By chance, Gephardt was to speak to the DNC just two days after his announcement speech. Even if anti-war sentiments were not rising to a crescendo, this would be a tough crowd for the hawkish Gephardt to woo. DNC members felt affection for Gephardt, but they pragmatically viewed him as a failed congressional leader rather than an onward-to-victory-in-November presidential nominee. For Gephardt to have a chance to succeed, that skepticism had to give way to a reinterpretation of his political persona. The magic charm of the St. Louis speech would seem like a short-lived conjurer's trick if the candidate followed up with a faltering performance to the DNC. For Gephardt, it was repeat or retreat.
The candidate, who had just returned to Washington after a quick rollout tour to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, was upbeat. In his congressional office the morning of the DNC speech, Gephardt confidently announced that he was comfortable enough with the twenty-minute condensed version of his announcement speech to operate without a prepared text. "I think we should just wing this thing," he said. Carrick argued for the TelePrompTer: "Dick, you've been on the road and you're tired. This will help you keep focused." Gephardt responded dubiously, "Are you sure?" The candidate's other advisers were TelePrompTer true believers. So Gephardt rehearsed with the ubiquitous device that looks to the uninitiated like twin see-through music stands, but allows a speaker to follow a projected text as his gaze rhythmically shifts from left to right. An aide rushed the computer disk for the TelePrompTer over to the Hyatt Hotel on the other side of Capitol Hill, the site of the DNC meeting. But there was a slight hitch—when Gephardt arrived at the Hyatt, just minutes before the speech, an apologetic DNC staffer announced that the disk was incompatible with the TelePrompTer system. Moments later, in the elevator heading down to the ballroom where the DNC was assembled, Carrick joked, "Well, Dick, maybe you're right. Maybe you ought to wing the speech."
Gephardt is not Bill Clinton, who flawlessly improvised during a State of the Union Address when the wrong speech was inserted into the TelePrompTer. Although there were a few boos because of his Iraq stance, Gephardt did well with a speech text consisting of a few phrases hastily scrawled on the back of a press release. Because Gephardt knew his message, his self-confidence was compelling, even if the speech lacked the polished precision of Attie's prose. There were a couple of minor snafus. Only after Gephardt detailed his health care plan did he backtrack to talk about Matt's cancer and to recall "the terror in the eyes" of the other parents. He got away with announcing flatly, "My ideas come from twenty-six years in the U.S. House of Representatives. I learned a lot from those years." Still, he ended with a flurry of passion as he declared that his success in life, as the son of a milk-truck driver, underscores the truth that "we are all bound together." With his voice rising and his syntax falling by the wayside, Gephardt declared, "I want to be a president in that Oval Office who every day I walked into that office what I have in my heart and my mind is the aspirations and the dreams and the potential of people like me."
Like so much during the Invisible Primary, the ripple effects from the Gephardt announcement address and his ad-libbed DNC speech were subtle. Gephardt media adviser Laura Nichols said proudly, "In the span of a week, we went from old face to seasoned and experienced." But it was more complex than that. In an effort to reach beyond traditional political settings, Nichols booked Gephardt in early March on the Daily Show on Comedy Central. After thirty minutes of friendly political banter, host Jon Stewart turned to Gephardt and said with surprise, "Let me tell you something honestly. I had no idea that you had this kind of passion in you. You have fire in your belly, sir. I watch you on C-Span and [here Stewart adopted a deliberate monotone] it's just bill no. 5-14-3." Bingo! That second look, the notion that this veteran legislator was more than just another blue suit on C-Span, was what Team Gephardt had been questing for all along.
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From the days of the born-in-a-log-cabin mythology that helped elect William Henry Harrison in 1840 to the small-town-boy portrayal of Bill Clinton as "the man from Hope" in 1992, presidential candidates have hawked their humble beginnings to suggest that only rutted roads lead to the White House. No line is more important in defining Gephardt's political persona than his proud boast "My father was a milk-truck driver." It's his calling card. It's his way of forging emotional bonds with the voters that conveys the implicit message: "I, and I alone, instinctively understand your struggles, your values and your aspirations."
The problem for Gephardt is that he is not alone in claiming such a populist pedigree. John Edwards possesses an equally glittering up-from-the-working-class heritage, which he brandishes to full effect: "My dad worked in a mill all his life, and my mother's last job was working for the post office." The youthful-looking North Carolina senator does not dwell on the $25-million fortune he made as a trial lawyer. He glides over this pesky detail as he strains to create a linkage connecting his parents, his hardscrabble legal clients and his goals as a politician. He can be heavy-handed with these I'm-fighting-for-people-just-like-you claims. When he declared his own candidacy in early January 2003 with a nonstop round of TV interviews, Edwards was like a wind-up toy mechanically repeating the script, "I want to be a champion for regular people, the same people I fought for my whole life, people like my own family where I was the first to go to college, where my dad worked in the mill..." Edwards's use of the phrase "regular people" was so incessant that it inspired mocking comparisons to a TV pitchman hawking a new over-the-counter remedy for constipation.
But what about Democrats not lucky enough to be born with a workingman's tin spoon in their mouths? One of the curiosities of the Democratic race is that three leading contenders (Lieberman, Kerry and Dean) all attended Yale University during the 1960s, an educational institution not normally confused with City College. In fact, if Kerry wins the Democratic nomination and runs against fellow Yalie George W. Bush, it will set up the first all Skull and Bones election in American history, a political event certain to send conspiracy theorists into a frenzy of speculation about the hidden machinations of the power elite. Social class is laden with inherent contradictions when it is brandished in Democratic politics. Voters revere the memories of patrician presidents named Roosevelt and Kennedy, even as they crave a candidate who's just like themselves.
Lieberman, the son of a Connecticut liquor-store owner, can rightfully claim to be the product of the meritocracy. That message is emblazoned in oversize lettering on his campaign website: "I feel as if I have been blessed to live the American Dream." When Lieberman formally announced his candidacy in mid-January on a stage at his alma mater, Stamford High School, he said proudly, "It was here [in Stamford] that my parents Henry and Marcia—themselves children of immigrants—worked their way into the American middle class and gave my sisters and me the opportunities they never had."
More than most reporters, I instinctively understood the symbolism behind Lieberman's decision to kick off his campaign surrounded by a melting pot of long-ago high-school classmates. Five years younger than Lieberman, I attended a similar high school in nearby Norwalk. Back in that era, public schools in small Connecticut cities like Stamford and Norwalk came close to replicating the fabled ethnic diversity of a World War II infantry platoon as students named Rooney, Vizi, Cunningham and Shapiro all shared the small classroom. Later, when I talked about Stamford High School with Lieberman, he said, "It was a powerful experience in the diversity and unity of America for me. Most of my friends were not Jewish, but there was no bias. I never experienced a single act of anti-Semitism in my entire youth." The high-school experience was so idyllic for Lieberman that he actually likened it to the old sitcom Happy Days. Referring to his classmates who provided the backdrop for his announcement speech, Lieberman said, "The real-life Fonz was actually up there on stage with me."
Autobiography is a bit trickier for Dean and Kerry, candidates whose prep-school classmates were more likely to have trust funds than to be
nicknamed "The Fonz." Dean, who grew up on Park Avenue as the descendant of a long line of WASP stockbrokers, handles the problem by rarely referring to anything that happened before he attended medical school. Unlike his rivals, Dean draws his entire campaign narrative from adult life, from his twin careers as a doctor and a governor. With Dean, it's never where I come from. It's always what I have done.
Kerry, whose pre-campaign political action committee (PAC) was called the "Citizen Soldier Fund" defines himself through the duality of his Vietnam experience, the yin and yang of a young medal-draped navy officer who returned home to lead anti-war protests. Flying back to Boston in late October 2002, after a campaign trip to Maine, Kerry began musing about what it would have been like to grow up in a blue-collar Boston suburb like Lynn or Revere. "There are times when I really say to myself that I missed something," confessed the well-born senator, whose father was a diplomat and whose mother belonged to a Bostonian family with a lineage almost worthy of conversation with the Lodges and the Cabots. "Because I didn't have a neighborhood like a lot of kids did. I moved around. But I've made up for it. I've learned a lot about what that was, what that means. I have respect for it. Affection for it. But I can't live there. I'm not going out and pretend. I'm not going to talk about farming in some place because I once dug a hole in a garden."
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The question came at the end of a late February interview with Gary Hart, that Banquo's ghost from the 1980s who was toying with becoming the tenth Democrat to enter the presidential fray. The former Colorado senator—who came so close to winning the 1984 nomination and still carries the painful memories of the 1987 sex scandal that derailed his second bid for the presidency—was now sixty-six, and his gray hair had begun to thin with age. But his intellect and his seriousness of purpose remain formidable. Hart had rightfully earned a reputation as a seer. He co-authored the prescient mid-2001 report that warned of terrorist attacks on America. The former senator and I had been talking for an hour about old campaigns and new terrorist threats in the dark bar of Washington's Hay-Adams Hotel, just a short walk across Lafayette Square from the White House of his then-and-now dreams. At the end of the conversation, Hart asked in a soft voice, "Do you think I'm crazy thinking that this period ought to be the ideas period?"
I was embarrassed by the intersection of his earnestness and my world-weariness. My encounter with Hart was already tinged with guilt, for I rode with the press posse that hunted him down for the crime of sailing to Bimini with Donna Rice aboard a boat named Monkey Business. I also felt protective of Hart's wispy fantasy that ideas still matter in politics and that his hard-won wisdom about foreign policy and defense strategy could earn him a respectful hearing in the clotted Democratic field But I couldn't honestly tell him what he wanted to hear. I couldn't portray the early stages of the 2004 Democratic race as a noble struggle of policy arguments with party activists and the press providing a rapt audience. In presidential politics there is a vast chasm between what ought to be and what is. Ideas, aside from the deep rifts over Iraq, were no longer how serious candidates defined themselves. And a grudging acceptance of that reality may have contributed to Hart's subsequent decision not to run.
It is not that the Democrats have collectively decided that, in an age of Bushian platitudes, intellectual rigor is an impediment to power. Most of the leading presidential contenders have followed Bill Clinton's 1992 pre-primary strategy of delivering what are billed as "major policy addresses" to undergird their campaigns. From a Kerry speech on "Citizenship and Service" to a Lieberman presentation called "Creating Factories of the Future" and an Edwards oration about "Revitalizing Rural America," the candidates have not deliberately shied away from substance. In August Edwards released a sixty-five-page booklet of his detailed issue prescriptions entitled Real Solutions for America, clearly modeled after Clinton's 1992 collection, Putting People First.
Now for the problem: Democrats sound eerily alike on most domestic issues. Instead of zesty policy debates, it's bring in the clones. The candidates all stoutly oppose the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and want to use the budgetary savings to provide health care for uninsured Americans. They worship at the shrine of Clinton-era balanced budgets and angrily decry the fiscal recklessness of the Bush administration. For the Democrats, energy independence is a sacrament and affirmative action is the birthright of the disadvantaged.
There are differences at the margins—distinctions that are sure to be exaggeratedly portrayed in attack ads as symbolic of character flaws as the primaries draw closer. Dean and Gephardt, for example, stand alone in their determination to roll back virtually all the Bush tax cuts, instead of docilely supporting fiscal relief for the middle class. The candidates' health-care plans can be neatly arranged in newspaper charts by the magnitude of their ambition: Gephardt's S200 billion-a-year tax-credit plan lies at one end of the spectrum and Edwards's $53 billion-a-year child-centered proposal at the other. But pardon my refusal to portray these varying approaches to health care as a titanic struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party. Forgive my reluctance to become bogged down in a debilitating debate over the proper tax rate for a family of four in Phoenix with $57,000 in income, a small 401-K plan and two children in middle school. For after too many campaigns and too many position papers that were forgotten after the election, I cling to the stubborn belief that these minor programmatic disputes reveal little about how any of these Democrats would govern as president.
What most primary voters will remember is that all the Democrats sound alike in excoriating the Bush economic record and earnestly pledging that when they are elected parents will no longer have to lie awake at night worrying about how to pay for a doctor's visit for a sick child. The duplication in the candidates' agendas for the nation's future is so great that you can almost imagine vendors roaming the early primary states shouting, "Hey, cold beer, peanuts, position papers! You can't tell the players without a scorecard." During the same week in mid-March 2003, three White House aspirants made major addresses delineating their prescriptions for the nation. So here's a snap quiz to deconstruct the Democrats. Step into your isolation booth, furrow your brow as the band plays "thinking" music and identify which candidate offered these predictable policy maxims:
1. "I want an economy in this country where we create jobs that don't move offshore. I want an America that has health insurance for everybody."
2. "Energy independence is critical to the long-term national security of the United States."
3. "Before September 11, this administration's central domestic policy was budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy. Today, even as the bill for those tax cuts continues to climb...and families are struggling to make ends meet, what is the administration's central domestic policy? Budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans."
I'm sorry, time's up. The correct answers are (1) Howard Dean, (2) John Kerry and (3) John Edwards. But these words could just as easily have been spoken by Joe Lieberman or Dick Gephardt or Bob Graham. It's all so random. That's the fun of playing Deconstruct the Democrats: The Game of Interchangeable Oratory.
Why this barrage of boilerplate? There's a two-word explanation: Bill Clinton. The forty-second president transformed the Democrats into the party of fiscal responsibility; his most glittering tax cut was the dramatic expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which freed working Americans a notch or two above the poverty line from any federal income-tax burden. Clinton's most galling failure, of course, was the congressional rebellion against his 1994 health care plan. So it was inevitable that any Democrat running for president in 2004 would cleave to the Clinton record on the budget and taxes, while lifting high the soiled banner of health-care reform for all Americans. But Clinton also bequeathed something else to his party: issue advisers.
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 staf
f, "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."
One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 18