Show Time!
Believe it or not, presidential wannabes are at it already
It is a filthy day in Manchester, N.H. An icy rain whipped by a stiff and unforgiving wind gives a slick and shiny coat to the trees, the light poles, and the candidate for president. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina leaps over a man-eating puddle of slush on his way into the Merrimack Restaurant on Elm Street, almost slips, rights himself, and plunges inside to greet Courtney Henrich. In just 13 years, she will be eligible to vote.
"Hah, har you?" Edwards asks in a soft and pleasant Southern accent that is eerily reminiscent of Andy Griffith (who grew up just about 95 miles away from him in North Carolina's Piedmont), though Edwards is, in fact, far less well known than Andy or Opie or even Aunt Bee. Edwards goes on to ask this same question of Courtney's mother and grandmother and any other carbon-based life form that comes within his reach. This is known by political professionals as "retail politics," which really means "bothering people in restaurants." It is a staple of presidential campaigning, and in New Hampshire, politicians are about as easy to find in restaurants as maple syrup. What is unusual, however, is that Edwards is doing it incredibly early, in February 2002, two years before anybody in the Granite State will cast a primary vote. And he is not alone. Joe Lieberman is out on the trail and John Kerry and Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle and Chris Dodd and Howard Dean and Al Gore and Russ Feingold and Al Sharpton and what is going on here? Why are these guys enduring blank stares, hotel mattresses, and airline food all for the privilege, many would say, of getting their heads handed to them by George W. Bush in 2004?
Because they must. Because the lesson of 1992, the Year of the Skunked, is emblazoned forever in their memories: Leading up to that year, there was another Bush with stratospheric approval ratings in the White House and some of the Democrats who were planning to run against him got cold feet and let a political force named Bill Clinton run away with the nomination and the presidency. They have cursed their timidity ever since, and now everybody shares the same popular wisdom about 2004: You can run now or you can run last. Is this a sign of excessive ambition? Perhaps, but accusing presidential candidates of excessive ambition is like accusing ballerinas of spending too much time on their toes: It is what defines them.
Go with the flow. Nobody is yet officially running, but it is almost impossible to tell in the modern era exactly when a campaign begins, because campaigning is now endless. As Charles Jones puts it in The Permanent Campaign and Its Future: "Permanent campaigns lack convenient starts and stops. Candidates fit themselves into a continuous flow of very public events."
John Edwards is fitting himself into very public events from one end of the nation to the other. In order to run for president, he must raise millions of dollars, put together a staff, line up party activists, increase his name recognition (somewhere near that of Barney Fife would be good). But first and foremost he must remember never, ever to wear a live microphone into a bathroom.
Which almost happens before he sits down for an interview in the Merrimack Restaurant. C-SPAN has a crew with him--C-SPAN is the lifeblood, the glucose drip, the keep-hope-alive channel of presidential candidates--and the producer clips a wireless mike to his belt just before Edwards decides to powder his nose. As he is about to disappear into the men's room, a look of horror passes over the producer's face. She runs after him, lunges underneath his suit jacket, and says, "Um, do you want me to turn you off?" He does. He most definitely does.
To some, campaigning is a series of such indignities, large and small. And some very successful politicians have loved serving but have hated running. "It is grueling and time consuming and it burns people out," says Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore's campaign manager in 2000. "Without fire in the belly, you can't survive. If it's not in your soul, you won't make it." Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, who ran in 1988, says: "What it takes is an overwhelming desire. . . . I used to think back in the '80s that you could seek the nomination and still be the kind of father, husband, son, etc., you wanted to be. [But it] means no more quiet conversations on the beach with your wife, no more deciding you're going to take your granddaughter to a teddy bear tea. . . . When you seek the presidency, it has to be total and complete focus."
But Anita Dunn, who was Bill Bradley's communications director in 2000, has news for the guys now running: "This is the fun part. Very small crowds give you an opportunity to have real discussions. It is still very informal and relaxed. And there is huge interest among Democratic activists out there. It is absolutely stunning. The activists have never been interested this early. Why now? Because they feel we should have won last time."
Dunn also believes that this period, which Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts jokingly refers to as "early retail," is valuable for another reason: You can screw up now and learn from it. Later, your mistakes won't just embarrass you, they can cripple you. Consider what happens after Edwards emerges from the men's room, microphone mercifully off, and sits down for an interview with a regional TV crew with his wife, Elizabeth, seated next to him. Elizabeth is bright, funny, and candid (three qualities valued about as highly as poison oak by many political advisers), and began the day by asking reporters: "So, have you met anyone up here who knows who he is?"
Straight-faced. The answer was no, which may not have been exactly what the campaign had in mind, but Edwards himself is letter-perfect at stop after stop. He is warm and friendly and gives good eyeball; he has his line down about why a former trial lawyer would make a good senator or president--"I spent my adult life representing people who played by the rules and got hurt by people who didn't"--and he even can tell people with an absolutely straight face that he really is in New Hampshire just to listen. "One of the worst places to find out what people care about is inside Washington, D.C.," he says, already maneuvering to be an "outsider" candidate. "One of the best places are places like New Hampshire [or Iowa or California or Florida] and North Carolina." And after he says it, lots of people just want to scoop him up and brush back that shock of Kennedyesque hair from his forehead and squeeze him just a little. He gets incredible crowd reaction. People named him its "Sexiest Politician" last year; Elle calls him "the new and improved Al Gore" (which, upon examination, may not be the highest praise in the world).
But now the camera swivels unexpectedly onto Elizabeth, who looks startled, having assumed she was just wallpaper for this interview, but is tossed a little wake-up hand grenade masquerading as a question: Does she consider herself "an equal partner" with her husband? In real life there may be several good answers to this question (including "yes" and "no"), but politics is not real life, and, in fact, there is no good answer to this question politically. Answer yes and you are an overly ambitious spouse who is asking the voters to take you and your husband as a package. Answer no and you are some wimpy little cookie-baking appendage to your man.
Elizabeth opts for honesty (which many political advisers value considerably less than poison oak) and says, "I'd be very hard pressed to call myself an equal partner . . . "
John, sensing danger, interrupts her and says hurriedly, "She's an equal partner in everything."
Elizabeth gives him one of those special marital looks, one of those looks that can toast bread, and John continues, "And I would never interrupt her because I get killed when I do!"
Which is exactly the wrong thing to say. "You do not," Elizabeth says.
John, smile at full wattage now, looks into the camera and says, "But she is an equal partner in everything I do."
It is one of those amusing, frank, human moments, the kind that any married couple in America could identify with and the kind that campaigns avoid like death. Amusing, frank, human are not on the play list. Amusing, frank, human get misunderstood and end up like Hillary Clinton in 1992 saying, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas," which got the campaign off message for several days. But now, nobody cares, nobody notices. One of these guys falls off the stage or sticks up a 7-Eleven and it might get him on the front page, but failing that, this is a low-attention time and it may very well be that they all will look back on early retail as the good old days.
Waiting for Al. Not that things behind the scenes are calm. Unless and until Al Gore decides what he is doing, the Democrats lack a front-runner, and this has meant considerable jockeying and elbowing by the others. That Edwards has been the "flavor of the week" for several weeks now helps him attract press attention, but as the Japanese say, "The nail that stands up gets beaten down."
"The problem with Edwards," one Democratic insider says, "is that he doesn't convey strength. He looks small, not big. The only thing that matters in the early days is: Do you look substantial?" (Which leads to a call to Edwards's spokesman, Mike Briggs, who is asked for Edwards's exact height. "Six feet is what his driver's license says," Briggs replies carefully.) The insider continues: "Does Edwards have the intestinal fortitude? He knows he is the most likely vice presidential choice for whoever wins. You watch: He will dabble until the spring and then pull out." Since Edwards does not admit he is running for president--"Sure, I've thought about it," is as far as he would go for U.S. News--he can hardly deny that he will someday drop out to run for vice president. But much of the behind-the-scenes discussion these days is on the No. 2 spot.
In the final days of the Gore recount battle, some of his senior staffers hatched a Doomsday Plan that would go into effect if Gore lost: They would mount a "We Wuz Robbed" ticket in 2004, using the anger over the recount to stage a Gore/Lieberman rerun--and they would run in the primaries as a team! It would be without precedent. And even though the Democratic Party is hardly kind to its losers--Adlai Stevenson in 1956 was the last person to be nominated again after losing--the Gore/Lieberman team would simply squelch opposition. The plan was so audacious that the Gore people were almost giddy. "It was going to be `The Rumble in the Jungle II,' " one Gore staffer joked. "We were going to get Don King to promote it."
But after September 11, anger over the recount seemed a trivial issue and some in the campaign assumed the secret plan was dead. Yet a longtime friend and supporter of both men, Martin Dunleavy, the political affairs director of the 200,000-member American Federation of Government Employees union, says there is plenty of current talk about another Gore/Lieberman ticket. "Lieberman's own people are divided on whether he should run with Gore again," Dunleavy says. "I have heard a number of party leaders advocate the idea to Gore. I think the members of my union would be extremely thrilled with it. Our attitude is that they won the first time." When asked by U.S. News if he is considering such a ticket, Lieberman smiled and said Dunleavy's remarks were "unauthorized" and that he, Lieberman, hadn't "thought that through."
Conflicting messages. But the possibility of a joint primary ticket depends on Gore's entering the race. Because nobody (including Gore) knows if he will, Lieberman is trying one of the toughest tricks in politics: running for president as his own second choice. He has pledged not to run for president if Gore does run but will almost certainly run if Gore does not. Still, Lieberman will not follow the Gore/Lieberman game plan of 2000 if he does run. He now disagrees with Gore over the issue of populism. Critics of Gore, most notably the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, to whom Lieberman is very close, say that Gore's 2000 "people vs. the powerful" message was divisive and lost him the election. In a speech at the DLC convention in Indianapolis last July, Lieberman repudiated the Gore strategy by saying that people vs. the powerful was "too subject to misunderstanding." Lieberman also says he was prevented by the Gore campaign from talking more about faith and values and that was a mistake. When asked by U.S. News if Gore blew an easily winnable race, Lieberman replied: "How do I answer the question? I felt good about my own contribution."
Not that Gore did not make contributions of his own. One thing Gore does have that many other candidates lack is an understanding of farm policy. And farm policy is disproportionately important in presidential politics simply because the Iowa caucuses precede the New Hampshire primary by eight days. It is the first time anybody votes for these guys and it gets huge media coverage. The dirty little secret of politics, however, is how sick some candidates are of Iowa. The only policy acceptable to some Iowa farmers seems to be some version of "give us all the money in the Treasury and we'll return what we don't use" and candidates are tired of the pandering they have to do.
Besides, John McCain skipped Iowa in 2000, practically lived in New Hampshire, and whomped George W. Bush there by 19 percentage points. Bill Bradley slugged it out with Gore in Iowa, squandered time and money, lost the caucuses by 28 percentage points, and then went on to lose New Hampshire by 4 percentage points. If Bradley had skipped Iowa and spent all his time in New Hampshire, might he have beaten Gore there and seriously damaged him? We don't know. But Bradley probably asks himself that a lot.
"A bunch of candidates will skip Iowa this time," predicts Anita Dunn, who has done some consulting for Daschle's PAC this cycle. "Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, they should all skip Iowa. Gore and Gephardt have locked up most of the Iowa support already."
Gore may also have a near lock on some other support: African-Americans, the most loyal voters Democrats have. If Gore doesn't run, however, who gets those votes? Brazile names so many possibilities--including Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Daschle, Roy Barnes (the governor of Georgia), and Al Sharpton--that it could be a real scramble. The candidates are already showing their deep concern and generosity. When Brazile needed money to help the Texas Senate campaign of Ron Kirk, who is black, she knew just where to go. "I called up the presidential campaigns [i.e., the PACs of the potential presidential candidates]," she said. "Lieberman, Daschle, Gephardt, Edwards, I think they all gave. And they are not giving out of the goodness of their hearts."
But even with black votes, Brazile says, Gore has two liabilities: the "viability" issue--if he couldn't beat Bush in 2000, how is he going to do it in 2004?--and the loss of his home state of Tennessee, which cost him the White House. "It's an albatross around his neck," Brazile says. "And he will have trouble assembling a staff and raising money. The donors have the biggest egos in politics; they want to be courted and other candidates are getting to them."
Gore backers scoff. They say that there is always new money to be found and that there is no shortage of political staffers in the world, though they admit that a deeply committed, deeply loyal staff, the kind that formed around Clinton or even Bradley, has never formed around Gore. And if the other candidates had forgotten why they disliked Gore, he reminded them at the recent Florida Democratic state conference in Orlando.
Whipped up. The candidates were supposed to walk out and give speeches. But Gore assembled a "whip" operation to hand out professionally printed signs (no other candidate had signs) and stickers (no other candidate had stickers) and to arrange for throbbing music to be played when he entered. (No other candidates had planned on music, throbbing or otherwise.) Though all this roused the crowd and wowed the press, the other candidates thought this represented Gore at his worst: overly striving, overly competitive, the man who has landed more blows on fellow Democrats like Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Bradley than he ever landed on George W. Bush.
Nick Baldick, who worked very hard for Gore in 2000, helped engineer his victory in New Hampshire, and almost engineered a victory in Florida, has been advising John Edwards this year. "Gore has a whip operation?" Baldick sneered in Florida. "Gore needs a whip operation."
Will Gore do it? Can he really summon the passion for another run? He entered the hall in Orlando to the U2 tune "Where the Streets Have No Name," the first two lines of which are: "I want to run. I want to hide." The trouble for Gore is that he seems to want to do both and he can't.
Meanwhile, the long-distance runners run on without him, enduring the scrutiny when they can get it and the loneliness when they cannot.
"I want to be helpful to all of them," Brazile says, "but I don't feel passionate about any of them."
And they only have about two years to change her mind.
This story appears in the April 29, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.