Turning Point
After nearly everyone had written him off, John Kerry turned a limping campaign into a force that couldn't be beat. Here's How
Gov. Tom Vilsack, an unusually thoughtful politician, made this candid appraisal of the caucuses in an interview: "This really is a party-building process. It's designed to find those people who are genuinely interested and active and willing to spend the time, because those are the very same people that you're going to rely upon [in the general election] to make the phone calls, to knock on the doors, to lick the envelopes and the stamps, to host fundraisers. That's the structure." Lest you think Vilsack is in any way defensive about the process, however, he went on to liken the Iowa caucuses to the American Revolution. "If you think about how our democracy got started--really got started--it was a caucus process," he said. "It was those guys meeting in the basement of the tavern in Boston yakking about the issues of the day and figuring and fussing and fighting and ultimately coming to a conclusion about the direction they were going to take. I think it's great."
Great, but difficult. Which is why Mauro and La Macchina didn't bother with it. The caucuses? Who needed them? Well, Kerry needed them if he was going to become the Democratic nominee, and his aides were not going to let guys like Mauro slip between their fingers. Crawford knew he could not close the deal--he had not backed Mauro for county supervisor--but he maintained good ties to Mauro's brother, Michael, who just happened to be the Polk County auditor, and Crawford kept asking Michael to help bring John around. (John has seven living siblings--one died a few years ago--which means that when the family gathered for Christmas in 2003, there were 131 people and they met in a church hall. When U.S. News asked Mauro how many votes he could count on from that gathering, he smiled and said, "About 60," which is not bad considering some are children and too young to vote.) But Crawford knew somebody else would have a better chance of sewing up Mauro, especially if that somebody else had a last name ending in a vowel.
"So Crawford calls me up and says he wants me to do a 'wop-on-wop' with Mauro," Ricca said.
"That would be 'Italian-on-Italian,' " Whouley interjected.
"You could translate it that way," Ricca allowed.
So Ricca flew back to Iowa (he had been there in November with Whouley to try to persuade Vilsack to endorse Kerry), and he went to a dinner meeting with Mauro and about a dozen members of La Macchina a few days after Christmas at an Italian restaurant owned by one of Mauro's cousins. (By his count, Mauro has 655 cousins. Mauro likes to count things.) Ricca assumed he was going to have to do a selling job, but it didn't turn out that way. Mauro had met Kerry on a previous trip to Iowa, and Mauro liked it when Kerry roared up to the meeting on a motorcycle. Besides, Kerry was a veteran, as were Mauro and many members of La Macchina, and they felt a bond with him. So Kerry was not the problem. The caucuses were the problem. The caucuses were not their thing. Ricca understood the psychology perfectly. (A good political organizer would make a pretty fair shrink.) "These guys were not used to failing," Ricca said. "That was the problem. Their organization spent its life making it easy for people to vote--here is the absentee ballot; I'll come back and pick it up from you--and now they were going to be asking people to go to caucuses for three to five hours in winter. It was the antithesis of what they knew how to do."
advertisement
