What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Meanwhile, Gary did his reading, kept out of trouble. There was a mini-scandal in chem class one year when someone stole the final exam, and Lester Hoffman, the teacher, hit the roof and made everybody take the test again ... but Gary didn’t need that kind of shortcut. (In fact, Bill Meucke offered him a peek at the test, but Gary was scared, and said, “Get that thing out of here!”) Grades were never a problem for Hartpence. Like most of the smart kids, he knew he was going to college. Even had the school picked out: Bethany, a Nazarene college near Oklahoma City. Of course, that wasn’t a big school, with teams that people talked about, like KU, or K-State, or even Ottawa U ... so it wasn’t something he could small-talk about.

  But even with that, he found another way. He found out he could not talk. It worked like a charm! In fact, it was charm ... you could almost see it happening in him, about the time everybody got their licenses, sophomore year, ’51–’52. ... Gary and a friend, or a couple of friends, would be riding around, dragging Main, like everybody else, in the evening. Maybe they’d check in at the Dutch Maid, or Scott’s (seven burgers for a dollar) on Fifth Street, near the library ... and then, they’d go to the youth center ... where Gary found he didn’t have to dance, and he didn’t have to play Ping-Pong, and he didn’t even have to small-talk. He found out he could sit in the back, alone, near the fireplace, lost in his thoughts, a bit melancholy, silent... and, sure enough, some girl would come over to say, “Oh, Gary, don’t worry ...

  “Gary, things’re gonna be all right. Are you sad?”

  And Gary’d say, no, he was all right, just thinking ...

  “Really?”

  And sometimes, they’d get to talking about what Gary was thinking, maybe what he’d been reading ... he was so smart! And he made them feel smart. He always wanted to know about them, what they thought ... (Really? That’s what they thought? He never knew that ...) And he spoke so softly, almost purring, and they could see how he brightened, the fun in him, his eyes ... if they were a year or two younger, it was even easier, and almost more fun, and it made them feel important.

  Sometimes, they’d get back in the car, Gary and the girl, or him and a friend and a couple of girls, and they’d drive out to the south edge of town, to the airport, just a strip of concrete in the fields—no lights, no planes at night ... and they’d pull out onto the runway, and stop the car, and open the doors. And with the radio glowing, the Mills Brothers piercing the dark, they’d dance on the runway, under the stars. ... Gary liked to dance slow, and close, almost motionless. ... That concrete was rough on the shoes, but what the hell—Gary hardly moved his feet.

  14

  The Diddybop Bostons

  HERE THEY COME, OFF the plane, the diddybop Bostons, jangling down the ramp to get ahead of their man. There’s nothing like them—not out here, anyway. First thing is their color: they’re gray. In Iowa, the only people that color are sick. But the Bostons are always soot-color in the winter—like streets after snow, after the salt trucks come through and it dries during the day ... asphalt gray. They don’t notice: they feel fine, full of nervy energy and quick talk. And busy, always—maybe that’s what makes them gray, those women with the skin stretched around their eyes, like they’ve been in traffic for the last ten years, their jaws narrow under tight haircuts. The guys seem to have more flesh, and flush to their cheeks, but when you get close, it’s only broken veins ... their capillaries all had little strokes, practicing up for the Big One. The other thing is the way they move, so busy: the first ones are hunched over fast mincy steps, like they’re getting out of cabs in the rain; they’ve got to get off the ramp, to get the shot, and their cameras, lights, boom mikes all stick out, giving them a six-legged look, like something skittering under the stove when the light switches on in the kitchen. Then the lights are on, and the others come out, bouncing down the ramp, with the jingle of all the crap they carry (even the guys have little bags), with their heads bobbing time, and their gray eye sockets shifting back and forth, looking the place over, while their heads are nodding, like they’d buy it—if it weren’t such a dump. A couple of the guys have a hand in a pocket, like they’re holding shivs, and there’s one chewing gum, and they’re off the ramp, still bouncing and jingling, while they trade bursts of rat-a-tat talk down the concourse, and quick snorts of laughter, and two of them stop at a picture on the wall, the sort of color-chocked promotional photograph that airport authorities select by committee, and one of them is digging in a bag for a notebook. It’s a farm scene ... with animals ... which is just what the diddybops came out to see ... and now a third one comes up behind, and says, as if the first two were wondering, “That’s a cow.” And they all have a giggle about coming out here—“hog-hopping,” as the Globe would call it the next day.

  Make no mistake, though: these people were in deadly earnest. For one thing, besides the Governor and his wife, and Sasso, and a couple of staff to tend to them, there were about twenty-five reporters, and each would have to get a story, to justify the trip. All the affiliate TV stations had three or four people each, not to mention Channel Fifty-six, and public TV, and Ken Bode with his crew from NBC, and the big papers had at least two, or two and a columnist, and the smaller papers—The Quincy Patriot Ledger, The Worcester Telegram—had their State House guys out there, with plane tickets and hotel rooms ... and those guys weren’t even political writers, who were used to spending a fortune to learn ... well, not much. No, these guys had to have a story, and the story was: Is he running, or not? So every few minutes, they’d poke their mikes in, like thermometers, to see if the fever was rising.

  The official line on the trip was that Governor Dukakis, a prominent member of the National Governors Association, was invited to Iowa by the Governor, Terry Branstad, for a hearing on rural America ... just part of the Governor’s continuing process of self-education. But that polite fiction begged the question: as if Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing module, and tried to explain, “Hey, no big deal, I’m just here to collect some rocks.” No, the point for the Bostons was the trip itself, and they were in full Presidential cry. The Bostons always expect to have a piece of this President business: it’s a regional industry with them—like ham is in Virginia. There was no Kennedy going this time, so ... The Duke was the ticket. The Boston TVs had already commissioned exclusive polls to see where he stood in Iowa. The Globe had a guy on the streets of Des Moines two days early, showing a picture of Michael, like a runaway child, to see if anybody knew him.

  They didn’t. But the process already was feeding on itself. The moment the diddybops hit that ramp, Gate 3B, Des Moines Airport, it did not matter that no one in Iowa wanted Michael Dukakis to be President. The local TVs and The Des Moines Register showed up to cover the arrival ... as news! ... He has come! Hey, more than a year to the caucuses, and this guy already needs a Greyhound to carry his press corps—we better get out there! At one point, one of the Bostons asked one of the Des Moineses why the hell he was there: “If so many of you guys weren’t here,” said Michael Day, of KCCI, Des Moines, “we wouldn’t be covering this today.” Meanwhile, Day complained that Dukakis wasn’t saying anything. Which, of course, filtered back to Michael. Why didn’t he say something?

  And from that moment, it did not matter that Michael Dukakis had nothing to say about Iowa—in fact, knew nothing of the problems of its farmers ... in fact, had never been sufficiently interested in Iowa to visit in his fifty-three years, save once, as a college student, thirty-three years before, when he hitchhiked through, one blurry night, on his way to somewhere that did interest him, which was Mexico. Didn’t matter: the Des Moines TVs and the Register were there, to give the people of this state their first impression. What did he have to say? ... And Lowell Junkins, who had run and lost for Governor in Iowa, got into Michael’s car at the airport (he had to know some farming—didn’t he?), and Junkins was talking diversification: problem was too much corn and cattle and hogs. You know, Junkins said, forty years ago, the second biggest cro
p in this state was apples, but people lost track of that. ... So by the time he got to his first stop in Iowa, Michael was talking diversification. Sat down in a cattle barn and started telling ranchers about diversification. How about lamb ... or fruit? In Massachusetts, he said, his farmers had branched out into berries, lettuce ... Belgian endive. (You know what Belgian endive brings at the Stop & Shop? A fortune!) And it did not matter that these cattlemen had spent their lives raising cattle, and were looking for a way to perpetuate that life. It did not matter that, in Iowa, a Massachusetts-size farm is called the front lawn. Michael had come out to talk to farmers ... so, he talked. And he said to the cameras, after a half-day: “I’ve learned a lot. We’ve had some ... terrific discussions.”

  But it really didn’t matter: the bubble is its own show. By 5:00 P.M., that first day, Michael steamed into downtown Osceola, Iowa, supposed to march Main Street, meeting and greeting (“Hi. Mike Dukakis. Tell me who you are ...”), and right away, the cameramen and sound men were running, six-legged, out of the Greyhound, the rent-a-cars—counting cops, seventeen cars in the motorcade now—and the lenses and mikes were poking over his shoulders, next to his ears, driving him nuts ... but Osceola will never forget. There was a Boston TV lady, Janet Wu, a Chinese, cabled to a satellite truck on Main Street, doing her stand-up, live, back to Boston for the six o’clock news. There were three satellite trucks parked in Osceola, with their dishes turned aloft to the stratosphere, while the halogens stabbed at the storefronts, and strobes whirled atop the state police cars, and, of course, people came out, stood on the street, staring, and then the diddybops grabbed them and poked tape recorders or notebooks at them: “C’nIgetchurname? ... Spellit ... Y’farmer? ...” And people were asking: “What is it? Who is it? Who?” But that wasn’t important: three high school girls were standing on Main Street in the middle of the trucks, and cables, and cop cars, and press-pack-rent-a-cars parked crazy-quilt over the curbs, and by the time he came, almost trotting, Michael Dukakis, five-foot-eight in his wing tips, almost lost in the press pack, and not too happy about it, either ... it simply did not matter. The halogen fireflies came at the girls, and it was ... so exciting ... Oh, GOD, there he IS ... EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ... that they started to scream.

  Michael only worried about the cameras. Did they have to be there? Were they always going to be there? How could you have a discussion with people while boom mikes were brushing their noses? Sasso shrugged: “This is what it is, Mike. Part of the process.” And he watched for a sign—a frown, a grimace—that would have told him Michael could not take the bubble, that he was going sour. But Michael tried to shrug it off. He talked to Kitty—of course, she thought it was ridiculous, an outrage, the way the camera people trampled everywhere: they could kill somebody ... and they wouldn’t care! But she didn’t make it an issue. She was so eager for Michael to have a good time. That night, they were going to have dinner with Governor Branstad and Governor Clinton in a private home in Osceola ... and then each Governor would sleep in a farmhouse ... to have another talk with a farm family. And Kitty professed herself charmed by these arrangements ... smiling all evening, talking hogs, chewing nicotine gum ...

  Oy! A waterbed? ... “Oh, how delightful! We’ve never tried one!”

  It was during dinner that night, while the camera people were out on the lawn, shining their halogens at the windows, standing on the flower pots, tipping two over, that their hostess, Judy Barrett, brought up the subject, life in the bubble: “I don’t see how you can stand it,” she said. “People writing down everything you say, putting it on tape. On stage every minute of the day ...”

  But the process was already feeding on itself: Michael and Kitty were already inside, playing the roles assigned.

  “Oh, we love it,” Kitty said.

  “We like politics ...” Michael said, “... meeting people, talking to the people out there, today, just ... terrific.”

  Meanwhile, Sasso was doing his part, out to dinner with the rest of the press, a steak joint, the only place in town. They filled up four or five tables with the Bostons, who were having a great time, knocking back a few, while Sasso worked, from table to table, like a bar mitzvah boy, dispensing quotes and the gift of his smile, his enjoyment of them. This could be fun! ...

  You bet it could: the reporters knew where their interest lay, too ... a story that would take them all over the country, maybe to the White House. ... They were going national, not to mention all those steaks on the cuff. ... There was a TV in the restaurant, and when the local news came on, there was a bit of a hush. And then ... there it was ... The Duke, their guy, lead story! And from the Boston press rose a quiet, but unmistakable, cheer.

  The startling thing about the Hart campaign, when he started out again, after New Year’s, was how quiet it was, how sane, even here in New Hampshire, where he’d won before, where he had so many friends. You would have thought that a guy thirty points ahead in the polls (no one else was even in double figures) would be packing in huge crowds, stuffing the high school gym, with a big flag behind him and a platform for cameras. But Hart was wise to that: he did not want to climb into the bubble.

  What he wanted, what he got, were living rooms, holding anywhere from a dozen to forty people, places he could talk for an hour, and listen, answer questions, have everyone feel they’d met him, feel they knew why he was running. That’s how he started out, last time, ’82–’83, and it worked—better than anyone dreamed ... anyone except Hart. Of course, last time, he didn’t have a choice: a year before the first votes were cast, he couldn’t have packed a high school gym—nobody knew him. (One time in Portsmouth, Hart tried to work a bingo hall. “Hi, I’m Gary Hart. I’m running for President.” One bingo player turned and snapped: “President of what?”) This time, he had his choice, and he took it: he wanted it small, at the start.

  It had to do with Hart’s theory of campaigning. (Hart always had a theory.) He liked to build from the bottom up. That meant all organizing was local: once a person signed on to run a town, they need only turn to the state office for supplies, resources, and requests for the candidate’s time. In the same way, the state campaigns never had to follow orders from the national staff. The national staff was there to serve the states. When Hart explained the theory, he talked about concentric circles. The base of the campaign, and the locus of his greatest effort, was that first circle. It wasn’t too big—could not be—maybe ten or twelve souls in any one state, handpicked for their energy, credibility, and contacts, who knew Hart, knew what he stood for, had internalized the message. Those ten or twelve would then create a second, larger circle: people they knew, in their neighborhoods, or places of work. They might invite a group to their house to meet Hart, or get a member of the second circle to host a coffee, with his friends, which would start a third circle. The point was, the message would radiate out to the final, largest circle, the voters as a mass.

  It was like Amway ... or saving souls. More like the latter, because it rested on faith, ultimately on Hart’s own faith: he was the only one who fed all the circles. In ’83, Hart had to explain the theory, how it would work, over and over: forget about the polls—once he started to win, the polls would turn around overnight. Forget about endorsements: he could do more with half a dozen good twenty-two-year-old organizers than a score of State Senators who climbed on because they thought he was a winner. Before the votes went down in ’84, Hart even had to tell his people to forget about money—their salaries, which he could no longer pay. When he started to win, the money would roll in. It was the same thing he said about charisma: they called him aloof, too cool, couldn’t lift a crowd ... well, when he started to win—suddenly—they’d see the charisma. Americans love a winner, he said. They were going to love him.

  And they did. After he won New Hampshire in ’84, he was instantly the candidate of charisma—funny, how he’d changed so much in a week. ... That’s what he thought this time around, when everybody said how much better he was. All the writer
s with him in January ’87 came away with the same psycho-political mumble about Hart—“more at ease with himself ... more relaxed ... more at peace ...” Yeah, he was more at peace: he was thirty points ahead.

  But there was no doubt it was clicking, whatever “it” was. In those living rooms, Hart was self-possessed, self-assured, funny sometimes, always full of purpose. He knew what he wanted from that room, that day. He knew what he had to say, and why. His issues made sense, they hung together: it was a worldview; that’s what Hart had spent the last two years on. He had connected the dots. So, when he brought up an oil-import fee—a ten-dollar-a-barrel tax on imported oil—it may not have been a popular stand in New England (where heating-oil costs are a cutting issue). But Hart did not justify the tax just on the basis of energy policy—to spur production in the Southwest. It would also help reduce America’s killing trade deficit. It would raise money for his education proposals. Most of all, it was a national security issue: if America had to send troops to protect “our” oil in the Persian Gulf, the result, he insisted, would be disaster.

  And always, in the question-and-answer sessions, he found his own overdrive, bringing the questions of policy back to the bedrock of Hart-facts. Yes, he was against protectionist tariffs. But not just because they were a bogeyman since the thirties, when tariffs caused a worldwide depression. It was because the goals of trade had changed. America could not, and would not, dominate world markets as it did after the Second World War. The goal of trade had to be a mutual enrichment, the size of the worldwide pie expanding as nations bought ever more from one another: if the America-first crowd ever won, if the U.S. somehow restored its domination, the result would be enmity, isolation, and war.