The burst of applause sets up Edwards's final appeal as he tries to close the deal and convince these desperate-for-victory Democrats that he's for real. "I have so much energy and passion, you have no idea," he says as his North Carolina accent seems to thicken with the implicit I-can-win-in-the-South message. "It drives me seven days a week—sixteen, eighteen hours a day—because at the end of the day, it's not about me, it's about us." With his aides carefully watching the clock, Edwards takes a handful of questions before he departs with a flurry of handshakes.
Unlike the early trips to New Hampshire when his speeches earned him little more than muted applause from the uncommitted, this time Edwards wins converts. "I'm sold," says Barclay Jackson, who was probably ready to sign on at hello. Though she adds, reflecting both her historical grasp of eighteenth-century New England theologians and the novelty of her candidate preference, "I still want to call him Jonathan Edwards."
******
This is the obvious moment to offer a paean to the enduring vibrancy of American democracy as it plays out every four years in Portsmouth living rooms. Here in New England, where American liberty took root, here on the seacoast so close to where the Pilgrims landed, here in the state in which Eugene McCarthy toppled a sitting president, here where Bill Clinton promised New Hampshire voters that he would remember them "until the last dog dies," here where Maytag repairmen and telecommunications lawyers, each with the precious gift of a single vote—enough, enough already!
Don't get me wrong. I still love New Hampshire living rooms. They remain that rare oasis in the parched desert of twenty-first-century American politics. But all idylls must come to an end. Listening to Edwards's now polished refrain and picking up the premature impatience of New Hampshire voters, I begin to get a premonition of how fast events are rushing on, how soon the soft-edged possibilities of the Invisible Primary will give way to the hard-sell certainties of the TV commercials.
How I dread the coming air wars, that other insidious version of living room politics. It won't be long before TV sets in early states like New Hampshire begin blaring out the phony catch-phrases and the empty slogans—the endless variants on the shop-worn Democratic pledge "I will fight for you." And then the gauzy images and the uplifting music will inexorably yield to the attack ads, as a scrum of well-funded Democrats battle for traction in a crowded field. Obscure congressional votes will be exaggerated into traitorous betrayals. Small differences in health care plans will be magnified beyond recognition in a cynical effort to prove that rival Democrats (yes, Democrats) want to undermine Medicare and Medicaid. The campaign that began so placidly with six appealing serious candidates will likely degenerate into a snarling sea of invective featuring offscreen announcers with ominous voices, grainy photographs and blown-up, red-circled, out-of-context newspaper clips. How sad, how ugly and how inevitable as the Democrats choose their nominee.
Yes, in the beginning, there was one candidate, one car and one reporter. But in the end, there will be one Democratic nominee, armies of deadline-driven reporters waiting for a gaffe or a stumble, motorcades that snake across the landscape like freight trains, dozens of anxious Secret Service agents murmuring dark forebodings into their headsets and cheering crowds penned up behind rope lines. This traveling circus, this frenetic caravan, this hydra-headed beast will symbolize the nature of success in America. It is the American way to take something that started in an intimate, innocent spirit in Iowa and New Hampshire and transform it into something elephantine, cynical and synthetic.
Come the fall of 2004, as the general election campaign against George W. Bush heads into its syncopated showdown, the gossamer memories of New Hampshire living rooms will seem like phantoms from another era, like black-and-white photographs from the 1950s showing Dad in his suit, Mom in her housedress and the kids in Davy Crockett caps all clustered around the family's brand-new Buick with tail fins that almost reach out to embrace the sky. True, the Democratic nominee will be the same person that he was a year or two earlier, the same amalgam of dreams, drive, discipline and sense of destiny. But the trappings of his candidacy will have changed beyond recognition; he will be enveloped in a retinue of aides fantasizing about their West Wing offices, sycophants plotting to snare plum embassies, and the occasional friend along to help the nominee maintain his sanity. Nothing in his life will be spontaneous; everything down to his twice daily shaves and his cherished exercise breaks will be scheduled. Even as he jets across the country, he will be overcome by the sameness of the routine and the claustrophobia of the bubble. His life will be reduced to the confines of the campaign plane, motorcades along Secret Service-secured, endless highways and mind-numbingly repetitive speeches, delivered to crowds that have lost their individuality and have become little more than a blurry sea of faces.
Yet if he is successful in his quest to make the proper noun "Bush" synonymous with the compound adjective "one-term," the Democratic standard-bearer will look back on his race for the White House—both its humble beginnings and its frenzied finale—as a curiously carefree interlude, a time when his only real responsibility was to act out the tightly scripted role of a presidential candidate. During the campaign, none of his decisions will send soldiers into battle or the dollar into free fall on the international currency markets. Instead the candidate will exert his authority by rewriting a paragraph in a speech, arguing over the text of an attack ad and rehearsing his ad-libbed comebacks for a presidential debate. In the annals of lonely guy decision making, none of this qualifies as heavy lifting.
******
But, for the moment, the presidential campaign is still being played out in the modest confines of Terie Norelli's living room. That's why a single confident phrase embedded in Edwards's Portsmouth peroration startles me: "When I am president of the United States..." It seems impossible to make the imaginative leap between this engaging man in a lavender sweater and someone who on a wintry afternoon in early 2005 might, just might, be placing his left hand on a Bible held by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and taking the oath of office as the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Despite all my years covering presidential campaigns, I cannot get over the weird disconnect between the familiar rituals of the campaign trail and that overly fortified white mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. The long and arduous race for the presidency always feels like an end in itself, an enterprise designed to climax with the back-slapping, bear-hugging, champagne-drenched ecstasy of a victorious election night. For all its single-minded intensity, presidential politics seems closer in spirit to a sporting contest than a transfer of power that will bequeath to the victor globe-girdling military and economic authority. The obvious parallel is to major league baseball, where a World Series triumph is followed by a four-month respite of awards banquets and endorsement contracts; then the new season magically begins with spring training.
It is hard to picture Edwards or any of his leading Democratic rivals in the White House. This is not a tribute to Bush's political invulnerability. Rather, it is a reflection of the failure of our collective imagination to envision any flesh-and-blood president other than the incumbent or his immediate predecessors. Even the sainted President Bartlett of The West Wing is a New England version of Bill Clinton with his oversize appetites air-brushed away to achieve liberal wish fulfillment. Back when I was devouring political novels as a teenager during the Kennedy-Johnson 1960s, every fictional president was either a handsome, young former senator with a rich and controlling father or a ribald, ruthless former congressional leader with a Texas twang. When even novelists cannot transcend our limited supply of presidential archetypes, it suggests an almost royalist reluctance to commit psychological regicide and mentally dethrone our current leader.
The conventions of political journalism contribute to this artificial separation between the campaign and the Oval Office. My colleagues on the press bus live in an environment of verifiable fact.
They chronicle the sights and sounds of campaign rallies, delve into the biographies of the candidates and detail the intricacies of their policy positions. The resulting dispatches from the front portray the candidates in two temporal spheres: how they are now and how they were in the past when clambering up the ladder of political success. But missing is that all-important future tense—how a candidate will handle the strains and stresses, the pressures and the pitfalls, if the voters elevate him to the highest office on the planet.
It isn't enough for reporters to assess the merits of a candidate's budget plan or to highlight the inconsistencies in his foreign-policy pronouncements. When I was covering Bill Clinton for Time magazine in 1992, I spent the requisite long hours huddled with campaign aides and independent experts trying to calculate the costs and the trade-offs involved in the candidate's pledge to provide health insurance for all Americans. What a recondite and ridiculous enterprise. Nothing that the Arkansas governor said on the campaign trail prepared the nation for the Rube Goldberg complexity of the White House plan that eventually emerged from the secret conclaves of Hillary Clinton's health-care task force. As a result, I and my equally fact-driven journalistic counterparts missed the real story, which was the vast policy-making powers that were soon to be ceded to an unelected First Lady.
I keep thinking of a scene that is endlessly repeated on press buses during a presidential campaign. A half dozen reporters huddle together, each with a tape recorder, trying to decipher a candidate's precise language in a just completed speech. Did he say "America's greatness" or "American greatness" before he was drowned out by applause? I say "spinach" to this kind of mind-numbing literalness. Somehow there has to be a vehicle for campaign coverage to get at larger truths. Yes, I understand and appreciate the canons of journalistic objectivity. But we lose something valuable in limiting our horizons to verifiable truths that are based on tape-recorded speeches, quotes from a campaign spokesman or even nasty put-downs uttered by consultants on a not-for-attribution basis. Somewhere amid the endless spools of TV tape and the gigabytes of text devoted to chronicling the 2004 campaign, we desperately need to find a way to make the daring leap from the realm of fact into the admittedly speculative world of presidential possibility.
I write this keenly aware of my own deficiencies as a prophet of presidencies. As a USA Today columnist covering the 2000 race, I was gulled by Bush's bland public pronouncements and his moderate record as Texas governor into badly misreading the far-reaching extent of his unswerving conservatism. I also neglected to fully appreciate the way that his Harvard MBA training and his post-drinking-life sense of discipline would contribute to what is unquestionably the most orderly, leak-proof and on-message White House in modern history. But my errors as an oracle have been bipartisan. Back in 1992, I was so impressed by Clinton's wildly improvisational style that I failed to foresee how this let's-pull-an-all-nighter freneticism would produce the debilitating chaos that marred his first years in the White House.
Okay, no campaign reporter or columnist can be a seer without peer. Walter Lippmann, after all, backed Richard Nixon in 1968 because he was convinced that Tricky Dick would end the Vietnam War. But the root of my errors in forecasting the contours of future presidencies was that I placed too much emphasis on the lessons of the campaign trail and spent too little time speculating about the essence of the candidates. As I have belatedly discovered, a slavish fidelity to so-called journalistic truth is ultimately little help in predicting how any new president will weather the transition from the confetti-cannon exuberance of campaign rallies to the sobering rigors of the Oval Office.
A presidential campaign is the dreamscape of democracy. Candidates, when allowed a moment of quiet contemplation, see themselves inscribed in the history books under the heading "A Return to Peace and Prosperity." Campaign aides picture themselves walking in the White House Rose Garden with the president's hand resting lightly on their shoulders as they offer sage advice on everything from Hezbollah to health care. Reporters, although we are loath to admit it, nurture the illusion that this will be the president who takes us into his confidence with so much access to the Oval Office that we will have our own Secret Service code name. But these private visions do not compare to the shimmering air castles built by Democratic voters.
Democrats have long been beguiled by the fantasy of the white knight president, the FDR-like leader who will somehow uplift the nation, inspire us to something greater than the next war or the next tax cut, and yet never lose his easygoing sense of authenticity. For sixty years, longer than most of us have been alive, the Democratic Party has been waiting for that transcendent next president. John Kennedy, for all the myth that has come to surround his memory, was too much a creature of muscular Cold War verities to measure up to this august standard when he was alive. Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, such enormous talents in such flawed containers. And yet for all the disappointments and the undelivered promises, there is the enduring hope that maybe the next election will somehow fulfill these idealistic dreams.
In that optimistic spirit, let us jump over the hard-fought presidential primaries and the bruising general election campaign against Bush. Imagine instead that we have been transported to early 2005 and there is again a Democrat in the White House. Through the mists of time, we see...
******
As he strides into the Oval Office for the first time, the new president allows himself a moment of private celebration. "I still got the gift," he muses. "I had them going during the Inaugural Address, I really had them going. When I did that whole riff on equality, I almost expected Clarence Thomas to rise up shouting, 'Amen, brother!' When I was really rolling, I thought I even saw a flicker of a smile on old Dick Cheney's stone face."
The Leader of the Free World slowly circles the room, his hand fondly stroking the silk of the sofas, as he says half aloud, "So this is the Oval Office. It's smaller than I imagined. Of course, if Bush had any grace he'd have invited me over for a chat during transition. But Republicans, they just have no manners when it comes to losing an election, especially when they were whomped by a Democrat like me. Well, Bush is now on the flight path back to the Texas two-step and—guess what?—I'm here in the big house."
He walks to the desk and peeks at the single sheet of paper resting on it—his schedule, embossed with the seal of the President of the United States. "Looks like it's time for a sit-down with my national security adviser," he observes. "Something about reassuring the allies. They should feel reassured already, since I'm the one president who's not about to bomb anybody. Except with love. You know, it would have been a hoot to keep Condi around. But despite certain affinities, there were, as they say, grave policy differences."
His reverie is interrupted by a soft knock on the Oval Office door. The president pauses, not knowing whether to shout "Come in" or open it with a flourish. The door opens a crack as a White House secretary announces, "Your national security adviser is here, President Sharpton."
******
THE SCENE: The Oval Office late on a January afternoon with a hint of sunset visible over the snow-covered South Lawn. Seated on couches are the president, his congressional relations chief and the four top Democratic leaders of Congress. Two other presidential aides stand awkwardly against the wall. The White House photographer, with an equipment bag at his feet, is recording the scene.
THE PRESIDENT: I've got to tell you—and you know this Tom, especially—how many times we've been over here as supplicants. Begging Bush for crumbs and Clinton for a bit more of a slice. It feels different now that I'm, I guess, the host.
TOM DASCHLE: It makes me feel proud, too, Dick...er, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: I'm not used to it either, Tom. I just wish my mother were here to see it. But we've got to get down to business. I have the Canadian prime minister coming in at 5:30. (Turning to the aide on the sofa.) Steve, could you bring us up to speed.
CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS
ADVISER: Mr. President, the White House task force will have your health-care plan ready to submit to Congress by mid-February. As you know, we have to phase it in more slowly than we'd like for cost reasons. Our thinking is that you should formally unveil it with a prime-time address to the Congress. That would set up a great "triumphant return to Capitol Hill" angle with the press.
NANCY PELOSI: President Gephardt, I hate to say this, but we don't have the votes to even get a shell of a bill out of committee in the House. It's not just the Republicans. Some of the Democrats on Ways and Means are also balking at the cost.
THE PRESIDENT: Tom, can we move it through the Senate?
DASCHLE: Not this year, I'm afraid. Maybe in early 2006, if some of those moderate Republicans start to get antsy about reelection.
THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate the honesty. But I've gotta tell you, I thought things would be different when I was president. But here I am, back at the same old stand, wishing and hoping and praying that someday the Democrats will win back the House. The French, I think, have got an expression for it: The more things change, the more they remain the same.
FADE OUT as a lone spotlight outlines the care-worn face of the new president.
******
"John Kerry. President John Kerry. Testing. Is this damn thing working? [Pause] Sitting here in the Oval Office speaking into a tape recorder, even a miniature one, I can't help feeling like Richard Nixon. God, I hated that man. I remember standing at the gates of the White House, must have been late 71, a VVAW [Vietnam Veterans Against the War] demonstration shouting—No, maybe the historical record doesn't need to know the precise twelve-letter epithet that the future forty-fourth president of the United States screamed at the thirty-seventh in this august line.
Shapiro, Walter - One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 22