Now, a month later, Cabrera is the former Gore staffer most coveted by other presidential campaigns. But he lacks the clothes to close the deal. He sheepishly alerts Lieberman recruiter Jim Kennedy—the senator's longtime press secretary now working for the post-presidential Bill Clinton—that his sartorial options are closer to PU than GQ. Retrieving what passes as his best sweater from the dry cleaner and still looking like a high-school student on his first field trip to Washington, Cabrera nervously arrives at the candidate's Senate office for the interview.
"I thought you'd be wearing sweatpants," Lieberman says by way of greeting. For the next fifteen minutes, Lieberman banters with Cabrera, whom he knows slightly from the Gore campaign, mostly asking questions about his hometown (Pomona, California) and his family. This is not the kind of probing interrogation that Cabrera had come to expect from a presidential candidate who would be picking the person to serve as the public face of his campaign. As Lieberman continues to crack jokes instead of breaking out the bright lights and rubber hoses, Cabrera realizes that this campaign could actually be fun. Finally, as the interview draws to a close, Lieberman asks if he needs more time to make a decision. "Yes," Cabrera says, "I'd like to talk things over with Vice President Gore." As for Lieberman, he's convinced. "We want you," he announces as if the matter were never in dispute. "I know what your concerns and issues are [a reference to matters like salary and title] and as far as we're concerned, they're settled."
(As Cabrera tells me this story, I find myself drifting back to 1976 when I was an impoverished writer for the Washington Monthly desperately angling for a job with Jimmy Carter's campaign. My wardrobe in that era was limited by both finances and, embarrassing in hindsight, taste. On the summer day that was to seal my political fate, I was wearing an exuberantly rainbow-hued Madras jacket, electric-blue pants and a drip-dry shirt. Suddenly the phone rang with the encouraging news that senior Carter aide Stu Eizenstat wanted to interview me in just twenty minutes before he caught a plane. Even though my outfit was not touted by dress-for-success manuals, I was filled with the youthful certainty that my coat of many colors could not possibly blind the Carter campaign to my inner merit. Boy, did I learn a life lesson! The look of horror on the face of Eizenstat, an uptight Atlanta lawyer, eloquently instructed me that the interview was effectively over before we had a chance to shake hands.)
For Cabrera, who was also courted by Howard Dean and John Edwards, it was the combination of Lieberman's avuncular tone and his decisiveness that made the difference. Every campaign takes on the personality of the candidate and, as Cabrera put it, "I now know why Senator Lieberman has people on his staff who have been with him for decades."
Cabrera had talked with Dean by phone, but the former Vermont governor, nervous about being able to afford extra staff, had said that he planned to wait a few months before hiring a press secretary. There was also a thirty-minute face-to-face interview with Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, that was closer to the law boards than Lieberman's laid-back approach. The senator, as he did during most first-time meetings, began the session by bluntly stating, "This is how I can win." In lawyerly fashion, Edwards then peppered Cabrera with questions: "What are my positives as a candidate? What are my negatives?" This friendly but arduous conversation ended without a formal job offer being made. (Edwards soon hired Jennifer Palmieri from the Democratic National Committee as his press secretary.)
A few days after his meeting with Lieberman, Cabrera tapped out an e-mail message to Jim Kennedy. Entitled "The Decision," it followed the familiar contours of a MasterCard commercial:
Cost of a new BlackBerry: $300.
A new campaign cell phone: $100.
Hearing Jano speak Yiddish: Priceless.
******
Just as the run-up to a wedding replicates all the stresses (money, in-laws, choice of china patterns) of a long marriage, so the endless presidential campaign mirrors the challenges of serving in the White House. That anyway is the best excuse around to justify our cockamamie presidential-selection system. The long and winding road toward November 2004, punctuated by the bumper-car bedlam of the primaries, tests the mettle and maturity of would-be presidents. If a candidate goes ballistic at a press-conference in Iowa or melts under the bright lights of a pre-primary debate, it is a safe bet that he will have problems with recalcitrant congressional committee chairmen, let alone French diplomats.
But nothing better approximates the challenges of the White House than the seemingly straight-forward task of selecting a campaign staff. For the presidency is, at its core, a management challenge. The choice of a pollster may not have the same global implications as picking the Pentagon boss, but the approach to decision-making is probably similar in both cases. Nothing better reveals a candidate's management style and philosophy than the personnel decisions inherent in constructing out of nowhere a $30-million national enterprise to win the nomination. And nothing more closely replicates the fateful choices that a soon-to-be-inaugurated president would have to make as he selects his cabinet and the roughly 400-person White House staff in the frenzied ten weeks following the election.
Yet many of the Democrats seeking the presidency in 2004 have never managed anything larger than a congressional staff. Dean, to be sure, was the governor of a Lilliputian state and Lieberman back in the 1980s served as Connecticut's attorney general. But only Bob Graham, whose tenure as Florida governor ended while Ronald Reagan was still in the White House, boasts anything resembling major-league administrative experience. There is a theory that suggests that voters instinctively sense that slipping an amendment into a congressional conference report and giving passionate speeches from the floor of the Senate does not add up to the best prep course for the presidency. After all, devotees of historical precedents point out that since the nineteenth century only two presidents (John Kennedy and Warren Harding) have moved directly from Capitol Hill to the White House. But while I worry about managerial expertise, I am also leery of such rigid historical determinism, since it requires premising an overarching theory on the hapless presidential races of Senators Bob Dole, George McGovern and Barry Goldwater.
What is puzzling, though, is how little press attention is devoted to how presidential hopefuls cobble together their campaign teams. A candidate can't simply go to the bookshelf and take down management manuals with titles like Who Moved My Primary? and The Leadership Secrets of Alf London. All campaigns are different, though the unhappy ones always provide the best stories. Every Democratic presidential contender is determined not to replicate the revolving-door 2000 Gore campaign in which the indecisive candidate changed strategies and discarded consultants like a hypochondriac with a permissive health plan. Even Lieberman, Gore's ever-faithful running mate, told me, "I didn't want to end up where Al was in terms that there weren't people around him with longtime histories with him." But there is more to constructing a campaign than simply putting on a bracelet inscribed with the acronym WWAD—What Would Al Do?—and then doing the exact opposite.
Each candidate must make a series of decisions as he assembles his staff. Does he place a premium on personal chemistry and decades of loyalty or entrust his fate to political hired guns with impressive pedigrees? Should he opt for youthful potential or jaded experience? Is he a micro-manager or a passive delegator of authority? Will he tolerate rival power centers or emphasize staff harmony? And, most of all, how will the candidate react when he hits those inevitable potholes on the road to the White House? Does he angrily purge his staff as Bob Dole did in 1988, literally leaving two ousted aides on the tarmac in Jacksonville, Florida? Then there is the model of Bill Clinton, who regrouped during the dark days before the 1992 New Hampshire primary and ended the indecisiveness of unwieldy, multi-operative conference calls by effectively placing James Carville in command of the campaign. Even more inspirational in some ways was the way that George W. Bush loyally stuck with Karl Rove and Karen Hughes after his humiliating defeat in New Ha
mpshire.
As the only Democratic contender to have run for president before, Dick Gephardt boasts the most clearly articulated theory of staffing a campaign. "I always wanted to use mostly people who I had worked with before," he said. "This [running for president] is hard to do. And for me, it was so much better and easier and more reasonable to do it with people who you worked with before. Especially some from '88. They know you and know what you want to do, and you don't have to explain it." The irony here is that the 1988 Gephardt campaign, as chronicled by Richard Ben Cramer in What It Takes, was notoriously fractious, with the cabals and purges traditionally associated with losing efforts.
But like a dysfunctional family that has been together so long that they have learned to adjust to each other's personal idiosyncrasies, the Gephardt team, at least in the early going, has been harmonious. As pollster Ed Reilly, who performed the same role in 1988, put it, "If you go through a fight like that, there's a bond." The campaign had an initial misstep when Washington lobbyist Tom O'Donnell signed on as campaign manager in December 2002 and then resigned within the month. His replacement, Steve Murphy, ran Iowa for Gephardt in 1988. Before he took the job, Murphy asked the candidate, "Dick, are you sure that Bill Carrick doesn't want to do it?" Instead, the California-based Carrick, the 1988 campaign manager, is the media consultant. Murphy, Carrick and Reilly, all in their fifties, laughingly refer to themselves as the "Cryogenic Corps." Other top staffers such as consultant Steve Elmendorf and press secretary Erik Smith are veterans of Gephardt's congressional leadership office.
Trying to characterize the staffs of the other candidates is a trickier enterprise, since they don't fit into a cubbyhole as neatly as the Gephardt operation. By reputation—though not by the actual early spending totals for salaries and consulting fees—John Kerry's campaign is seen as a behemoth on a par with General Motors. In early July, twenty-one senior staffers and advisers (eighteen of them male) attended a Kerry strategic-planning session on Nantucket. And after the opening-bell South Carolina debate in early May, Kerry dispatched two media consultants, two pollsters and a passel of press aides to spin webs for reporters. Gesturing at the oversize Kerry team, Dean media consultant Steve McMahon cracked, "It's the Noah's Ark campaign. They have two of everything."
Kerry's Washington-based campaign manager, Jim Jordan, a veteran of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, embarking on his first presidential race, may face the most daunting diplomatic challenge since Colin Powell tried to sell the Iraqi war to the Security Council. He has to cope with a phalanx of Boston consultants with long-standing ties to Kerry and battle scars from the 1988 Dukakis campaign. Throw into this volatile mix late-arriving media consultant Bob Shrum, who is a charming addition to any campaign as long he gets his own way. Then there is Kerry himself, the Democratic contender who most keenly relishes the feints and maneuvers of politics. This love of the sport can be an asset, but it also fosters a long-standing reputation for micro-managing his own campaigns. Before signing on as campaign manager, Jordan extracted from Kerry a promise that he would concentrate on being a candidate instead of moonlighting as his own consultant. "He's been remarkably trusting," Jordan said, and he's given us a tremendous amount of responsibility."
The Edwards operation is, well, curious. At times during the early months of 2003, it seemed less a campaign than a fund-raising machine and a candidate. This was a period when Edwards was shedding consultants while his rivals were augmenting their teams. Shrum, along with his partner Mike Donilon, defected to Kerry; Steve Jarding, who had fallen into disfavor while running Edwards's political action committee, enlisted with the Graham campaign. That left an inner core of the campaign that was both close-knit and a trifle jejune. As a well-respected young political operative who interviewed with Edwards back in January asked, "Where are the adults in the campaign?"
Like the acerbic Dean, whom he does not otherwise resemble, Edwards is blessed with preternatural self-confidence and conveys the impression that the master plan for the campaign resides primarily in his head. No matter what the organization chart says, the Edwards campaign is really a series of concentric circles revolving around the candidate and his wife. "He's very clear about his priorities," said campaign manager Nick Baldick, who ran New Hampshire for Gore in the 2000 primary. "He'll say, 'I want you to do X, Y and Z.' But then he lets you do it. He doesn't expect to be involved in figuring out the budget for Ohio."
Lacking the longtime national political connections of a Gephardt or a Kerry, Edwards initially assembled his team from alumni of his 1998 Senate race (veteran pollster Harrison Hickman and twenty-eight-year-old communications director David Ginsberg) and upwardly mobile political warriors attracted by his potential (Baldick and speechwriter-strategist Jonathan Prince from the Clinton White House). The balding thirty-five-year-old Baldick, who joked, "I wish I had a candidate who looked older than I do," first met Edwards in mid-2001. At the time, Baldick was searching for a mount for the 2004 presidential race much like a jockey checking out thoroughbreds in anticipation of the Kentucky Derby. He had three criteria: a candidate he liked, a candidate who could win the general election and a candidate who believes what he says. (This last factor was a telling reflection of the political culture.) Baldick explained his emphasis on viability in the general election: "If I'm I going to do all this, and be away from children and my wife, I just couldn't spend my time working for a guy who can get his butt handed to him."
******
A presidential candidate with just one aide is akin to an impoverished nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat trying to keep up appearances in three squalid rooms with only his samovar and long-suffering manservant for company. Throughout most of 2002, Kate O'Connor was the Howard Dean campaign. She was the person most likely to pick up the phone if you called the fledgling campaign's Burlington office, and she and a Vermont state trooper were the governor's only companions on the road. Small wonder that the thirty-nine-year-old, brown-haired O'Connor laughingly calls herself "long-suffering," although others who know her well from Vermont politics prefer such descriptions as "territorial" and "overprotective." Having worked for Dean since he was a part-time lieutenant governor, O'Connor exudes small-town Vermont—neither flashy nor sophisticated, but quietly competent and blessed with a sense of the comic absurdity of the original rickety venture. Each time she's asked if she has a family, O'Connor gives the same answer, "If I had been married when this campaign started, I wouldn't be by now."
The initially underfunded Dean, taking a page from Jimmy Carter's 1976 playbook, prefers staying in the homes of his supporters. "He's just cheap," O'Connor explained. The candidate's disdain for hotels meant that his traveling aide found herself consigned to the second-best available bedroom, which invariably belonged to the youngest child in the family. So she spent her nights sleeping on undersize single beds in rooms decorated with storybook mobiles, teddy bears and PlayStations. O'Connor, who has mastered the trick of packing for an entire week in a single carry-on bag, reveled in small luxuries, such as discovering that she was being upgraded to a foldout couch on a trip to Iowa.
In a presidential campaign, the first thing to go is memory, since the brain is ill-equipped to keep track of the ever shifting kaleidoscope of strange towns and strange beds. When CNN filmed me in Iowa before the 2000 caucuses for a Jeff Greenfield segment about journalistic geezers on the campaign bus, the question that left me comically sputtering with confusion was a simple query asking where I had been during the peripatetic prior week. O'Connor has developed her own way of coping with the amnesia that afflicts us all: She mails postcards from the edge. Whenever she arrives in a new place, she dashes off a postcard to her parents back in Vermont. "My parents are keeping all the postcards in a scrapbook they insist they'll give to me when I'm in the White House," she said during the early days of the campaign. "But I tell them to save them for when I'm so broke after we lose that I'll have to move in with them."
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nbsp; During this start-up period, Dean was both reluctant to hire staff since he would have to pay them and flattered that his self-created crusade was beginning to attract interest from Democratic operatives with actual campaign experience. But given a choice between penny-pinching and proven political talent, Dean's frugality won every time. As the candidate admitted to me in September 2002, "We're unlikely to get the people that everybody has read about in the Washington Post because we're going to be a come-from-behind insurgent campaign." To illustrate his point, he mentioned a recent phone call that he received from a political pro who told him, "You better talk to me soon, since I'm thinking of going with Edwards." In a voice thick with scorn, Dean said, "That's not a conversation we're ever going to have—that guy's an opportunist." Instead, Dean envisioned a staff who would mirror his own passions: "I want people to have some belief in me or the policies that we're talking about. I want people to be working for a cause, not just a paycheck."
The next month, October, Dean chose as his campaign manager Colorado political consultant Rick Ridder, a veteran of the Gary Hart and Bill Bradley presidential campaigns. Even though Dean had some national political connections from his days as president of the Democratic Governors Association, it was telling that he bequeathed the direction of his campaign to someone whom he met for the first time on a campaign trip to Colorado in July. But then Dean scorned most Washington-area consultants as mercenaries, an attitude that stemmed from the treatment he received as a client in his low-budget campaigns for re-election. The conspicuous exception to this disdain was Dean's longtime loyalty to the Virginia media firm run by Joe Trippi and Steve McMahon, which had made the commercials for his gubernatorial races and signed on early for the presidential campaign.
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 10