Whenever a major "new ideas" speech loomed on the horizon in the early days of the campaign, a Washington-based candidate would invariably instruct his staff, "Talk to Bruce and Gene." That's Bruce Reed, who was Clinton's chief domestic policy adviser, and Gene Sperling, the former White House economic coordinator. Veterans of the 1992 campaign and all eight years of the Clinton administration, they are the Gilbert and Sullivan of the Democratic Party, effortlessly composing witty and tuneful variants on familiar party themes. Reed and Sperling are equal-opportunity policy mavens, dispensing unpaid policy guidance to any serious candidate who seeks it. Reed, now the president of the Democratic Leadership Council, laughingly described their role in helping the candidates frame their opening-gun speeches on the economy: "We provided a number of people with the same lackluster advice. There was a similarity to the arguments they all made, but that probably would have happened even if Gene and I had called in sick that day." But there was a yawning ideas gap, stemming from too many candidates needing to make too many speeches. Calculating that the major contenders each required a minimum of five major domestic policy addresses, Reed wondered, at the risk of sounding immodest, "How can we fuel twenty-five speeches when Gene and I have maybe five big ideas?"
The Democratic candidates are a bit like the Israelites who were handed a Holy Writ to guide them in their wanderings through the political desert. Instead of the Ten Commandments, it's the playbook from the 1992 Clinton campaign. You can hear echoes of the only two-term Democratic president since FDR in the words of all of them, most notably those of work-hard-and-play-by-the-rules Clinton disciple John Edwards. Appearing before the DNC in February, Edwards began his speech with a classic Clintonian conceit: "Across America, every day, most people go to work believing that hard work will earn them a chance to get ahead. Every day, they try to do the right thing for their families and on the job, because they believe that's more important than making a quick buck." A leading Democratic consultant put it like this: "In one way or another, all the candidates are still using some version of the rhetoric that Bill Clinton introduced in 1992. The exception is Howard Dean, who has a very blunt, apolitical way of speaking. Dean has found fresh language and a new way of talking about things that, at least, is different."
******
Howard Dean was exasperated. Meeting with his Burlington-based campaign staff in late January to plot out his travel plans, he moaned, "What's happened to the schedule? It's out of control." The last-minute invitation to appear before NARAL symbolized Dean's need for a body double. It's madness: Iowa on Sunday, Vermont on Monday, a three-minute speaking slot at the NARAL convention in Washington on Tuesday, then a pre-dawn flight to New Hampshire on Wednesday morning for a long-planned appearance at a retirement home in Nashua. Not even the most desperate traveling salesman, Willie Loman with his bulging sample cases, would tolerate this itinerary from hell. The candidate exuded a palpable reluctance to juggle his travel plans to accommodate NARAL. Dean can be stubborn, but this time his staff got its way.
On the day of the speech, Dean's mood failed to improve when his direct flight from Burlington to Washington was canceled, forcing him to make a mad dash to change planes in Philadelphia. Needless to say, the harassed doctor-turned-governor-turned-presidential candidate didn't spend long hours revising speech drafts and honing his rhetoric in front of a TelePrompTer. Instead, the unflappable Dean limited his preparation to a few minutes in the holding room at Washington's Omni Shoreham Hotel, the site of the gala dinner honoring the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Dean followed his standard practice of jotting five key points on a stray piece of paper, punctuated by a single word to remind him of an illustrative anecdote.
The first group visual of Campaign 2004 came as the candidates emerged from the holding room in the order of their speaking positions. Edwards, looking like he was inwardly rehearsing his rhetoric, strode out first, followed by Al Sharpton, Lieberman and Gephardt. Then came the six-foot-four Kerry with his arm draped over Dean's shoulder, maybe eight inches beneath his own shoulder, the Mutt and Jeff of the Democratic Party. As Kate Michelman, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, introduced the six Democrats, Gephardt staffers distributed to reporters a prepared text of his remarks. The Missouri congressman, who entered the House in the 1970s as an opponent of abortion, was the only candidate expected to make news. He would offer a sober explanation of his gradual "change of heart and mind" on the issue, as "my eyes were opened...by friends and colleagues and by strangers, women I didn't know and would never meet again, and by members of my own close family."
But what opened the eyes of the 1,500 abortion-rights stalwarts at the Shoreham were speeches by Sharpton and Dean. The rambunctious reverend from New York, a protest candidate reveling in his sudden elevation to Democratic responsibility, roused the rafters with sure-fire lines like "It's time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians." When he stepped to the microphone, Dean began by declaring, "I'm going to talk to you as a governor and a doctor." But he soon let rip with a full-throated attack on the Bush administration: "This government is so impressed with itself in promoting individual freedom, they can't wait to get into your bedroom and tell you how to behave." The audience cheered lustily as Dean thundered, "We don't want the government telling us how to practice medicine! The practice of medicine is none of the government's business!"
Okay, Dean was preaching to the converted. But then he abruptly lowered his decibel level and changed his tone. "Let me tell you a story," he said, his voice beckoning the audience to move a little closer to the fire for a good yarn. "As many of you know, I am a doctor and an internist. One time, a young lady came into my office, who was twelve years old. She thought she might be pregnant. We did the tests, and she was pregnant. She didn't know what to do. After I talked to her for a while, I came to the conclusion that the likely father of her child was her own father." Dean paused to allow the tension to build as his rapt listeners contemplated the realities of life in small-town Vermont. Then as his voice filled with angry indignation, Dean delivered his devastating applause line: "You explain that to the American people who think that parental notification is a good idea." By the time Dean finished his eight-minute speech, which was interrupted by applause seventeen separate times, the shock troops of the abortion-rights movement were waving glow-in-the-dark table decorations to light his way toward the White House.
It is almost unprecedented for a single evening during the Invisible Primary to transform a candidacy. But, make no mistake, that was exactly what happened to Dean with his almost canceled NARAL speech. Afterward, Howard Fineman, Newsweek's influential political correspondent, was prompted to write, "I came away from the annual National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League dinner the other night with one conclusion: Howard Dean is going to be a player." Suddenly Dean was no longer a former governor from the land of Ben and Jerry, but a plausible rival to Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards and Lieberman. It took a day or two for Dean to grasp the implications of his Cinderella transformation, but he eventually got it. "What those dinners do is that they establish me as a serious candidate," Dean told me three days later during, yes, another trip to Washington. "People have never heard of me before. Then they hear about me from other people, but they don't see me. And when they see me, they realize this is a serious candidacy. Once they realize it's a serious candidacy, because they like the message, they're now free to help."
There was only one flaw in this upbeat narrative. Dean's sad-eyed story about the pregnant twelve-year-old girl was partially deceptive. Worse, Dean didn't fully comprehend how he compromised his credibility by editing and over-simplifying the tale. I will confess that an influential figure in another presidential campaign prompted the questioning of Dean about his NARAL narrative. But when he was asked about what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story," Dean said, "I don't want to talk about it. It turned out that the father wasn't the father. But I ca
n't say too much about this because it will lead to an exposure of the girl, which is absolutely wrong."
My desire, obviously, was not to intrude on anyone's privacy. But I was stunned by Dean's admission that the central salient detail of the anecdote dramatically brandished before NARAL to expose the folly of parental notification (that the girl was impregnated by her father) was incorrect. As Dean explained, "It turned out that she was improperly [sexually abused], but not by her father. Not that I knew at the time." But he did know it when he retold the tale to NARAL. I wondered, as I often do when I catch a candidate embellishing the truth, whether I was being too harsh and judgmental. This was not the equivalent of Ronald Reagan continually citing a fictional "welfare queen" driving around Chicago in her Cadillac. This was also not George W. Bush reciting sixteen deceitful words about African uranium in his State of the Union Address. Something awful did in fact happen to this twelve-year-old girl. For his part, Dean conceded, "I've thought about not using that story any more, though it's so powerful, because I don't want this girl exposed and that could happen."
Self-definition is a tricky affair in presidential politics. The same autobiographical stories that attract voters can, when viewed from another perspective, repel them. It's simpler when campaigns revolve around issues. You can parse position papers and cost-out policy proposals. But the 2004 Democratic race is about personal history and character—and there is no official source like the Congressional Budget Office to rate the candidates based on what they consciously choose to reveal about themselves. Does it matter that Dick Gephardt is a milkman's son and John Edwards's father started as a mill worker? Should we admire John Kerry because he fought in Vietnam, or is the essence of his appeal his later anti-war fervor? Is voting for Joe Lieberman the only way to ensure the survival of the American Dream? And what of Howard Dean, who dramatically demonstrated with a single story both his Marcus Welby-as-politician appeal and his preference for powerful narrative over the literal truth?
Every political leader is a prisoner of his own life experience. But what a presidential campaign cannot reveal is whether the illustrative tales that candidates tell the voters are the same stories that will be reverberating in their minds, if and when they find themselves brooding alone in the Oval Office. For that is the most elusive truth of all: who the candidates truly are when they are out of the view of the adoring throngs and the ever-inquisitive reporters.
Chapter 10
In Which the Candidates Remain Themselves
(Despite All Efforts to Package Them into Something Else)
Any Jewish male, with the possible exception of Philip Roth, can identify with Joe Lieberman's tone as he describes his eighty-six-year-old widowed mother, Marcia. Lieberman, of course, projects a good son's love coupled with pride at her live-alone independence: "She works hard to do almost everything. I told her she remains an inspiration in that sense." But there is also a flicker, just a flicker, of boyish Mom-do-I-have-to annoyance, especially when the topic turns to food.
Lieberman and I are in the backseat of his van, that familiar venue for political interviews, on a glistening New Hampshire Monday morning in late April. On the floor next to Lieberman is the ultimate campaign survival kit—a brown paper bag stuffed with Passover rations that his mother pressed on him (you can hear her saying, "Take it with you, Joey, you look thin") after a holiday visit to his childhood home in Stamford, Connecticut. Reaching into this maternal brown bag, Lieberman becomes the first presidential candidate in the proud history of American democracy to ever offer me—or quite possibly any reporter—matzos, saying, "This will probably inhibit your ability to ask serious questions." And then gesturing to an unopened box of kosher-for-Passover macaroons on the seat next to him, Lieberman adds with a hint of private amusement, "We also have sweets."
Even during a backseat interview, the senator is a gracious host. But that's Lieberman's style: so amenable, so affable and so damned elusive. It isn't that he bristles with defensiveness or even ducks questions. Rather, Lieberman blesses virtually every query with the same empty compliment, "That's interesting," and then frowns with momentary concentration as he frames his careful answer. With Lieberman, there is a circular quality to the reporter-candidate exchange, since every Q and A brings you right back to where you started. I have been at this game too long to believe that you can achieve anything close to intimacy with a man who is running for president. But I do nurture the conviction that enough time in the backseat of a van and enough off-the-news conversations can produce a level of insight that goes beyond the self-confident certainties of a candidate's sales pitch. Yet here I am, my mouth gummy with matzos and my lap filled with crumbs from the bread of affliction—and the always friendly Joe Lieberman is testing my faith in my reportorial wiles.
Maybe I am unused to a presidential candidate with Lieberman's medium-cool temperament. He's neither pompous nor soporific; his wry-with-corned beef sense of humor prevents him from being equated with uber-hawk Scoop Jackson, the 1976 presidential contender often described as so boring he could douse the fire during a fireside chat. At the start of our conversation, I mention to Lieberman that I noticed a hidden religious motif to his Easter Sunday appearance on Face the Nation, since he shared the broadcast with a fellow Jew, Bush foreign-policy adviser Richard Perle. Lieberman immediately cracks, "John Edwards is going to do Yom Kippur." But what if Edwards, like John Kerry, discovers he has Jewish ancestors? With a chuckle, Lieberman says, "He seems to be sticking with what we know about him."
For all his Good Humor Man persona, Lieberman, more than any Democrat running, embodies the locker-room sports cliché "Don't get too high or too low. Just take it one game at a time." Interviewing aides and family members about Lieberman's mood on that fateful mid-December day when Al Gore pulled out of the race, I was struck by similar tales of the senator's well-modulated calm. As his son Matt put it succinctly, "There was no 'Yippie!'"
I repeat Matt's comment to Lieberman, not to glean fresh anecdotes about Gore's withdrawal but to get a better fix on his personality. "Temperament," Lieberman responds, "it's interesting. That day I felt a combination of excitement and seriousness because this was it. I was now faced with this awesome responsibility. So I wasn't jumping up and down. Part of it may have to do with my respect for Al Gore."
Okay, I suggest, maybe that's an atypical example. Lieberman, munching one of Mom's apples, is still mulling the earlier question. "There is no question that I have a more even personality," he concedes. "But I can get high." Somehow, I sense, this is not a coded reference to drug-addled youthful escapades. "I get angry about things. I get happy about things," Lieberman defiantly insists in his soft, slightly quavering voice. "I'm having a great time. It's very demanding, but I'm enjoying it and I do feel a sense of mission and purpose."
At that moment, inflamed with mission and purpose, Lieberman arrives at the high school in Derry, where he will be speaking to a current-events class. As the van pulls to a stop, Lieberman offers a final thought: "Here I am with the opportunity to run for president and to try to make a difference on a scale that I honestly never imagined that I would get a chance do. It's great." Unlike Tony the Tiger who always roared, "It's Gr-r-r-eat!" as he hawked Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, Lieberman pronounces the word "great" without a hint of inflection.
******
All of us—ordinary voters and out-of-the-ordinary political reporters alike—cannot resist reducing presidents and pretenders to cartoonish caricatures. Ronald Reagan was a dim-bulb actor reading a presidential script; George Bush (good ol' 41) quested after the presidency simply because it was the missing line on his resume; Bill Clinton, governed by his libido, squandered his enormous talents to his outsize appetites; and George W. Bush wanted to be president both to avenge and transcend his father. Granted, there is an element of truth to these crude portraits, but they also obscure far more than they explain. Both in cocktail-party chatter and daily political coverage, we b
randish these facile interpretations with all the subtlety of a pre-schooler trying to jam a round peg into a square hole. Just hit the point harder, we reflexively think, and maybe it'll fit.
I understand the allure of such armchair psychiatry, even if most analytic interpretations come closer to fraud than Freud. The powers that we bequeath to a twenty-first-century president are inherently frightening, whether it is the ability to obliterate Saddam Hussein's regime with minimal congressional oversight or the authority to imprison Americans as "enemy combatants" without a public trial. For all the hype and hoopla of a presidential campaign, the choices that voters make are fraught with unimaginable consequences—and they know it.
Who in their right mind feels comfortable basing this decision solely on gauzy thirty-second commercials and poll-tested speeches that obedient candidates read off the TelePrompTer? Who can derive lasting insight from newspaper charts dutifully listing the candidates' health-care plans? Rightfully suspicious of media manipulation and yet supinely dependent on television and the press for information, voters are desperate to cut through the phoniness of a presidential campaign in search of larger truths about the character of the candidates. Any glimmer of authenticity—a sepia-toned childhood photograph, a brief televised glimpse of a frowning spouse, a flippant remark during a debate—becomes incorporated in an overarching theory, becomes a building block of air castles filled with psychological speculation about the candidates. Even the smallest details can be fraught with symbolic significance. Howard Dean's buttoned-down Brooks Brothers shirts. The brief flap over whether Edwards was chewing gum onstage during the NARAL convention or whether, as his aides insisted, it was a breath mint. Or the bigger brouhaha prompted by John Kerry's too-effete-to-eat request for Swiss cheese, rather than the authentic Cheez Whiz, on his Philly cheese steak sandwich.
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 19