me to say, with words that echo in my ears even today, "You blew it!"
Enough reminiscences of bygone campaigns, since I have one final task to complete. I must explain why, following the model of What It Takes, I am presenting this book without an index. All of us on the fringes of the political game have stood in book stores riffling through the alphabetized final pages of a new book to see if we are mentioned. This egoistic ritual inspires either the transient joys of relevance or the lasting agonies of rejection. To spare everyone further emotional turmoil, I have dispensed with the editorial feature that has caused more heartbreak than the senior prom.
But there is also a serious reason for this willful omission. I did not write this book as a scholarly reference work or a dense study of the political process. Rather, it is the tale of one reporter's adventures with this season's political dreamers, who each fantasize that he will become the forty-fourth member of an illustrious historical chain dating back to George Washington. The joy of this book, I hope, is in the narrative, not in the roster of names mentioned on specific pages. So, please, put aside the yellow highlighter and the serious expression. Instead, if I am lucky, you will read it in bed late at night with a smile on your face.
Chapter 1
Rubes on the Road
In the beginning, there is only one declared Democratic presidential candidate, one car and one reporter.
As the lone car with a Vermont state trooper behind the wheel heads south toward a Democratic dinner in New Hampshire, the slate-gray late afternoon sky and the premature reddish tint to the foliage serve as mournful reminders that this is the last Saturday of summer 2002. But Vermont Governor Howard Dean is too wound up with coiled energy to be disheartened by the change of season. As outlandish as it seems for a candidate without money, campaign staff or national following, Dean is consumed by a seductive fantasy: the self-confident conviction that come July 2004 he is destined to be standing alone on the stage of the Democratic Convention, bathed in a sea of light, his hands held high in exuberant triumph, as he accepts the presidential nomination of the party of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton.
That may be the dream, but the momentary reality for Dean, the doctor turned five-term governor, is defined by a black-and-white photostat of the first brochure of the 2004 campaign season. From her perch in the front seat, Kate O'Connor, the governor's lone traveling aide, hands the folded, envelope-size "Dean for America" flier to the candidate for inspection. With pursed lips, Dean scrutinizes it with the intensity of a president reading a memorandum from his national security adviser. After noting several typos, the trim, buttoned-down Dean points to a photograph of himself on the inside flap and complains, "This picture makes me look like Dick Cheney. Like I have Bell's palsy." But the candidate's middle-aged vanity is assuaged by the cover photo montage, which shows him smiling in white shirt sleeves and tie against the over-orchestrated backdrop of an American flag and, yes, the White House. "This is really excellent," he says, before asking nervously, "Did we get a price on this?" There is something weirdly incongruous about the question. Here is a man who might, just might, someday be deciding the Pentagon's budget—and he's worrying about minor printing costs.
In a one-car caravan, it is hard for a reporter to maintain journalistic detachment. Soon Dean and O'Connor are debating a rarified question of political packaging: the merits of a phrase describing him as "an avid downhill skier." The candidate broods, "People think that skiing is a rich man's sport, that it costs as much as golf. So make it 'an avid outdoorsman.'" Dean turns to me, his backseat focus group, to validate his linguistic sleight of hand. I offer a political hack's judgment that I have never seen a single ski pole during a quarter century of reporting trips to Iowa—and, perhaps, the sport does have elitist overtones. As a populist alternative, I suggest, "an avid outdoor bowler." (In the end, the brochure merely describes Dean as "an outdoorsman...[who] hiked all 270 miles of Vermont's spectacular Long Trail.")
Nothing in politics compares to the enforced intimacy of sitting with a candidate in the backseat on a long car ride. There are no distractions, just two guys talking, as the one with the tape recorder tries to take the measure of the other who wants to be president while the topics range from Jean-Paul Sartre (Dean has an encyclopedic memory of his political philosophy courses at Yale) to the lineup of the 1961 Yankees. Up until now, Dean, the governor of a rustic bed-and-breakfast state, has been something of a stealth candidate—and this is only his third lengthy interview with a national reporter. During the early days on the campaign calendar, you can still pose an obvious question and receive a candid rather than canned response. So, I ask, how did you decide to run for president?
"It's a hard question to answer," Dean begins. "The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out. But the way it happens is that I'm very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it. I know that doesn't make any sense. It sounds like I'm just a very ambitious person who wants to be president."
I resist the temptation to mention that naked ambition has spawned countless other candidacies. But Dean does it for me: "There's a big difference between me and some of the other Democrats. There are two Democrats running because they want to be president, that's all they can tell you." (An obvious, if slightly petulant, reference to probable rivals John Kerry and John Edwards.) "I want to be president because I want health insurance, I want to balance the budget, I want a decent foreign policy. I want to lead people, not follow. I don't want to just do what it takes to be elected." (Whoops, here comes the stump speech.)
Surprisingly, Dean opts for something suspiciously close to honesty: "I decided in August [2001] that I wasn't going to run again [for governor]. It then quickly came to me that I had a choice of joining boards and swearing at the New York Times every morning and saying how outrageous it was. Basically, I was in a position where I thought I could run for president, so I decided that I was going to."
That
answer is about as unvarnished as an experienced politician ever gets. For all his sincere, if still vague, sentiments about health care, the economy and foreign policy, Dean is not running as an embodiment of a political movement. There were no "Draft Dean" websites or trial balloons floated by his fellow governors. Rather, faced with a life change in his early fifties, Dean recoiled at the vision of the road ahead—a few corporate boards, a blue-ribbon commission or two, the semi-retired, didn't-you-used-to-be-somebody, bland life of a respected former governor. Having stared into the abyss of irrelevance, Dean preferred to roll the dice at a craps table soon to be filled with other candidates who would arrive with huge piles of chips and chits earned in Washington.
Sure, Dean's impetuous decision to be the first declared candidate means arduous weeks on the long trail in Iowa and New Hampshire, endless car rides to small towns along two-lane blacktop, never knowing if at the next stop there will be a half dozen apologetic party officials or an eager crowd of two hundred Democrats, and evenings ending in the spare bedrooms of local supporters. This quest also brings with it a repetitive diet of breakfasts and lunches with New York investment bankers and other party fund-raisers (the Regency Hotel one day, the University Club the next), always wondering if practiced patter, a smile and a shoeshine are enough to close the deal. For the frugal and underfunded Dean, the closest thing to relaxation is solitary time in the backseat of his state car, a motorized luxury that he will lose when his final term as governor ends come January. Amid the blur of cities, handshakes and speeches, there will be days when Dean's air of crisp determination collides with rebuffs and disappointments, when his self-created candidacy seems to be held together with duct tape and stubbornness.
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 1