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Once upon a time—that is, as recently as 1992—the presidential caucuses and primaries unfolded at a sensible pace that encouraged deliberation by the voters and, not incidentally, provided political reporters with a natural narrative arc filled with exciting reversals of fortune and dramatic comebacks. Back then, February belonged to Iowa and New Hampshire, which winnowed the field; the cluster of southern primaries in March known as Super Tuesday reduced the contest to an undisputed front-runner and a desperate challenger; the race was generally decided when the big industrial states such as New York and Illinois weighed in come April; and any remaining doubts were dispelled as California, Ohio and New Jersey went to the polls on the first Tuesday in June.
But then—hiss! boo!—the Republicans ruined everything in 1996. California jumped its primary to the first Tuesday in March in deference to the outlandish presidential fantasies of GOP Governor Pete Wilson. New York moved up as well, as Al D'Amato gamed the system to boost his Senate patron, Bob Dole. The result was a slam-bang-thank-you-ma'am calendar that effectively truncated the presidential race from four leisurely months to three pinballing weeks. This was politics reshaped to fit the attention span of an eleven-year-old boy weaned on Mortal Kombat video games and computer-generated movie mayhem.
Sadly, the leaders of both parties quickly learned to love this new fast-forward primary schedule. No longer did they have to worry about protracted and divisive primary fights filled with snarling attack ads and belittling debate epithets. Instead of the uncertainties of democratic decision, they now had de facto nominees by early March. And since the general election campaigns of 1996 and 2000 were largely funded with soft money, the unseemly haste of the primaries permitted both parties to concentrate their energies on raking in the five- and six-digit checks that paid for the spate of TV spots that so elevated the political dialogue.
It was a wonderful system unless, of course, you had the misfortune to be a voter. In recent years, all the civics-book verities about democracy seem to have been subordinated to the selfish needs of a bipartisan $2-billion-plus-per-campaign-cycle, multi-tentacled syndicate that might be called Politics, Inc. The central beneficiaries of this closed-loop system are the political parties, the consultants, the spin doctors, the imagemakers, the pollsters and the local television stations that jack up their ad rates before an election. The political press corps, so cynical about the motivations of most candidates, seems to be curiously uninterested in the large financial benefit that their most indispensable sources—the consultants—derive from free-spending campaigns. Now that I have gotten that screed out of my system, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming.
The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, have explicit rules that protect the folksy rituals of Iowa and New Hampshire with the political version of the Endangered Species Act. In 2000, the Democrats retained their traditional rule barring any state, save for the favored duo, from holding delegate contests before the first Tuesday in March. Consequently, after Gore edged Bradley in New Hampshire on February 1 (the earliest primary date in history), the Democrats went dark for five weeks. On the Republican side in February, John McCain electrified the nation with his lightning-round challenge to Bush in the South Carolina and Michigan primaries—states where the Democrats were consigned to the sidelines. As former South Carolina Democratic chairman Dick Harpootlian recently said to me, "If Bill Bradley and Al Gore had come in here and spent money, it would have been dynamic for party building."
This history, arcane though it may seem, explains why the Democrats most likely will have selected their 2004 nominee so early in the year that most Americans will still be mistakenly scrawling "2003" on their checks. In a classic example of fighting the last war, the Democrats eliminated the South Carolina problem and the five-week gap that so bedeviled them in 2000 by advancing the primary calendar by a month. Now for the first time Iowa and New Hampshire are both in January, and other states can freely hold their primaries and caucuses beginning Tuesday, February 3. This scheduling decision, made by the Democratic National Committee in early 2002, virtually mandated candidates such as Dean, Kerry and Edwards to start gunning their engines before the voters went to the polls in the off-year congressional elections.
Why this intemperate rush to judgment? Party chairman Terry McAuliffe insists, "We have to get a nominee early." Yet the logic behind his oft-repeated assertion remains elusive. There is no risk this time of South Carolina Democrats being upstaged by the Republicans, since North Korean plebiscites are more suspenseful than Bush's unchallenged renomination. With soft money banned, the party fund-raising that is still possible by pushing the margins of the new law can take place with the nomination fight still undecided. As Bob Dole in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000 demonstrated, a presidential nominee selected months before the convention is a semi-unemployed vagabond with nothing to do other than listlessly campaign and endlessly mull his vice-presidential choice.
In McAuliffe's defense, he belatedly managed to impose some semblance of rational order on the Democrats' February frolic of primaries and caucuses, pressuring the state parties to fall in line. With the exception of the Michigan caucuses on February 7, the early campaign weeks will be confined to states with small enough populations that candidates do not automatically face bankruptcy by waging a media campaign. This is not to deny the system's inherent lack of deliberation—and the mind-numbing speed with which many of the Democratic dreamers will be forced to arrange vacations during which they can brood about might-have-beens. Theoretically at least, the presidential calendar allows candidates who are shut out in Iowa and New Hampshire one last chance to recover.
If midsummer conventional wisdom is correct (a highly dubious proposition), then Gephardt or Dean will win Iowa on January 19 and either Kerry or Dean will prevail in New Hampshire on January 27. My fellow reporters and I will immediately jettison parkas and boots as we head below the Mason-Dixon Line. South Carolina takes the place of honor on February 3, though it shares the date with four other primaries, most notably Arizona and Oklahoma and two caucuses (New Mexico is the one that matters). This fandango of Sunbelt delegate contests allows Edwards, Lieberman and Graham, who are all likely to finish out of the money in Iowa and New Hampshire, to construct credible scenarios for stirring comebacks.
There was a moment, though, when it looked like everything might come unraveled and the 2004 political calendar would prove Will Rogers's oft-quoted maxim: "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." McAuliffe spent March 2003 beating back, with the aid of the national leadership of the UAW and AFL-CIO, a threat from Michigan to move its caucuses to January in defiance of party rules and the traditional prerogatives of Iowa and New Hampshire. Reflecting the Byzantine world of internal Democratic politics, a major factor in the equation was a failed drive by New Hampshire Republicans to approve a right-to-work law, which would have made the state anathema to labor. "Had they passed right-to-work," McAuliffe said during a May interview, "I would have lost a huge argument. What could I have said to defend a state that has a Republican governor and no Democrats in the congressional delegation?" In theory, the national chairman of an out-of-power political party has about as many divisions as the Pope. But for all his bluster, McAuliffe knows how to work the levers of power. Explaining the way he derailed the Michigan challenge while glossing over some of his hardball tactics, he laughingly said, "It took a lot of promises of good hotel suites at the convention and good seats on the convention floor."
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The senator's aides were impatiently demanding that he leave immediately for his speech in Iowa City, but Tom Harkin had one more thing that he insisted on showing me. We had been talking politics over coffee on this mid-February Sunday morning in the tiny living room of the nine-hundred-square-foot shingled house in which Harkin grew up, the son of an Iowa coal miner. The senator—who recently restored this place redolent with childhood m
emories after acquiring it upon his brother's death—walked me to the back of the house to point out a small, nondescript bedroom that a weary traveler might grudgingly accept if the only alternative were sleeping in the car. "This is where we slept, Harkin said, referring to his brothers and sisters. "All six of us. Three to a bed."
The symbolism inherent in that 1940s bedroom goes a long way toward explaining Harkin, his populist values and the role that he may ultimately play in the Iowa caucuses. In an effort to focus the Democratic race on bread-and-butter issues such as jobs and health care, Harkin arranged a series of nine forums around the state, which were broadcast on C-Span, giving each of the nine declared candidates their own day to answer questions from voters. The potential reward, when the forums concluded in September, was a Harkin endorsement. "I'm now the nine-hundred-pound gorilla," he said in an uninflected tone that suggested that he was merely stating the obvious. "I have the best organization. I have the best list. I love Tom Vilsack, but he's never done the nuts and bolts of politics."
Although Harkin's words were guarded on this frosty day, even during the off-the-record portion of the conversation, it was hard to detect much enthusiasm for Kerry or any sign that Edwards's efforts to ingratiate himself were bearing fruit. Dean, who had made the pilgrimage to this modest house in Cumming the day before, appeared to intrigue Harkin—now that he could remember the Vermonter's name. "A governor is different," Harkin said about Dean. "I saw it running in 1991-92 against Clinton. People look on a governor as different than us [legislators]." But Harkin's encouraging comments about Dean's "nice crisp message" did not necessarily portend a pre-caucus endorsement. "I've had a lot of people call me and ask me what to do," Harkin said. "And I tell them, 'Keep your powder dry.'"
Six months later in mid-August, as I chatted with Harkin on a flight from Des Moines to Chicago, I could tell that the would-be Iowa kingmaker was still far from striking a match to his powder. The vacation-bound senator's major pre-occupation was his annual mid-September "steak fry"—traditionally the biggest Democratic event in Iowa—which this year would feature Bill Clinton along with most of the Democratic class of '04. Aside from state attorney general Tom Miller, who based on long-standing friendship was backing Lieberman, most prominent Iowa Democrats have been slow to make presidential endorsements. Chuck Todd, the editor-in-chief of the subscription-only on-line daily political newsletter "The Hotline," captured the slow-to-gel mood of Iowa Democrats when he wrote that only the "Gang of 5,000" activists were closely monitoring the pre-caucus jousting.
My trip to Iowa coincided with the State Fair in Des Moines, where this year the butter sculptures were secular rather than religious: a life-sized yellow cow and a grease-propelled Harley-Davidson. It was easy to revel in the hot-diggity corn-dog hokum of strolling down the midway with a glad-handing candidate, his entourage, several camera crews and a dozen political reporters momentarily liberated from any illusion that the Democratic race was a contest of ideas. This was a photo-op as old-fashioned as Calvin Coolidge donning an Indian head-dress for the cameras. Here the test of fire in your belly was what you put in your stomach. Lieberman, opting out of the traditional appearance at the pork pavilion, demonstrated his cast-iron gullet by cheerfully downing a mass-market, cream-filled cupcake that had been coated with batter and placed on the griddle. As he laughingly declared, "Anything I say for the rest of the day will be subject to the fried-Twinkie defense."
This was a week when all the serious Democratic contenders made pilgrimages to the heartland. Even though Dean was now powered by what the original George Bush back in 1980 called "the Big Mo," I was the lone reporter who trailed the candidate, traveling in a borrowed van with the vanity license plate "MCFUN" to a late-night appearance at a tiny public library in the hamlet of New Hartford. How small was the library? Well, I have more books in my dining room, though I can't begin to compete with New Hartford when it comes to the collected works of Zane Grey.
The sixty-five mostly gray-haired Democrats—an impressive turnout in this rural Republican county—who heard Dean deliver his standard stump speech lustily cheered lines like "Of all the people leading in the polls, I'm the only one who didn't support the president's war in Iraq." But applause did not equal caucus commitments. I watched Dori Jurgensen, a college biology instructor from nearby Denver, as she punctuated virtually every Dean sentence with an approving nod. But she declined to take the final step of signing the Dean pledge card that she cradled in her hand. "We're just starting to think about who to support," she said. "I'm not ready to commit."
Edwards, in contrast, toured Iowa in an over-sized bus, the kind of vehicle favored by country-music stars and John McCain in the 2000 primaries. Speaking to forty Democrats on a supporter's front lawn in Waverly, Edwards exuded passion about his plan to mandate health-care coverage for the nation's twelve million children without insurance. That might seem like standard-issue Democratic rhetoric except for what happened next. "We're going to do something about twelve million kids," he said, before cutting himself off mid-sentence as he belatedly noticed the arrival of his wife Elizabeth and their two small children. "Oh, they're here," Edwards burbled. "This is my family." He completed his speech with three-year-old Jack clinging to his waist and Emma Claire, now five, periodically venturing forth in a valiant but vain effort to dislodge her brother.
Over the last quarter century, I have shared campaign buses with drunks from British tabloids and hymn-singing supporters of Pat Robertson in 1988. But never, until now, had I experienced the romance of the road in the company of two small children. As soon as we pulled out on the Edwards bus, Jack, exuberantly pointing out the window, announced, "Daddy, a playground!"—and seemed mystified when we didn't immediately brake to a halt for a ride on the swings. Reviewing the day's schedule a few minutes later, Edwards mentioned that he would be making an appearance at a house party to raise money for an Iowa legislative candidate. That prompted Emma Claire—in a dazzling display of the eternal innocence of children—to ask in a puzzled tone, "Daddy, what's a fund-raiser?"
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New Hampshire Democrats, unlike their Iowa counterparts, are not afflicted with Indecision 2003. The website "politicsNH.com" has been charting the candidate preferences of 105 leading Granite State Democrats—and only 37 of them remained Undecided by mid-August. But those on the fence were certainly noticed.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an uncommitted New Hampshire Democrat in possession of political influence must be in want of telephone calls. Consider Terie Norelli, the assistant Democratic leader in the New Hampshire State House who hosted a series of receptions at her home in Portsmouth for the candidates, including one for Edwards in late May. During the week following the North Carolina senator's appearance, Norelli received calls from Edwards, Dean and Hadassah Lieberman. "Edwards definitely is hard sell," she said, comparing phone techniques. "It was 'This is John Edwards, I definitely need your help.'" In contrast, she explained, "Howard Dean was more friendly. It was 'I'd like to have you involved.'" She never returned the Lieberman call since Norelli described the senator as "way too hawkish for me."
As for Beth Campbell, the SEIU official, her liberal sentiments were drifting toward Gephardt, but Dean had proven to be her most faithful gentleman caller. During one conversation when Campbell was obviously afflicted with a bad cold, Dean even volunteered to make a bedside medical visit. On another occasion in the spring, Campbell was at her state job in Concord, dealing with stray dogs and other animals, when the telephone rang. The conversation went like this:
CAMPBELL: Animal Population Control Program.
CALLER: Is this Beth?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
CALLER: This is Governor Howard Dean. (A brief exchange of pleasantries)
CALLER: Will you endorse me?
CAMPBELL: No, but thank you for asking. (Pause) Governor, you know better than that. I can't endorse until my union does.
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As we sat in a booth at Pappy's Pizza in Manchester in late May, Lou D'Allesandro was mulling his status as the last remaining uncommitted Democratic state senator. Originally on this Friday, D'Allesandro was slated to have breakfast with Kerry and lunch with Lieberman, but both were unexpectedly trapped in Washington by Senate votes. "I want someone who I can believe in and trust. I'll tell you in all candor," he declared gesturing toward his heart, "I'm not looking for anything. I just want a president who has not only compassion but common sense."
Then, as an exercise almost more for his own benefit than mine, D'Allesandro worked his way through a process of elimination. Dean was still dismissed as someone who won't survive the long haul. "The one thing that Kerry presents that's objectionable—and that's his patrician attitude," he sniffed. "He can't seem to get rid of it." The state senator, a moderate Democrat, was attracted to Lieberman's views but troubled by his style of self-presentation. "I think Lieberman plays up the religious role too much," he complained. "If Gore thought he was good enough to be vice president, stop thanking God."
Two straws were left, since Graham did not factor into these calculations. "The most likeable guy in this race is Edwards," he said, radiating enthusiasm for the first time in the conversation. "Of all these guys, he's the sleeper. This guy can explode. He can battle Bush on likeability and credibility." It would be a coup for Edwards, running just ahead of an asterisk in most New Hampshire polls, to snag such a major figure in the largest city in the state.
If only politics were that simple. But then there was Gephardt, who phones D'Allesandro at least once a week. "My loyalty to Gephardt is that he's always been very good to me," the veteran politician said with just a tinge of sadness in his voice. "He's done everything I've ever asked. That's important in this business."
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 13