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
It was unlikely that Harkin would endorse Kerry--"There is a lack of chemistry between them," Crawford said diplomatically--but he was hoping for the union's endorsement. While he waited, Crawford assembled a huge notebook of Kerry's policy positions and dropped it off at Terrace Hill, the ornate Second Empire-style governor's mansion in Des Moines. (Though Terrace Hill is pleasant looking, the architectural style is familiar to anyone who has seen a horror film. The house on the hill in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is Second Empire.) He also assembled a tape that matched Kerry's appearance on Meet the Press against Howard Dean's and dropped that off, too. Sometime in the summer, Crawford found himself on the same flight home to Des Moines with Christie Vilsack and told her: "I want to make sure you know how eager we are to earn your support." To which the governor's wife replied, not unpleasantly, that she had made no decision, but "I don't need to be lobbied or romanced."
The Kerry campaign, of course, continued to do both. Kerry met with Vilsack in early fall, and Vilsack set out three criteria for an endorsement: Kerry would have to be endorsed by AFSCME, he would have to be competitive in the polls in Iowa, and he would have to have a solid foundation of support. The first meeting between Vilsack and the Kerry staff came on November 24. Though it was set up by Crawford, the pitch was made by Whouley and Joe Ricca. Whouley knew the meeting was going to be difficult. On November 12, AFSCME had endorsed Dean so Vilsack no longer had the cover to endorse Kerry. Vilsack didn't want to meet with the Kerry aides either in the capitol or the governor's mansion, where somebody might have seen them enter or leave, so the meeting was set up in a holding room in the vast Polk County Convention Complex after an MSNBC debate. (The meeting was supposed to be top secret, but through a bizarre mix-up the media were alerted: Ricca, trying to reach Whouley to tell him the time and place of the meeting, called his hotel, the Renaissance Savery, and asked for his room. He left a voice mail saying the Vilsack meeting was set for that night. But Ricca had been mistakenly connected with the room of Ryan Lizza, a reporter for the New Republic .)
In the meeting, Vilsack was frank. Without the AFSCME endorsement, he said, there was no way he could endorse Kerry. "I am about to propose a major tax package to fund educational initiatives, and I need AFSCME to push it," Vilsack reportedly explained. "I can't alienate AFSCME by going against their choice. All politics is local, and I can't afford to do this."
Whouley and Ricca believed him, but they also knew that Kerry's poor standing in the polls made it far easier for Vilsack to say no. Nobody wants to back a loser.
"We have a foundation of support in Iowa," Ricca told Vilsack.
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