Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In

by One Car Caravan (v1. 0-lit) (NonFiction-US

  With our psychological bent, those of us in the press vans can be described as forever Jung. So much campaign coverage involves listening (to variations of the same speech) and watch­ing (the smiles, the laughs, the handshakes and the back slaps) from afar. When you spend your days with your nose pressed up against the toy store window, you inevitably start wondering about the secrets hidden in the backroom. Journalists know just enough biographical details about a candidate to connect the dots in a graphic that may lack artistic precision but appears close enough to reality for daily deadlines.

  As the self-appointed guardians of the entrance to the Oval Office, reporters are constantly alert for any character trait that smacks of Nixonian weirdness or suggests that maybe this guy shouldn't be entrusted with nuclear weapons. That's why the press during the 1980s was so merciless toward Gary Hart—that's why so much was made of his name change (from Hartpence) and his conflicting accounts of the year of his birth. This time around, the Boston Globe tried (unsuccessfully in my view) to paint John Kerry as two-faced for sometimes failing to contradict the easy assumption that anyone with his last name had to be Irish. Similarly, nothing makes Bob Graham's advisers more ner­vous than a protracted discussion of the color-coded notebooks (which I quoted from earlier) that he uses to record the flotsam and jetsam of his public life. Sadly, it doesn't take much of a jour­nalistic leap to go from these quotidian details to psycho-babble about Kerry's identity disorder or Graham's anal-compulsive behavior.

  For all my uneasiness about the shock (therapy) troops of the press marching off to cover a campaign carrying analytic couches on their backs, I recognize that a candidate is far more than a walking set of position papers. For me, the relevant distinction is between psychology and temperament. No reporter or profile writer knows enough to plumb a politician's inner psyche, but journalists are equipped with the observational skills to describe his personality and draw conclusions from it. It's the difference between unknowable causation and visible effects. A candidate will spend days huddled with his handlers deciding how to best portray himself on the campaign trail, choosing which biographi­cal snippets to stress and which policies to peddle. But a presi­dential contender's basic temperament remains an innate and immutable quality that defies the mind-clouding powers of even the most adroit political image makers.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt stumbled onto something of lasting political import when he came before the 1924 Democratic con­vention to hail New York Governor Al Smith as "the Happy War­rior of the political battlefield." The Happy Warrior sobriquet was lifted by speechwriter Samuel Proskauer from a William Wordsworth poem, and initially Roosevelt dismissed the refer­ence as too literary. But as FDR himself went on to dramatically demonstrate, Americans want their presidents to be jaunty and optimistic, rather than dark and brooding. In modern times, Richard Nixon and maybe Lyndon Johnson are the only excep­tions to this Iron Law of Presidential Positivism.

  Personality may not be destiny—or the ebullient Hubert Humphrey would have defeated Nixon in 1968. But in presiden­tial primary politics, temperament matters more than any other factor beyond the direct conscious control of the candidates. Vot­ers may not be able to decipher which of the candidates secretly felt inadequate as a child, but they can judge personality. If you were to rate the serious 2004 Democratic contenders on an upbeat-downbeat grid, the enthusiastic John Edwards would eas­ily win the Happy Warrior award as the spiritual descendant of Al Smith, followed by the sublimely confident Howard Dean and the ever-smiling Dick Gephardt. At the other end of the scale are the stiffly senatorial Bob Graham and the long-faced John Kerry. As for Joe Lieberman, he is exactly where his uninflected person­ality puts him—squarely in the middle.

  ******

  Like so many in Lieberman's immediate orbit, the crisply effi­cient Clarine Nardi Riddle goes back a long way. Back to the late 1970s, when Lieberman was a leader in the Connecticut state senate and she was his legislative counsel. When Lieberman went on to become state attorney general, she became his deputy before succeeding him in that office when he was elected to the Senate in 1988. After stints as a Connecticut state judge and a trade-association executive in Washington, Riddle rejoined Lieberworld in early 2003 as the senator's congressional chief of staff for the duration of the campaign. Despite, or maybe because of, her long experience as Lieberman's alter ego, Riddle resorted to all too familiar imagery in describing his workaday personal­ity. "Joe is a wonderful person to work with because he's so even-keeled," she says. "You're not diverted by someone who has highs and lows in temperament."

  We were talking behind closed doors in Riddle's interior office as anxious staffers visibly paced in front of a glass wall in hopes of attracting the attention of the senatorial stand-in. But I was not about to yield my seat for the press of congressional business. I had come to see Riddle because I had been toying with a notion about Lieberman. My conceit was that he had developed a public style that used affability as a weapon to keep the intruding world at a safe distance. Like any reporter in the grips of a big theory, I was searching for evidence to fortify my gut instincts. That's why I sprang to attention when Riddle said, "When I first worked for Joe in 1979, he was so quiet that when we talked about bills, I'd have to do all the talking."

  It all fit. Lieberman used to be shy and quiet, and the humor is now all part of the facade of the public man. Riddle, though, had scant patience with my insistent theorizing. To her, Lieberman was simply blessed with a good sense of humor. "He enjoys con­necting with people," she explained. "Humor is one of the ways that he connects. It's one of his ways of drawing the world closer." Maybe closer, but not too close. Robert Frost might have been speaking for political reporters when he wrote, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." So I left Riddle's office, still stubbornly convinced that Lieberman uses humor more to wall people out than to draw them in—to safeguard his privacy by deflecting probing questions with a deft quip.

  But temperament isn't hereditary, at least in the Lieberman family. Feisty and funny, ditsy and dedicated, Rebecca Lieber­man is endlessly exasperated by snap judgments about her father's bland public image. Rolling her eyes in remembrance, she recalled a dinner at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan's Greenwich Village where the couple at the next table began loudly handicapping the Democratic field. She was enraged when she overheard their smug pronouncement: "Lieberman's too conservative. He has no personality." As she put it, "I wanted to go over there and shout at them, 'How could someone with no personality have a child with this much personality?'"

  ******

  Few reporters would dare ask a candidate's wife a question this blunt. But campaign consultants operate free of the social con­straints that govern the work lives of journalists, and media con­sultant Tad Devine, in the midst of taping commercials for her husband's 1998 Senate race, asked Elizabeth Edwards, "Why did you marry him?" Instead of the usual prattle about a twinkly smile or a good heart or love at first sight, she responded with an answer that captured the essence of Edwards's political appeal: "I married him because he was so optimistic."

  Those of us blessed or burdened with an Eastern European Jew­ish heritage may find it hard to imagine what it must be like to go through life feeling, as Mary Martin did, "When the sky is a bright canary yellow, I forget every cloud I've ever seen." The ancestors of cockeyed optimists didn't live in shtetls. But for a presidential can­didate, what a gift of the gods. Imagine waking up every morning fired up with the faith that today you'll raise $100,000, work out the kinks in your health-care plan, corral that elusive endorsement and rouse campaign audiences to a fever pitch. Imagine what it must be like to believe that the inevitable setbacks in a campaign are momentary detours on the road to fulfilling your destiny. But it's more than inner self-confidence. When radiating from a presi­dential candidate, optimism is contagious; it is the essential qual­ity that convinces voters that, hey, he really means it; maybe this time we'll get a president who does something for me.
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br />   TV coaches can teach a candidate how to smile on cue and even how to feign sincerity. But optimism isn't learned behavior; it is bred within the fiber of your being. Edwards has spurned instruction in the black-box arts of projecting well on a twenty-seven-inch screen. But put him in a small room with real-life vot­ers on the right day and it's akin to watching Clarence Darrow address a jury. That's optimism talking. As Elizabeth put it, "John's viewpoint, and it's become the viewpoint in our mar­riage, is that if there's a problem, you do whatever you need to do to solve it. It's not that it's insoluble and you moan and groan. It's just if there's a problem, you do something about it." So simple, so easy and so baffling to us born pessimists. (A prime illustra­tion of this mindset was Edwards's go-for-broke decision in early September to stop hedging his bets and to unequivocally rule out running for re-election to the Senate in 2004.)

  Edwards attributes what he calls his "relentless optimism" to his parents, Bobbie and Wallace, and their mantra that "there's nothing you can't overcome with hard work and knowing who you are." We were sitting in his Senate office and his eyes were rimmed with dark circles from continually getting three or four hours' sleep a night—the pitfalls of relentless, seventeen-hour-a-day fund-raising and living in a household with two small chil­dren. Describing his life as an upward arc of unimaginable accomplishment, Edwards began, "Growing up in our family, it was a big thing for me to go away to college. A big thing." He originally enrolled in Clemson on a football scholarship, living with his grandparents in South Carolina, before dropping out after one semester to return home to attend North Carolina State. He majored in textiles—yes, textiles—on the assumption that he would eventually join the management team at a mill. As Bobbie Edwards told my wife Meryl in a 2001 interview, "That's the practical side of him. He wanted something to fall back on."

  There were job offers after he graduated, but Edwards wanted to go to law school, a leap he made with the aid of student loans. "When I became a lawyer," he continued, "I remember talking to my parents about how I wanted to be one of the best lawyers in North Carolina, thinking that probably was not reachable, think­ing that was not a realistic goal." He began contemplating a polit­ical race before his son, Wade, died. "When I decided to run for Senate, no one had ever heard of me. After a lot of hard work, that worked out," Edwards said, glossing over the detail that it was mostly a self-funded campaign. "And the same thing has happened with respect to the presidential race. Each of these steps has been a great surprise."

  Listening to this oft-told tale of a seemingly charmed life, my gaze kept returning to Wade's Outward Bound pin in the lapel of Edwards's suit jacket. How, I wondered, does he manage to pro­ject a sense of hope for the future after the death of his son? That was the kind of traumatic event that turns any man into Job rail­ing against a merciless God. When Meryl wrote a magazine pro­file of Edwards in early 2001, Elizabeth told her, "The kind of carefree happiness that we had before is forever gone from our lives. We will never have it back." But as I watched Edwards's smiling face, I also remembered that a Washington Post writer recently reduced him to tears by pressing him about his dead son. Such intrusiveness wasn't my natural game, though I did feel compelled to hesitantly mention Wade in the interview. Edwards responded in a quiet, controlled voice, "I just don't think that's something that, even in private, I want to talk about." I honored his reticence, certain that Edwards would never emu­late Al Gore in using the death of his sister from lung cancer to frame a political argument about smoking in a speech to the 1996 Democratic Convention.

  Don Marquis—the 1920s newsroom bard who chronicled the sayings of a cocksure cockroach named archy who couldn't reach the shift key on the typewriter—once wrote, "an optimist is a guy/that has never had/much experience." Say what you will about John Edwards. Complain that at age fifty he still comes across as jejune. Sniff that he has no business running for the White House after a Senate career of such brevity and flickering achievement. Grump that he is the willing captive of the trial lawyers who are funding his campaign. But never, ever say that his optimism is based on a lack of real-life experience.

  ******

  Any interview with a presidential contender during the Invisible Primary involves an elaborate ritual of information sharing, since the contours of the race are so amorphous that both candidate and reporter are looking for validation of their instincts. But none of the candidates is more attuned to the nuances of political gos­sip than John Kerry. Which was why, with deliberate name-drop­ping intent, I mentioned to Kerry during a conversation the morning after the campaign's first debate (sponsored by the Chil­dren's Defense Fund in mid-April) that I had dinner afterward with fellow columnists Maureen Dowd and Joe Klein. "Wow, I'd like to be a fly on that wall," Kerry said, leaning forward in his armchair in his Senate office. My point in pricking Kerry's how-am-I-doing curiosity was to spark his reaction to a comment by a Midwestern friend of Joe's, a non-political novelist who just hap­pened to be in Washington on her book tour. Having never seen any of the candidates in person prior to the debate, the novelist observed that the tall Massachusetts senator had struck her as a "sad sack." So with that comment in mind, I asked Kerry bluntly, "Are you a happy person?"

  Kerry responded, as most of us would, "Absolutely. I'm a happy person." Then he paused, intrigued, and inquired, "Why did that come up? Did somebody suggest that I wasn't a happy person?" Airbrushing last night's dinner conversation, I mention that a non-columnist at the table thought that Kerry came across as "sad." (The telltale term "sad sack" seemed too cruel to repeat.)

  God knows, Kerry was entitled to his downcast moments. In the prior six months, he had endured the death of his mother, Rosemary, and surgery for prostate cancer, the same disease that killed his retired diplomat father, Richard, in 2000. As if Kerry's "Annus Horribilis" were not complete, the Boston Globe in Feb­ruary 2003 revealed to both the world and Kerry himself that the senator's paternal, Jewish-born grandfather had shot himself in ghoulishly public fashion in the men's room of Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel in 1921.

  But in a presidential race, a candidate cannot easily admit to vulnerability. So, reacting to my deliberate provocation, Kerry tried to frame his answer in political terms: "Is there some sad­ness in my life? Sure. But ask anybody who hangs around with me in my free time. Yes, I'm a happy person. But I'm also a seri­ous person, who gets frustrated when things that ought to be hap­pening and are possible don't happen. It makes me angry. Like kids last night [referring to the Children's Defense Fund]; it makes me angry that kids are neglected."

  Most politicians would have left things there. No one can get into trouble seeming depressed over the plight of abandoned children. But even as the conversation drifted toward more pre­dictable political topics (Kerry's pique at Howard Dean), the Lincolnesque senator was clearly troubled by the notion that he projects a sad visage. Being characterized as aloof was something he could handle; in his February press conference announcing his prostrate cancer, Kerry joked that the doctors were planning to remove his "aloof gland."

  But being called sad was different in referring not to his man­nerisms, but to his essence. It may also speak to the reality that his heritage on his paternal side was not Boston Brahmin, but prone-to-depression Central European Jewish. Kerry tried to explain that he really was not that complicated a person, at least to himself, even while acknowledging that he might be puzzling to some. "Partly, it's because I like to hold on to parts of life that sometimes politics doesn't want to let you hold on to," he said, in a reflective tone that seemed closer in spirit to two guys in a bar late at night than a formal interview. "I like to create a little zone of privacy, where you can be who you are and go off and veg and relax and not have a public piece." Belatedly recognizing the obvious truth that running for president is to privacy as burlesque is to modesty, Kerry added, "I know what's involved in this thing."

  Still, it gnawed at him that a woman he never met perceived him as hangdog. Maybe it was ego; maybe t
he word "sad" res­onated with something his handlers had told him, but Kerry was determined to find a safe explanation for his image problem. "It's funny," he said, harking back to the debate, "if you want to know the truth about yesterday, I didn't get to exercise. I was pissed off that I had to go straight to the thing. She might have picked up on that. I thrive from being able to touch life during the day. Give me one half hour outdoors during the day to be able to run around with the sun in my face, the wind, and I'm a new human being." Finally, Kerry was at peace. The problem did not lie in his nature, but in the nature of his exercise regimen. If only the vot­ers could see him with the wind in his hair on his Harley, if only they could see him in a wetsuit with a surfboard (as he was pic­tured in Vogue), then they could understand who he really is and they could appreciate his hard-earned, late-in-life happiness.

  ******

  My sense of Kerry is shaped by the time I spent with him in the shadow of his mother's impending death in the fall of 2002. Every presidential candidate is a canvas for our projections, so perhaps inevitably, I came to see Kerry not as a graspingly ambi­tious politician but as an embodiment of the fragile fabric of mortality that we all confront, even amid the hurly-burly of a presi­dential campaign.

  During a late October campaign trip to Maine, Kerry men­tioned that he and his daughters had recently carried a tree fash­ioned from vibrant, multi-hued autumn leaves to his mother's bedside. "My mom helped me appreciate them," he said. "I'm a nut for fall foliage." Now in his office, five months after the funeral, Kerry said, "I wish my mom had hung around for longer, but it was her time. We were blessed with an enormous period of good-bye. It was very gentle, very touching and very meaning­ful."