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
Mauro agreed. "This was a different thing," he said. "I don't know about caucuses. One reason people vote absentee is because they don't want to go out! Holy cow, what was I doing?" After the dinner and assurances he would get some support from phone banks, Mauro told Ricca that La Macchina would do it. But he wanted to make clear that this was a huge commitment. "If we do something, we do something to win," Mauro said. Ricca was very pleased, but he was also no starry-eyed kid. He knew that Mauro was going to be trying something completely new, and completely new things rarely pay off in their first outing. "I really wasn't sure what it would yield," Ricca said later.
After the dinner, Mauro and his friends went to his insurance office just west of downtown Des Moines, where Mauro has 10 phone lines. They began calling people to get an idea of how difficult it was going to be to get people to vote in the caucuses.
"Don't ask me!" caller after caller told Mauro. "Please don't ask! A vote for you, that's different. I always vote for you; you know that. But to go out to the caucuses for--who is it? John Kerry?--c'mon, John. We're talking three, four hours here!" Mauro knew he was not going to win that battle. So he had to massage it. He called the people who would be his precinct captains on caucus night and told them that the caucuses were not going to last three, four hours this year. "If you ain't done in an hour and a half," Mauro said, "my people are walking out, so be done in an hour and a half. This ain't no ceremony . Get 'em in, get 'em out."
Still, Mauro did not have an easy time. Many balked. But now Mauro was committed, and he and La Macchina worked the phones and worked the doors. "I knew Dean was not going to sell," Mauro said (noting also that the Dean campaign had never bothered to call him for his support). "You can't bring people in from outside to start knocking on doors. It don't work that way." Ricca went out with one of Mauro's precinct workers one day to see how it did work. "I went around door to door with the guy," Ricca said. "He knew everybody, and everybody knew what they had to do. The guy says, 'Check these seven names of people and see if they are coming to the caucuses, and I'll be back at 2 p.m. to check.' And at 2 p.m., he comes back and they tell him, 'These five are coming for Kerry, and these two are not.' " And those were figures that the Kerry campaign could depend on. (And the two who were not coming could depend on somebody knocking on their door and asking why they weren't coming.) The Dean volunteers were often passionate, dedicated, and enthusiastic. But for the most part, they were not talking to their neighbors, and Kerry's volunteers were. John Mauro had coached Little League in his neighborhood, he had lived in Christ the King parish for 27 years, and he had known most members of La Macchina, which was also a civic organization doing charitable work, since they were 7 years old and going to St. Anthony's Catholic elementary school together. Most of the Italian immigrants who came to Iowa settled in either Des Moines or Oelwein. "And we all said the same thing to them," Mauro said. "We wish you had gone to Florida! We wish you had gone to California!" But they came to Iowa, where the winters are harsh and the caucuses harsher.
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