But other than choosing up a campaign manager and a media-consulting firm, Dean—like a bridge player without a face card—stayed out of the frenzied bidding wars for political operatives after the 2002 elections. As a result, the Dean machine came together as the political embodiment of a Field of Dreams, not as the result of rigorous personnel planning. You could almost imagine a ghostly voice whispering in Dean's ear, "Build it and they will come." And so they did, one by one, pilgrims heading north, somehow sensing that something strange and wondrous was happening on the shores of Lake Champlain.
Take Courtney O'Donnell, who at twenty-seven had slaved in the penurious vineyards of losing 2002 Democratic campaigns from Janet Reno's gubernatorial primary in Florida to a hopeless Tennessee Senate race. Back in New York City after the election, she found herself attracted to a certain Vermont governor whom she had only seen on television. So on a snowy day in December, she drove to Burlington without an appointment or even the name of a contact person. "There was no one picking up the phones at headquarters and I didn't have a street address," she recalled. "All I knew from reading the papers was that it was located over a pub." Driving aimlessly around Burlington, she finally spotted a Dean sign on the building that the campaign then shared with the Vermont Pub and Brewery. After a few days volunteering in the tiny office, she stayed up until 3:00 a.m. constructing a set of charts for Ridder, who had just arrived in Burlington. The next day, after a fifteen-minute interview, Ridder hired her as his assistant, making O'Donnell the seventh paid employee in the Dean campaign. As Ridder said, "She answered all my questions, she had what I needed, so I was ready to hire her." She is now the campaign's deputy communications director.
Although richly emblematic of the Dean crusade, O'Donnell's story also captures the run-away-with-the-circus glories of presidential campaigns. Politics stubbornly remains the province of the messy life history, not the domain of executive search firms In every campaign, plum jobs are awarded to people like O'Donnell who simply arrive at the right moment and demonstrate their competence and dedication. These opportunities are the political equivalent of battlefield commissions in the army—and they stand as a continuing rebuke to the right-scores, right-schools, right-friends rigidities of the American meritocracy.
Even in late February, after the candidate became the troubadour of the anti-war movement, the Dean campaign retained its eclectic hiring practices. In far-off Moab, Utah, thirty-one-year-old Matt Gross was working on a first novel and contributing to a political weblog (MyDD.com) when he was roused by watching Dean address the Democratic National Committee. "When I saw the DNC speech, I realized this guy's going to take off," Gross said. "If I wait until June, somebody's going to have my job." After a series of inconclusive phone calls to Dean headquarters seeking a low-level job in his original home state of New Hampshire, Gross left his wife, his two dogs and his pickup truck behind in Utah and flew to Burlington for a few days. "My only objective on day one was to make it past the volunteer coordinator," he recalled. A chance conversation with the Internet-obsessed Joe Trippi prompted Gross to mention that he had been writing regularly for MyDD. A fan of the website, Trippi immediately asked, "How soon will it take you to go back to Utah to get your stuff?" Gross, tall and thin with closely cropped brown hair, recounted this Moab-to-main-chance narrative as he sat at the computer terminal that is now his command post in campaign headquarters—the spot from which he, as content director of the campaign website, has helped transform the technophobic former governor into the Energizer Bunny of the Internet.
It would be a misconception to exaggerate the Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland let's-put-on-a-backyard-musical aspects of the Dean crusade. When it came to hiring for the top positions in New Hampshire and Iowa, the campaign operated within the contours of traditional politics. Although thirty-four-year-old New Hampshire Dean coordinator Karen Hicks boasts a standard political resume (political director of Jeanne Shaheen's failed 2002 Senate campaign), she regarded her choice of a presidential candidate more as a calling than a cash transaction. Burned out after the Senate race, Hicks retreated to the Indian beaches of Goa in late November and December. "The process of being away and what was happening with Iraq was getting me pretty freaked out," she recalled. "I felt like I was coming back here almost in a time warp."
On her return, she had a series of conversations with the Kerry, Edwards and Gephardt campaigns about staff posts in New Hampshire. But Hicks realized that there were limitations on her choice of a candidate. "My value is my Rolodex," she explained, "and I couldn't get my friends to work for Gephardt." Still, the only presidential hopeful she unequivocally ruled out was Lieberman. Her reason for rejecting the Connecticut senator was both compelling and unique in the annals of the 2004 campaign: He once had her arrested! Working for the Naderite group Citizens Action in 1993, Hicks took part in a sit-in in Lieberman's office to protest the way he was dragging his feet on health-care reform. Lieberman responded by calling the Capitol police as Hicks and her group were dragged out while singing, "Say It Ain't So, Joe."
In early February, she briefly met Dean when he spoke to the state AFL-CIO. A few days later she had coffee in Hanover with Ridder, who almost instantly grasped that "she's a hotshot waiting to happen." He convinced her to ride around the state for a few days with Dean to get a feel for the candidate and the campaign. But there was skepticism in the Dean camp about entrusting New Hampshire to a woman who had never directed a statewide race. During their car talk, Dean never pressured Hicks to take the job. As she put it, "He's not a big sales guy." But the ambivalence cut both ways. Hicks was concerned about Dean's freewheeling, say-anything style that ran counter to the political dictates of message discipline. But she was impressed that Dean never flinched from a question in public or private. In the end the whole thing just proved too irresistible. As Hicks said, "With Dean, it won't be hard to convince a friend that this is The Guy. I can organize my way to victory."
But even as Ridder was tapping Hicks, they were playing taps for the campaign manager in Burlington. The amicable divorce between Dean and Ridder evolved over the first few months of 2003; like most breakups, it was not triggered by a single cause. Part of the explanation involved differing strategic visions. Ridder, and to a large extent Dean, expected to run a small, stealthy campaign designed to achieve a Gary Hart-like breakthrough on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Instead, in just a few dizzying months, Dean went from "Howard Who?" to "Howard Wow!"
Even though this Dean moment was partly created by his acerbic attacks on his rivals over Iraq, Ridder worried about creating lasting enmities with the party establishment, as Hart did in 1984. In contrast, Trippi, his replacement as campaign manager, reveled in the Dean spleen. Trippi had worked for Gephardt during the 1988 presidential season and displayed his incendiary style in Jerry Brown's 1992 scorched-earth primary campaign that bedeviled Bill Clinton until June. Even though the often disheveled Trippi and the buttoned-down Dean are stylistic opposites, they both come from the anger-management wing of the Democratic Party. Where Ridder wanted to court Democratic elected officials, Trippi was more inclined to shout, "Fuck 'em!"
Another important factor was what Ridder describes as Dean's "tight-fisted management style," which led him to complain to the candidate that he had been given "all the responsibility and none of the authority." Dean, accustomed to presiding over a governor's office that had fourteen employees, was slow to understand that he could not run the campaign from the backseat of a van in Iowa. "One of the difficulties I have with Howard is his willingness to let go," Ridder said, still using the present tense. But the candidate was also the political version of Scrooge McDuck. "When I presented Howard with a budget that had $6 million in overhead," Ridder recalled, "he just said it was way too high. He couldn't understand the salaries that people in politics were getting paid as professionals."
But Ridder also knowingly blundered into what may be the most dangerous place in Vermon
t—the spot between Dean and Kate O'Connor. On a certain level I don't fully understand O'Connor's reputation for internal ferocity, since as a reporter I have always found her to be engaging and rather self-effacing. But as Ridder recounted, "After I said to Howard in January that I wasn't sure what role Kate O'Connor could play in a presidential campaign, I wouldn't say that I was dead man walking, but I certainly was marginalized."
******
No one goes into Democratic politics for the money, but those who truly prosper are most likely to be media consultants. While pollsters and strategic advisers are usually paid a flat fee, ad makers also receive a portion (sometimes as much as 15 percent) of a campaign's TV buy. Even though presidential primary campaigns are more demanding, high-risk enterprises than free-spending Senate and gubernatorial races, it is safe to assume that the media-consulting firms for the leading Democratic hopefuls each stand to earn in the neighborhood of $1 million. (This is a guess, since the fees earned by consultants are camouflaged in the otherwise detailed expenditure reports that campaigns are required to file with the Federal Election Commission.)
This financial background is relevant in understanding Bob Shrum, the legendarily well-compensated roly-poly media consultant whose defection from Edwards to Kerry in February was treated in the Washington political community with the cosmic significance of Bill Gates leaving Microsoft. What Joe Klein, writing in Slate, called the "Shrum Primary" was a political fable with all the varying perspectives of Rashomon. There were grumbles from the Edwards camp that Shrum bolted after being told that his role would be limited to the behind-the-scenes task of making TV ads rather than serving as the public voice of the campaign. And cynics viewed Shrum's shifting allegiance as a measure of the political (and, yes, financial) viability of both Kerry and Edwards.
In quest of the Shrum version, I visited him in July at his new offices in Georgetown with panoramic views of the Potomac River. During our hour-long conversation, Shrum left the room to take phone calls from Kerry (just minutes before he delivered a major speech on homeland security) and the British Labor Party, another client. He took pains to show me a framed copy of the final draft of Bill Clinton's 1994 State of the Union Address, pointing out the last-minute changes that he had added to the text. Shrum's conversation was studded with references to his contributions to prior presidential campaigns: Ted Kennedy in 1980 (Shrum wrote his lilting "the dream shall never die" convention address), Dick Gephardt in 1988 (he and Trippi, a former partner, each take primary credit for the Hyundai ad that briefly revived the Missourian's campaign), and Gore's populist posturing in 2000.
Shrum, in short, was forthcoming about almost everything, save for many of the details of why he switched sides on the eve of battle. As the media consultant both for Kerry in his do-or-die Senate race against Bill Weld in 1996 and for Edwards in his 1998 maiden race, Shrum contended that he always stressed to both candidates that he would make no decision about his own plans until after the 2002 elections. He also emphasized that he never had a contract with Edwards for the presidential race. Still he acknowledged that he kept in close touch, mostly by phone, with Edwards during the crucial period in November and December when the North Carolina senator was wrestling with his White House ambitions. (Shrum's partner, Mike Donilon, was a frequent participant during the exhaustive deliberations in the Edwards living room.)
Ultimately, Shrum claimed, he went with Kerry because "he was the person who I thought would be the best president and have the best chance to win the general election." As Shrum told it, when he called Edwards from Chicago to inform him that he intended to move in a different artistic direction, "He was not happy about it. And for me, that was the hardest part of the whole thing."
Kerry, for his part, said that Shrum "knew that I was interested in his being involved, and it was really more his decision than mine." When Kerry hired Jim Margolis to make the ads for his unopposed 2002 re-election campaign, he told the media consultant that he might add someone like Shrum to the team for the presidential race. (Margolis confirmed this detail.) "I remember that conversation very well," Kerry told me. "I said, 'Will you have any problem with that?' And Jim to his credit said no and has not and does not. I think we have a terrific team as a consequence."
Edwards too may have benefited from Shrum's mid-course correction. As the presidential contender with the shortest political resume, Edwards could have easily been portrayed—albeit unfairly—as the southern-accented mouthpiece for Shrum's script. But as winter glided into spring, Edwards was in the curious position of a candidate who had successfully lined up the money to pay for his TV commercials but had no one to make them. Lieberman, who had been dangerously slow to organize his campaign after Gore's withdrawal, faced an analogous situation. Carter Eskew, one of Gore's media consultants in 2000, was supporting Lieberman, but he preferred to play a backstage role rather than dedicate himself to long hours in an editing room cutting TV spots.
The upper echelons of Democratic politics form a small, inbred community. That's why it was not entirely surprising that Edwards and Lieberman gravitated toward the same two media consultants: Chicago ad-maker David Axelrod and Washington-based Mandy Grunwald, who created Clinton's 1992 commercials and performed the same role for a New York candidate named Hillary in 2000. Axelrod and Grunwald were interviewed by both senators—and they described the hiring styles of these would-be presidents in similar fashion. Lieberman, who talked with the media consultants alone, was jocular and decisive. Edwards, who convened a series of meetings that included his top advisers and his wife, was lawyerly, methodical and slow to pull the trigger. In the end, each candidate proffered one offer—to the consultant who provided the most natural fit.
Axelrod recounted his meeting with Lieberman at Chicago's Drake Hotel, where the senator was staying. "He was thoroughly engaging," Axelrod recalled. "I felt comfortable with him within five minutes. Part of it, to be frank, is that I'm a Jew from New York, and he's like a million relatives." The problem for Axelrod, who envisioned a campaign built around populist outrage about Bush's record, was that "I couldn't get past Lieberman's politics."
Things with Edwards, in contrast, clicked from the outset. "There was a lot of discussion about why he was running and what his world-view was and what my worldview was," Axelrod recalled. He was initially hesitant to make the drop-everything-else commitment to a presidential race. But he gradually abandoned his reluctance during a series of meetings in late March and early April. "I knew I was buying the stock low," Axelrod said. "People view Edwards as a long shot. And indeed he is a long shot, though I believe the opportunity is there." In early August—before any candidate but the now rich-as-Croesus Dean was on the air—Edwards began airing three exquisitely photographed Axelrod ads in which the candidate talked to the camera about his share-cropper grandmother, his mill-worker father and his dreams of economic justice.
Grunwald—one of the rare women playing a major role in the 2004 presidential race of the equal-opportunity Democratic Party—came to Lieberman recommended by fellow media consultant Eskew and pollster Mark Penn. Describing her interview with the Connecticut senator, she said, "He was disarmingly funny at the beginning of the conversation, got right into the substance of strategy—and forty-five minutes later said, 'I want you. I want to hire you.'" During the same period in early April, she also met twice with Edwards, one a large group meeting and the other a sit-down with the candidate and Elizabeth. Grunwald felt the meetings went well. She was intrigued by Edwards's obvious potential, but she began to worry a bit about working for a candidate who seemed to agonize over every decision. So Grunwald accepted the Lieberman offer. Afterward her sister, Lisa, a New York writer, told her, "So you wound up going to the prom with the nice guy that you probably should have been going with all along."
Chapter 6
Iowa and New Hampshire
What third-class railway coaches were to Mahatma Gandhi, Southwest Airline
s is to Howard Dean during these early months of 2003. "If you get to the airport before we do, try to save us two places in Group A," instructed Dean aide Kate O'Connor. But as I arrive at the Southwest gate at Baltimore-Washington airport in the bleak pre-dawn hours of a January Saturday morning, I quickly spy Dean and O'Connor already clutching their oversize "Group A" early-boarding cards for the budget flight to Manchester, New Hampshire. As I join them, Dean looks up from reading the hockey news in the New York Times to gush, "I love Southwest. Because of Southwest, I've been able to spend three half-days in New Hampshire this week."
Dean sounds so enthusiastic, you could almost imagine him doing a commercial from the Oval Office: "Sure, I have Air Force One for my foreign trips. But as president when I want to move about the country, I fly Southwest." As Dean explains, every time he has to be in Washington, he flies back on Southwest via Manchester, holds a campaign event in New Hampshire and then makes the three-hour drive north to Burlington. This roundabout itinerary not only saves money but also boasts an inherent political logic, since nothing impresses the pampered voters of New Hampshire more than a candidate who shows up with the frequency of a UPS truck. You don't have to dangle a lamb chop in the window to attract the indefatigable Dean; he'll appear for the opening of an envelope, as long as it bears a Granite State postmark.
This morning Dean is a featured speaker at the quarterly meeting of the New Hampshire Democratic Party held in a Manchester elementary-school cafeteria decorated with crudely scissored paper snowflakes. Introducing the newly retired Vermont governor, state party chair Kathleen Sullivan says, "A year ago, people were saying that they didn't know him, but he's been here a lot. To win in New Hampshire, you have to cross a threshold so that people believe that you can be elected—and Governor Dean has crossed that threshold." When Dean starts off by reminding the 150 Democrats sitting on folding chairs that this is his twenty-third visit to the state since he began his uphill race for the White House, I find myself recalling Nelson Rockefeller's long-ago slogan in the 1964 Oregon primary. Mocking conservative rival Barry Goldwater's refusal to campaign in liberal Oregon, Rocky plastered the state with billboards pregnant with inadvertent double meaning: "He Cared Enough to Come."
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 11