Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In
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Instead of clarity, the Edwards dialogues generated more false climaxes than a Beethoven symphony. Once again opting for hope over experience, the campaign staff decided that since the week before Christmas is a traditionally slow news period, it would be an ideal time for Edwards to unveil his candidacy. A few days after Edwards returned from Europe, Jonathan Prince, a former Clinton speechwriter now a senior strategist with the campaign, and Ginsberg made the trek to the senator's home to argue for the virtues of this tentative rollout date. A little skittish, Prince and Ginsberg organized their mission under the guise of showing the candidate the new campaign logo (surprise: a star-spangled flag motif). When they casually inquired whether the senator had any firm plans for the week of December 16, Edwards snapped, "I'm not going to rush this decision just to get a little more press."
Throughout this period, the questions that Edwards kept raising were similar to those previewed by Elizabeth: "What does it mean to be ready to be president? Is the time right? Can I improve my skills without undermining my long-term potential?" Veteran Pollster Harrison Hickman, who had advised Edwards since the 1998 Senate campaign, tried to rebut the I'm-not-sure-I'm-ready concerns: "What, you want to be a better talk show host? What skills and knowledge will you pick up being in the Senate for six more years? Part of the problem of staying in Washington is you end up trying to fill the expectations of the people who live here." Miles Lackey, the chief of staff in the Senate office, argued that by waiting until 2008 Edwards would end up staking his future on the one factor that he can't control: the political environment four years from now.
Edwards knew, ever so wrenchingly, that there are many things in life beyond his control. It is impossible for an outsider to gauge what role the memory of his son Wade (whose Outward Bound pin Edwards wears in the lapel of his suit jacket) played in his inner struggle over seeking the presidency. Neither Edwards nor Elizabeth ever mentioned Wade in any of the meetings at the house, but his presence, even six years after his death, hovered softly around both of them. An Edwards adviser who understandably did not want to be quoted by name explained, "Someone like John Edwards is painfully aware that life moves quickly and things are precarious. We never talked about it, but it has to be part of his thinking." Others in the inner circle suggested that Wade's death made Edwards impervious to the fears that govern the lives of other politicians, fears like losing an election. As Hickman put it, "After you have to get up on a table in a medical-examiner's office and hug your son good-bye, there's nothing they can ever do to you."
Right after Christmas, Edwards indulged in the most sybaritic luxury ever granted a would-be president: unstructured time absolutely alone. To escape both the flurry of phone calls probing his intentions and the clamor and chaos of a household revolving around two small children, Edwards retreated (as he often did before major trials) to the family's North Carolina beach house on Figure Eight Island near Wilmington. There, over three days, he finally made his decision. There was never a Eureka moment, just the gradual arc of inevitability. Discussing that period in retrospect, Edwards automatically lapsed into the practiced cadences of political message. "I went away for the purpose of deciding a couple of things," he said. "Whether I felt strongly enough about the direction that the country was going and the extent to which it needed to be changed. And, second, whether I brought a perspective to the presidency that was important for the American people who were largely being left out in my view. It was about that simple."
Really? C'mon, wasn't there a moment of who-me humility? Edwards had spent too much of his life before skeptical juries not to concede the obvious. "Of course, many times," he replied. "If I was looking for the single most powerful push-back against doing it, that would be it. Thinking why in the world me? Why should I be the person who could best represent the American people and lead them?" So, what convinced you that you were indeed that person? Rather than hinting at the depths of his soul-searching, Edwards returned to his campaign theme of soft-edged southern populism: "People like my own family and people whom I have seen my whole life not get the opportunities that I thought they were entitled to. That was really what did it."
Even though Edwards the Reluctant became Edwards the Candidate, he somehow could not bring himself to make an explicit announcement to his staff. (Such an admission would, of course, have made him Edwards the Confessor.) The senator's phone conversations with the campaign high command after he returned from the beach were suggestive, but curiously elliptical. Staffers were reduced to joking among themselves: "He'll never tell us directly that he's running because he's afraid that we'll leak it to the press." Even during a New Year's Eve meeting in Raleigh to plan the round-robin TV interviews on January 2 that would trumpet his candidacy, Edwards continued these odd circumlocutions. Driving back to Washington with Ginsberg and Robert Gordon, the legislative director on the Senate staff, Hickman said, "I hate to bring this up. But in all the conversations that he's had with me, both privately and publicly, he's never said, 'I'm going to run for president.' I've read a lot of the books with campaign tick-tock—Teddy White and the others—and candidates don't wait until they appear on national TV to say for the first time, 'I'm running.'"
Political reporters might well take as their muse the duchess in Alice in Wonderland who told a certain small girl with long hair, "Everything's got a moral if you can only find it." If I and my colleagues in the press pack can construct elaborate theories about a candidate based on a mere slip of the tongue during a campaign debate, then surely there are larger lessons to be derived from the month that this fresh-faced senator spent pondering the outer limits of his own ambition.
On the credit side of the ledger for Edwards are both his recognition of the need for solitude and his refusal to be stampeded into seeking the presidency by the restlessness of his staff. Setting up a campaign structure to make it possible to run inevitably creates the expectation that you must run. "John and I had several conversations about having to fight against that," recalled Elizabeth Edwards in a follow-up conversation. "It was necessary for him to say, 'You have to do it on its own merits.' And not because people expected you to or even that they turned down another job to take this prospective job with you."
But all that has to be balanced against the sophistry of his professed rationale for running. As Edwards told Matt Lauer in the Today Show interview that launched his campaign, "I want to be a champion for regular people, the same people I fought for my whole life, people like my family..." Who are the people that the other Democrats are fighting for? The Baker Street Irregulars? The issue is not Edwards's sincerity, but his outsize pride in his trademark phrase "regular people." Those two words, which Edwards somehow regards as the Rosetta Stone for deciphering his political essence, were the culmination of his lonely days at the beach. "The message came from me, nobody else," he said with the aggrieved tone that Lincoln might have used to defend his authorship of the Gettysburg Address. "Nobody else played a role in this message. This was me."
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No other mainstream Democratic presidential candidate put himself through anything comparable to Edwards's ordeal of indecision. The presidency beckoned, this was their moment, so there was no need to strut across the stage doing their rendition of "To be or not to be?"
This fits the modern pattern in which presidential candidates are self-nominated. Gone is the era when a trainload of cigar-smoking party leaders wearing derby hats would descend on the hometown of a respected governor or senator begging him to run. Just a half century ago in 1952, the nominees of both parties (Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson) had to be formally drafted with petition drives and write-in campaigns in the primaries. But the age of coyness vanished about the time Henry Cabot Lodge won the 1964 New Hampshire GOP primary without ever leaving his post as ambassador to South Vietnam.
All the men (and also, in a technical sense, scandal-scarred former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun) lusting after the
wide-open 2004 Democratic nomination are the spiritual descendants of Jimmy Carter, the ultimate self-made president. In his 1976 campaign autobiography, humbly entitled Why Not the Best?, Carter writes about meeting, as Georgia governor, all the 1972 candidates from Richard Nixon to George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. The lesson Carter derived from his initial exposure to the leading political figures of his day: "I lost my feeling of awe about presidents. This is not meant as a criticism of them, but it is merely a simple statement of fact."
Aside from Edwards, the most wrenching decision made by any of the 2004 hopefuls had nothing directly to do with the Presidency. The day after the dispiriting 2002 elections, Dick Gephardt, who resembled Sisyphus in his efforts to win back the House , stepped down as minority leader.
Two days later, on the Friday of election week, Gephardt was perched on a couch in his palatial, soon-to-be-relinquished leadership office in the Capitol. Over his head was a dramatic rendering of the romance of the Industrial Age—an oversize 1873 painting of the Eads Bridge, the first railroad crossing of the Mississippi River, which was slated to be returned to the Saint Louis Art Museum. Gephardt had been conducting continuous interviews since the election. Although his words were practiced, the anguish over falling on his sword was still audible in his voice. The renunciation of his leadership post was not exactly a surprise, since many had assumed that it would be the logical response to the expected Democratic defeat. But Gephardt insisted that he made the decision with his wife, Jane: "We came back here after the election and we sat most of the day at home. And we decided that I didn't want to do this any more. I wanted out." So what comes next, heh-heh? Gephardt, at this point, kept up the pretense of being elusive: "I want to do something different. What it is, I don't know at this point; I haven't figured it all out."
Fast-forward to my next conversation with Gephardt—a fast figure-it-outer who was now an active presidential candidate—in late January 2003, the day of the State of the Union Address. This time, because of a bomb scare, we took refuge in Gephardt's former hideaway office off the House floor, to which his staff still held the key. The walls, once filled with cartoons and other memorabilia from his 1988 presidential race, had been stripped bare. When I asked about the decision to run, Gephardt made a surprising admission: "It's always a hard decision. I guess the decision to step down as leader was harder."
Those words made me think of Bob Dole wandering forlornly across America in mid-1996, ruing the day that he let his handlers convince him that resigning the Senate seat he loved was the only way to demonstrate his determination to oust Clinton from the White House. But Dole was Senate majority leader, while Gephardt, if he had stayed on, would have been stuck with heading the toothless House Democratic opposition at a time when the Republicans had no interest in bipartisanship. Gephardt, in his early sixties, had come to a point in life when the House was not a home. His reasoning was understandable—having hungered after the White House for nearly two decades, he felt entitled to one final turn of the wheel. It was place your bets, up or out, and hopefully no lasting regrets if you lose.
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If you believe the venomous critics of John Forbes Kerry, he's been running for president since his prep-school days when he first realized the implications of the initials "JFK." Yet for all the sneering put-downs of his overweening ambition, here he was—as Kerry himself took pains to point out—only getting around to his first race for the White House after nearly two decades on Capitol Hill. Sitting in his Senate office on an early spring day in 2003, Kerry gestured toward a burnished leather sofa and said, "I didn't think about it for ten seconds in '92 when Paul Tsongas sat on that red couch and asked if I was thinking about running for president. He told me that he was, and I said no I wasn't." (Tsongas, a former Massachusetts senator who died in 1997, proved to be Clinton's most serious competitor for the 1992 nomination.) Kerry, like Gephardt, made preliminary noises about challenging Gore in 2000. Yet for a range of factors (impeachment, Gore's prowess, Bill Bradley's candidacy and, he insists, concerns about divisiveness in the party), Kerry never entered the fray.
This time there was no hesitancy, at least on his part. As Kerry explained, "I felt so frustrated and angry about the [2002] election, angry about what happened to Max Cleland, angry about the voicelessness of my party and determined to make a difference. That resolved it for me, fairly quickly and easily." Cleland, a Vietnam veteran confined to a wheelchair because of his war wounds, was defeated in his Senate re-election bid in Georgia by a vicious GOP campaign that assailed his patriotism.
Well, it wasn't quite that simple. There was also the Teresa factor. As a traditionally adoring political spouse, Kerry's second wife is to Nancy Reagan as a woodpecker is to a cooing dove. The most talked-about article during the Invisible Primary was a devastating June 2002 Washington Post portrait of the senator and his mega-wealthy wife by Mark Leibovich that began, "Teresa Heinz is getting up a full head of rage, while her husband John Kerry fidgets"—and went downhill from there, painting Heinz as a harridan and Kerry as her hen-pecked enabler. Teresa Heinz is the kind of figure who would be intriguing to a novelist but endlessly exasperating to a campaign staff. The Mozambique-born, European-educated widow of Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Heinz and heiress to a half-billion-dollar-plus condiment fortune, she is smart, often charming and frequently self-absorbed.
During a February interview in her Washington office at the Heinz Foundation, she demonstrated a detailed knowledge of health-care policy, offered shrewd insights about her husband and displayed her penchant for lengthy digressions that invariably guided the conversation back to her own life. As a longtime student of senators on both sides of the political and marital aisle, she understands the presidential bug. A young-looking sixty-four (call me naive, but I thought her secret was great genes and not, as she later revealed to Elle magazine, Botox injections), she appreciates the time-is-fleeting pressures on her husband as he nears that day of reckoning with a sixty-candle-power birthday cake. "This is his fourth term," she said, "and he like a lot of us, maybe it's age-related, maybe it's the state of the world, feels a certain urgency to talk about certain things." As she explained, "I think he viewed this as an opportunity to finally get things off his chest and go for broke. Just go for broke."
Teresa, who adopted the last name Kerry for the campaign, admitted that she was initially troubled by the notion of a presidential race because she was keenly aware of the strains that the campaign would put on her and the marriage. "We talked about it a lot over the last year or so, off and on," she said. "Mostly, it was how do we cope with this? How do we live our lives? Is it really the right thing for us at this time?" Dressed in a black jacket and skirt highlighted by a white crocheted blouse and a large bejeweled cross encrusted with diamonds, she explained her initial reluctance: "I cherish privacy. I like to go to the supermarket. I like to talk to the shopkeeper. That's a big sacrifice for me, because I love doing those things." (That quote has been shortened out of necessity, since she veered off on a tangent halfway through before returning to the topic of Kerry's presidential ambitions.)
Here was how she framed what to her was the Big Question: "Do I, caring as much as I do about so many issues, have the right for selfish reasons, personal reasons, not to be part of his trip? And the more I thought about it—hiking by myself and just thinking, just out there with nature and God—the more I thought that I have to help him because of what he had to say, the questions that he had to raise."
And what a strange, strange trip it is sure to be, both for Kerry and the most uncontained political spouse in recent memory.
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When is a dream born? It is a Washington cliché that every senator peers into his shaving mirror and sees the next president. But Joe Lieberman—no stranger to ego, although he masks it well—was different. His curious lack of the presidential gland didn't primarily stem from any concern over being too Jewish o
r too hawkish. Rather, before 2000, he always regarded himself as a man of the Senate. Even with his family, he never allowed himself to muse aloud, "Well, maybe, someday, if everything goes right..." Even when a conservative newspaper columnist would occasionally, very occasionally, suggest that the Democrats should abandon their foolhardy leftist ways and look to someone like Lieberman, the Connecticut senator would wave it off with a bemused air. As Rebecca Lieberman, his thirty-three-year-old daughter from his first marriage, recalled, "He never talked about running for president. He never talked about it with us."
Of course, everything changed as soon as Lieberman ended up a hanging chad away from the heartbeat-away job of vice president. Small wonder. Every vice-presidential nominee in the past thirty years, with the conspicuous exception of Geraldine Ferraro, has at one time run for president. Now that he was kosher-certified presidential timber, Lieberman was poised to be a candidate, except for his old-fashioned loyalty to Al Gore, the man who single-handedly raised the Connecticut senator's sights beyond someday being chairman of the Armed Services Committee.