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 was not a lifelong politician. One day in 1990, he had a disagreement with a county supervisor over a piece of land and didn't like the way he was treated. "Bada bing, bada boom," Mauro told the incumbent. "Maybe it's time we take you out. Maybe it's time we find somebody to beat your brains in." In other cities, in other states, that might have meant somebody was going to get whacked, but while politics in Iowa is vigorous, it is not homicidal. All Mauro meant was that maybe it was time for the incumbent to be challenged. "You got nobody to beat me," the incumbent told Mauro.
"I'll beat you," Mauro said, and, of course, he did, though now, years later, he admits, "It was not a good reason to run." So Mauro had this core group from the neighborhood, and it was a powerful force because it organized only in the neighborhood. "It is an Italian village," Mauro said. "People here, they don't want outside advice." The South Side of Des Moines is also one of the densest population centers in Iowa, which means a large number of votes can be harvested in just a few blocks, compared with driving down miles of country roads for hours to knock on just a few doors. As the years went by, La Macchina did not escape notice. Senator Harkin came to Mauro, as did Vilsack, and both received support through his absentee ballots. (And it was, of course, a two-way street. "Harkin got us money for an Italian-American cultural center," Mauro said. "That was good. We have never asked the governor for anything, but we are sure he would be there for us.") As La Macchina began producing names of committed voters for Kerry, Ricca noticed something wonderful. "Mauro's group started churning up names we didn't have in our database!" Ricca said. Which means Mauro was truly expanding the voting universe. He was coming up with people not on anybody's list and getting them to vote for Kerry.
Which was not good enough. Nothing is ever good enough for people who sweat details, and many Kerry operatives had spent their lives sweating details. (In politics, the race is not always to the swift or even the smartest; it is often to he who works the hardest.)
The Kerry campaign had its own precinct captains for the South Side of Des Moines, and Ricca wanted to be sure they meshed with Mauro's. "Mauro's guys rarely came into Kerry headquarters," Ricca said. "They did their work from their homes. And we were very leery of that." You could ask why the Kerry campaign wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth, but political campaigns are very complicated machines and unless somebody is making sure all the parts are working together, they have a tendency to grind themselves apart. So Ricca asked Mauro to bring his precinct captains in to meet with Kerry's precinct captains, so nobody stumbled over anyone else. Ricca will never forget the day. "It was like a scene from Goodfellas !" Ricca said. "The leather jackets! The gold chains! I'm Italian-American, so I can say that." And it was important to Mauro that Ricca was Italian-American, that Ricca's father had been a custodian, and that Italian had been spoken in the Ricca home by Ricca's father and grandfather. "Though I can understand just a few words myself," Ricca admitted. "But I got to tell you, Mauro knew as little as I did!"
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