Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In
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Throughout most of 2002, Lieberman was animated by the intuition—more a hunch than any solid nugget of information—that Gore wouldn't do it. But by late fall, as Gore roared back in the headlines with his book tour and a foreign-policy speech assailing Bush's Iraq policy, Lieberman began to develop a frisson of doubt. After all these careful if-I-run preparations, was his career again destined to be defined by a near miss? Lieberman, though, was absolutely certain about one thing: Gore had said he would announce his decision in early January. The senator expected to learn more when the two of them got together at Gore's Washington-area home on Monday morning, December 16, for a long-scheduled chat.
But Lieberman didn't have to wait. Instead, the news broke mid-afternoon Sunday. Lieberman had just returned from Connecticut to his Georgetown home in one of Washington's rare gated communities. His wife, Hadassah, was in New York City, and the senator was sharing the house with their fourteen-year-old daughter, Hani. Suddenly he got a message from a Senate staffer on his BlackBerry wireless console: There's a rumor that Al isn't running. Lieberman and his daughter immediately switched on CNN to learn that Gore would indeed announce on 60 Minutes that he had chosen not to be a candidate. A surge of adrenaline shot through Lieberman as he thought, This is what I hoped for, this is what I dreamed about and, uh-oh, this is just the beginning of a long and grueling ordeal that can end who knows where. Hani, a deeply religious teenager, let loose with what even Orthodox rabbis would agree was the only appropriate response: "Holy shit!"
About an hour later on this BlackBerry Sunday, Lieberman received a text message from Gore formally confirming everything and asking to postpone their meeting so that the former vice president could work through his must-call list. When Matt Lieberman, a teacher in New Haven, got through on a low-tech device called the telephone, he found his father's mood to be well-modulated enthusiasm (more "How about that?" than "Yippee!") mixed with an undertone of seriousness about the gravity of the undertaking. At the moment, the mostly vacationing Lieberman loyalists were a far-flung lot, since they had been operating under the assumption that the first hints of a Gore decision would not come until after Christmas. So the residents of Lieberworld—the loyalists and staffers plus the senator and his family—got together on a conference call that evening and merely decided that Lieberman would hold a Monday press conference to announce that he "probably is a candidate." But that was a mere fig leaf of plausible denial. For during the call, Rebecca Lieberman concluded, "It's definite all right. We're doing this."
The yarmulke was in the ring.
******
As the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham was rather good at keeping secrets, especially big ones about himself. Graham didn't lurk in the shadows like a CIA agent operating a safe house in Damascus. The sixty-six-year-old Florida senator logged more appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows in 2002 than any other public figure. Rather in the spirit of Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Graham was adept at hiding the truth in plain sight. Though he intimated this to no one outside his immediate family, Graham had spent most of 2002 contemplating a bid for the White House.
This reticence was largely based on Graham's conviction that any hint of partisan ambition would undermine the joint Senate-House inquiry into the intelligence failures leading up to September 11, which he had been co-chairing with his House counterpart, Porter Goss. Ever disciplined, Graham didn't even explicitly raise the topic of a presidential race with his wife Adele. But as she recalled, "When he was discussing the problems with the intelligence investigation, I could tell he was thinking about it. You don't have to say it to feel it."
At a family Thanksgiving, Graham jettisoned this don't-ask-don't-tell policy. He felt liberated because the congressional 9/11 investigation was finally completed (although the eight-hundred-plus-page text of the report was not released until July 2003). The senator and his wife were spending the holiday at one of the places he loves best: the farm in Albany, Georgia, where Grahams have been raising Black Angus cattle since the 1920s. With them was the eldest of their four daughters, Gwen Logan, and her family, who had driven up from Tallahassee. Unlike anyone else, Gwen had actually been talking with her father about the presidency, off and on, throughout the year. Now she put it to him directly, "Dad, do you have the desire to do this?" Graham admitted that he had the yen. He recalled the words of his late sister-in-law, Katharine Graham, that every president she ever knew had "the depth of passion to do all the difficult and sometimes unpleasant things necessary to be elected and serve." Suddenly the White House, rather than the Black Angus, became the dominant weekend topic. When Gwen and her father wearied of their own suppositions and speculations, they went on-line to sift through the political news and then plotted some more.
After thirty-six years of elective office, including two terms as governor and three in the Senate, Bob Graham is the most successful politician in modern Florida history. Yet rather than immediately assembling a team of veteran advisers to map out a late-starting presidential race, Graham did nothing for two weeks. Absolutely nothing. Finally, without giving a reason, he asked his Senate chief of staff, Buddy Menn, to arrange a private meeting with the most famous political strategist in America not named Karl Rove.
James Carville was the first outsider to whom Graham confided his deep-cover aspirations. The thirty-minute chat at the senator's Capitol Hill townhouse was conducted in the friendly but formal fashion that is Graham's natural metier. No stranger to such conversations with would-be presidents seeking their learner's permit, Carville offered his standard advice about the rules of the road: "You've got to know why you're running...It's not a position, it's a job...The one thing you know in every instance without fail is that the person with the most money in the bank on January 1 of the election year gets the nomination." Graham, famous for his color-coded notebooks in which he records the hour-by-hour details of his day, jotted down the highlights of Carville's lecture. Although Graham never said anything definitive, Carville left the townhouse thinking, "Hey, this guy's going to run for president."
Four days later, on December 13, ABC's "The Note" ran this intriguing one-sentence item: "For those who think the Democratic field is pretty set, what would you say if you heard that Senator Bob Graham of Florida has initiated some 'serious discussions' with people about whether he might put together a strong 2004 presidential campaign?" But the senator, afflicted with what seemed to be a case of the slows, still did nothing overt beyond getting ready for a six-day, pre-Christmas cruise to Mexico with Adele. Graham was literally at sea when Al Gore made the announcement that turned the presidential race into "Anything Can Happen Day" for the Democratic Party.
For all his senatorial solemnity in Washington, Graham's hallmark in Florida is his "work days," media stunts in which he tries to replicate the on-the-job experiences of his constituents, doing everything from mixing mortar to grooming circus animals. Work day no. 385 on December 23 involved no heavy lifting; the gray-haired senator was slated to spend the day at Radio Carnivale in Miami's Little Haiti section. It began with an appearance behind the microphone on a morning call-in show. There, in response to a series of questions about his future plans, as some callers even mentioned the White House, Graham blurted out, "I'm seriously thinking about options, including the option of running for president." Never before in the nation's proud melting-pot history had anyone ever unveiled a presidential candidacy on a Haitian-American radio show. (As Graham later explained to me, his logic for opting for Radio Carnivale over, say, Meet the Press was simply that "I didn't want to be disingenuous.")
The meticulous Graham, of course, had brought along to the radio station his tiny green notebook to chronicle the day's events, large and small. Arriving at 7:45, he wrote, "Difficulty opening door—what if they had a radio show and nobody could [get in]." Entering the studio at 7:55, he dutifully noted "round table—2 mikes," detailed his pre-interview preparations ("cle
ar throat"), and mentioned that the announcer boasted that he was "the only talk show host with a USS," which is Graham's acronym for "United States Senator." Later in the broadcast, he described drinking "coffee—heavy sweet & sugar." Most of Graham's thirteen pages of jottings for the day referred to the concerns of the senator's Haitian-American constituents.
Hey, haven't we buried the lead? What about Graham's bombshell revelation that he was running for president? History should note that Graham devoted exactly two entries, totaling fifteen words, to the entire topic. During the call-in portion, sometime after 8:00, he scrawled, "repeated urging to run for President." Around 8:45, Graham also jotted down the words of the host who mentioned that his senatorial guest may be "moving to a new job [on] Pennsylvania Avenue." In short, running for president got equal billing with Graham's summary of a news break: "9:45—traffic—many accidents."
Others close to the senator, though, were more literarily exuberant. Adele Graham, who started keeping her own set of notes on the presidential race just the day before, wrote, "'Oui,' is the sound of enthusiasm coming from Haitian Carnivale Radio. Over and over, Bob was asked if he would run for president—and finally a child brought forth a positive response. I was listening and heard a confirmation of what I had expected. The press filled in the details throughout the day announcing the possibility of a presidential run. Our youngest daughter was very surprised. Our oldest daughter [Gwen] was his greatest advocate. All four [daughters] expressing comments of excitement and concern. The phone began to ring—longtime friends who had suggested it for years."
Two weeks later, the Grahams were back in Washington, returning home after a dinner across the Potomac in Great Falls, Virginia, with their daughter Suzanne and her husband, Tom Gibson. As Adele described it in her journal, "Bob is on the right path. A private breakfast with Warren Buffett. A ride by the White House on the way home from dinner with the Gibsons with [Bob's] statement: 'Maybe we'll be in that house over there in a couple of years.'"
Chapter 4
The Money Primary
As John Kerry peers down the long conference table at his two dozen breakfast companions on this mid-December 2002 morning, it is easy to imagine that he sees dollar signs along with such familiar faces as investment banker Felix Rohatyn. Assembled in the Park Avenue office of equity-fund manager Alan Patricof are some of Manhattan's leading Democratic fund-raisers, a group shell-shocked and adrift following Al Gore's precipitous withdrawal from the presidential race just two days ago. This long-planned meet-the-candidate session involves nothing so crass as the exchange of campaign cash. Rather, it is akin to a backer's audition for a Broadway musical. If the would-be theatrical angels leave humming the title tune, they will undoubtedly ante up later.
Suffice it to say that I am probably the only person at the table who worries about paying his monthly American Express bill. I had originally gone to see Patricof, whom I knew socially, after word had leaked out that he had gathered a small group to hear a preliminary pitch from General Wesley Clark, that intriguing figure always hovering on the fringes of presidential possibility. Patricof mentioned that I also had just missed a closed-door breakfast with the little-known Howard Dean. Then he invited me to the Kerry tryout and upcoming sessions with the other candidates. It was a surprising offer, since reporters are rarely permitted to witness the most clandestine courting ritual of the Invisible Primary—the wooing of checkbook Democrats. So here I am, feeling like I just landed a walk-on role in the political version of Upstairs, Downstairs.
After two trips with Kerry during the run-up to the 2002 elections, I am familiar with his standard pitch to Democratic activists in New Hampshire and Iowa. What intrigue me are the ways that he adapts his spiel to appeal to this politically sophisticated Manhattan audience. Running through his resume, for example, Kerry emphasizes the anti-war aspects of his Vietnam persona rather than the medals he earned as a navy officer. Liberated from worrying about how his comments might come across in tomorrow's newspapers, Kerry is scathing about the Democrats' failure to offer a coherent message during the off-year campaign and the refusal of his Senate colleagues to approve legislation establishing the Department of Homeland Security before the election. Kerry does not, however, go so far as to point out that the politically ill-advised battle over the lack of union protections in the Bush administration's homeland-security legislation was orchestrated by Joe Lieberman.
Even though Kerry is the only man in the room who removes his suit jacket in an effort to appear informal and relaxed, he comes across as tense, defensive and curiously tone deaf. Keenly aware of the recently orphaned Gore contingent in the room, Kerry makes a maladroit effort to empathize with the former vice president. In a bizarre biographical riff, Kerry likens Gore's bowing out to his own long-ago decision not to mount a second attempt to win a Massachusetts congressional seat in 1974 after losing an initial effort in 1972. Kerry portentously explains that he chose instead to give his support to Paul Tsongas because he didn't want to contribute to the Democratic divisions in "our country...er, my state, my congressional district."
By this point, Kerry is beginning to lose his audience; the man sitting across from me is visibly reading the New York Times. Before he answers questions, Kerry first poses a rhetorical one of his own: Can a Democrat from Massachusetts win the White House? His response, an almost word-for-word repetition of an argument he made to me in October, is that Massachusetts is not the liberal bastion that people imagine. Four of the state's last five governors have been Republicans (Kerry leaves unmentioned that he served as lieutenant governor under the exception, a fellow named Michael Dukakis), Massachusetts voted for Ronald Reagan both times and in the 1976 presidential primary, the state backed Scoop Jackson, the most conservative Democrat in the field. As Kerry revs up the way-back machine, I half expect him to mention that a Massachusetts Republican senator blocked the League of Nations in 1919.
Kerry's presentation provides the first intimations of a flaw in his candidacy—he tries so hard to be reassuring and is so conscious of the "Massachusetts liberal" label that he fails to make clear his rationale for running. Stressing his own moderate credentials and pandering a bit to presumed Wall Street sentiment, Kerry points out that he backed the 1996 welfare reform legislation and has supported a wide variety of business-oriented tax cuts. He speaks so effusively about his tax-cutting zeal, in fact, that several Democrats in the room mistakenly assume that Kerry voted for the deficits-be-damned 2001 Bush tax bill.
During the forty-five-minute question period, Kerry candidly outlines his fund-raising plans. Brimming with confidence, he declares that he can raise at least $30 million before the primaries, which, with federal matching funds, translates into a hefty nearly $50 million campaign budget. My ears perk up as Kerry casually mentions his intention to participate in the matching-funds program, under which the government doubles individual campaign contributions up to $250, Although he never spells out the significance of this declaration, I grasp it immediately. It means no ketchup money from the funds he jointly shares with his Heinz heiress wife, Teresa. Under the law, a candidate who donates more than $50,000 to his own campaign is automatically barred from receiving federal matching funds.
Kerry also serves up a lengthy and factually accurate exegesis of how George W. Bush corralled the 2000 GOP nomination. The secret was that the leading Republican fund-raisers collectively decided in early 1999 to unite around Bush, thereby depriving such potential rivals as Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole and, yes, Dan Quayle of the cash to survive the 1999 preliminary skirmishing. That's why the iconoclastic John McCain ended up as Bush's only serious challenger. Embedded in Kerry's narrative is an obvious lesson for Democrats who want to avoid a fratricidal nomination struggle in 2004. When Patricof asks about the potential for a divisive primary fight, Kerry makes this message explicit: "Alan, it's up to you and the rest of the people in this room. You can coalesce around a candidate and
squeeze out everyone else. Or we'll have to depend on everyone being on good behavior [in the primaries]."
******
Kerry's unite-around-me appeal prompted memories of a boast that Gore adviser Ron Klain made to me back in mid-1998 when the vice president was trying to clear the field for an unchallenged romp to the 2000 nomination. "There are only 30,000 proven big givers in the Democratic Party," Klain said with unequivocal certainty. "And we've already signed up 27,000 of them. There's no way that anyone can raise the money to oppose Gore." Whoops! What the Gore high command failed to consider was that "Dollar Bill" Bradley had carefully nurtured his own fund-raising base outside those 30,000 big-ticket donors. While Bradley had liabilities as a candidate, the former basketball star was able to match Gore dollar for dollar until he was upended in the New Hampshire primary.
These cash-and-Kerry fantasies similarly misjudged the dynamics of the 2004 money primary. In a contest without an obvious favorite, there is small incentive and large risk for fundraisers to prematurely anoint any candidate as the Daddy Warbucks of the Democratic Party. If they bet on the wrong horse, they could end up following the next Democratic administration on CNN rather than from, say, the embassy in Stockholm. The GOP's 2000 rally-around-the-president's-son movement to Bush reflected the ingrained royalist tenor of Republican presidential politics; the disorganized Democrats, in contrast, have consistently failed to clear the path to the nomination for anyone, even for an incumbent president like Jimmy Carter in 1980. A handful of glowing news clips, some promising New Hampshire polls and a consultant-heavy campaign staff were not nearly enough to cloak Kerry in an aura of inevitability.