What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  That Tuesday, when there was no more schedule, and darkness fell, and the killers gathered in another motel—this time a Howard Johnson’s, no food, no couch, no Loreen, and not a suite, just a row of rooms along a dim hallway—no one could tell Dick he would survive the night. They told him it was too close to call ... and sent him out again, to stand in the snow and dark, outside polling places—who could tell? Maybe he’d change a few votes. Then, they were so frantic, they sent Jane to other polls—“Now! Y’gotta get out there now!” ... She had to tell them to wait five minutes! Could she go to a bathroom? Could she get some gloves?

  That evening, when the polls closed, Dick came back, and the killers tried to leave him alone with Jane—private time, they called it. But Dick just sat on the bed, flipping channels—why didn’t anyone have any damn news! She tried to talk about the day, but he didn’t want to talk. (“Fine ... no, it was fine.”) So she shut up, and hunched back against the pillows with a sick, empty feeling inside. What would this do to him? Would he always regret? How would he get past this sadness? He kept flipping channels, and no one was telling him ... anything. She could see from his back how alone he was. So she walked down the hall, and she brought the killers back to him.

  They came in like angels of death. Even Carrick was accepting blame that night, for getting so panicky during the week—that had thrown Dick off his game. Doak and Shrum had spent most of the week fighting with Trippi over who was the genius behind the magic-bullet Hyundai ad. Ethel Klein was in her last night—the white boys had driven her off the plane when it looked like they were headed for the White House. So all they could offer Dick now was a chance to polish his third-place speech, a “fight-on-to-change-this-country” speech ... and after Dick had worked that over, at his narrow motel desk ... after the TVs had started scrolling some numbers ... and a couple of the dim rooms filled with suits and smoke and spin ... after Reilly had read his tea leaves, and punched up his friends at the networks, and as he was pouring into Dick’s ear the news, but only the good news, or the maybe-at-least-okay news, while Dick studied the carpet in the drab HoJo hall ... then Tony Coelho burst out of Dick’s room, calling into the hallway, as he came:

  “CBS just projected you got SECOND!”

  And Dick lifted his eyes from the rug and looked up at the cheap ceiling tiles, two feet above his head, as if they were Uncle Bob’s azure heavens, and he grabbed Coelho with a hand behind Tony’s neck and pulled him closer, till their foreheads were touching and Dick saw Coelho’s eyes as one, and he said, grinning, giggling: “This thing just might happen!”

  And everyone was so relieved ... they didn’t notice—not that night—that Dick’s cry of triumph had shrunk in eight days from a roar to a gurgle. No one thought to comment on the strange and dangerous air of deliverance in that hallway. ... Not to mention (no one did that night), they hadn’t closed the gap on Dukakis all week.

  To be precise, when they rolled into South Dakota the next day, they were, by Reilly’s reading, sixteen points behind Dukakis ... in a farm state ... in the Midwest. It looked like another grim week. As a matter of fact, the week couldn’t have started worse: Dick hit the ground, and the first guy he saw was ... Paul Simon.

  “Goddam that man! ...” he muttered. “Won’t he die?”

  (Actually, Simon was dead, but his Illinois pol friends didn’t believe in Death with Dignity. Hey! They wanted to go to the convention!)

  So Dick began to ply South Dakota ... and for two days he toiled, but he could not close the gap fast enough. He had the endorsement of the state’s reigning politician, Senator Tom Daschle ... and that endorsement he publicized on TV. He had the Harkin-Gephardt farm bill ... and his midwestern roots ... and his victory in neighboring Iowa ... and all those positives he publicized. But he was still eleven points behind. And he could not go into Super Tuesday, trailing a string of second-place finishes, limping, impoverished. He had to do something.

  So he scraped together an extra ten thousand dollars and ... he went negative.

  That’s when the dangerous magic happened.

  The killers had the ad ready Thursday night—they read Dick the script. They had to have a decision within hours, to buy the airtime Friday for weekend spots—give the sludge a chance to cook.

  The ad was quick and cheap. A narrator’s voice carried the freight:

  Gephardt was for a tough trade bill ... Dukakis was against.

  Gephardt was for the Harkin-Gephardt farm bill ... Dukakis—well, who could tell?

  Dukakis was the man who told Iowa farmers to diversify: “... flowers, blueberries, Belgian endive ...

  “Those are some of the reasons why South Dakotans are for Gephardt—not Dukakis.”

  Then, the Gephardt slogan appeared ... followed by the narrator’s voice, again, as if he had to make sure he got that right:

  “Belgian endive?”

  In Carrick’s gentle phrase, the ad was “a fuckin’ killer.” It went up Friday night, and Dukakis started bleeding support. By Sunday, the gap had closed to six points, and by the last tracking poll, Monday, they were even.

  One ad ... a lousy ten thousand bucks!

  Dick had struck the rock ... and lo, it gave water.

  114

  Lobster Salad

  IT WASN’T THAT THE Dukakis campaign was asleep at the switch. All the wise guys on Chauncy Street realized they had a fight on their hands ... everybody but Michael.

  He was still striding the boards, speaking the lines of his private play ... relishing the stirring climax of Act Two, when he’d won New Hampshire and stood on stage while his bride, Katharine, draped a gold medal around his neck.

  What an orgy of diddybop photos!

  What a luscious piece of marathon spin!

  “I always wanted,” the Globe had him whispering to Kitty, “to win a gold medal.”

  “That’s not true!” Kitty corrected. “What he said was: ‘I love you, babe.’ ”

  Well, the point was, the happy warrior marched off with a tremendous victory. He’d worked New Hampshire every week for a year, opened offices in every town with more than two gas stations ... he suffused that state in TV ads, TV interviews, a tidal wave of Duke-news from the Boston papers ... he paid enough staff to call 200,000 households, augmented his paid staff with hundreds of volunteers, who drove north from Boston to bring out the vote ... he had his two closest rivals at each other’s throats with broken bottles, and most of the nation, withal, ignoring the Democrats to see if Bush would bleed to death ... and the Dukakis juggernaut won the state with ... what? Thirty-six percent?

  That is, with sixteen percent less than the polls gave him, six months before.

  Fantastic.

  Of course, that showed Michael he was right. He was running the kinda campaign people liked. They were moving now. Things were happening! They were ... right on track.

  So when Kiley suggested, day after day, that they try to move the speech off good-jobs-at-good-wages, show the nation the passion for justice, the can-do spirit, the bedrock of conviction that underlay the campaign of Michael Dukakis ... well, Dukakis took the new lines out of the speech.

  When Estrich suggested, again, that they hit Gephardt with the flip-flops ... when she showed Michael a computer list of business PACs that contributed to Gephardt’s campaign, or a subset of that list—PACs that gave to Gephardt and to George Bush—Michael gave her that dirt-on-the-carpet look, and snapped: “I don’t wanna hear it!” (Of course, the list didn’t go to waste. It showed up in The Boston Globe. ... That was fine. Don’t tell Michael!)

  They planned TV ads on Gephardt’s PAC contributions and the flip-flops. Michael wouldn’t authorize production. (He didn’t want attack tapes lying around the office—no!) He asked someone—his Advance man, or a local pol—and they didn’t like the idea, either. That was one of Michael’s favorite moves. He’d ask anyone he saw about a line in a speech, an ad, a debate-prep zinger ... he’d ask until he found someone who didn’t like it. Then he�
�d report back to Chauncy Street that the local people didn’t like that stuff.

  In desperation, Estrich flew out to meet Dukakis on the road, to show him their polls on the PAC issue. It made a difference to people! If they could show Democrats that Dick Gephardt was taking that money (Mercantile Bancorporation, Inc., Political Action Committee—$5,000; Monsanto Citizenship Fund—$5,000), voters would finally see a difference between the campaigns! ... Michael immediately asked his driver, a kid in his dad’s Chevrolet: What did he think? Should a responsible candidate, should a Michael Dukakis, engage in that kinda, that sorta, that negative branda ... politics?

  “Yeah!” said the kid. “You know, that’s one of the things that really bothers me! They’re taking that money! ...”

  Michael gave Estrich a dirty look, like she’d set the kid up.

  Mostly, he heard what he wanted to hear. Michael was enough of a lawyer for that. Anyway, the campaign had moved beyond the states where he had to know people, where they might tell him something unpleasant. Now it was mostly airport to airport, with local pols on the tarmac, telling him he was doing ... well, fine ... things were looking great!

  So they were. Babbitt had dropped out. Simon was crippled. Hart was still out there with his daughter, and a single car, nosing around the South—why, Michael couldn’t figure. But Michael wasn’t going to stoop to attack now ... when people seemed to be catching on to the kinda guy he was.

  That was the problem. Michael saw his fortunes rising, and concluded: people were taking a good look now ... and they liked him!

  “We’re starting to connect out there,” he told friends back in Boston. “It’s something ... well, you oughta see it, it’s just ... terrific.”

  The problem was, Michael wasn’t going to hit anyone. That’s not the kinda guy he was. But there was a time ...

  In 1979, when Ed King supplanted Michael in the State House, Michael thought he was finished. If Ed King did a half-decent job, he’d be good for two terms. Michael was washed up. Paul Brountas convinced him he had to keep a little office for politics—if nothing else, just to thank the people who wrote in to tell Dukakis how sorry they were.

  “Just keep their names on file!”

  So he rented an office, one room, and staffed it with one young supporter, Andy Sutcliffe, who sent the thank-yous, kept the file cards, and took the calls ... some of them calls from Dukakis people who were still in the State House, who were terribly upset by the King administration.

  King was a Bozo!

  King was hiring hacks!

  King was disassembling all their reforms!

  So Sutcliffe had hot poop on the King administration. And this poop promptly found its way into the papers. King was doing a hell of a job of ruining his reputation—on his own. (During National Clown Week, he posed for a picture with a clown nose—then everyone called him a Bozo.) But Michael’s office-in-exile did what it could to help out.

  The best was the lobster salad.

  Ed King liked lobster salad for lunch. Of course, his bodyguards (King liked bodyguards) had to have lunch, too. So when Sutcliffe got word that Eddie King wanted the state to pay his take-out lunch bill ... twelve hundred dollars of lobster salad in one month ... well, it wasn’t long till the Globe ran a front-page exposé, along with a handsome picture of a lobster ... and Ed King had a new reputation as a wastrel Bozo.

  Michael could not have been more pleased. He knew, of course, about the leaks to the Globe. He and Sutcliffe plotted them. The public deserved to know! A wanton arrogance! ... The story deserved to be told! It was true!

  Just as true as the tapes that Sasso put out.

  But that was different. No one found out how the Globe got the lobster salad.

  Anyway, Michael had lost to this guy!

  In his Georgetown office, the day of the South Dakota vote, February 23, David Doak got the word from his TV friends: Gephardt was blowing Dukakis away.

  “How big?” Doak breathed into the phone.

  A small chuckle followed. He traded some numbers from previous calls ... when he hung up, he was smiling broadly. But ... back to business: he was explaining how the magic happened.

  “No, our one advantage was, we could turn on a dime ...

  “Bob and I went through four or five ideas, Wednesday and Thursday ...

  “Flew it out there ... got it up Friday night ...”

  Doak waited patiently while the writers wrote that down.

  No, he said, Dick wasn’t any problem on this. Dick understands now. Dick is on track ... took some doing.

  “You know, he kept waiting for someone to pin the fuckin’ merit badge on him ...

  “He’s done everything right—much better than anybody expected—and the shit is only getting tougher.”

  But Reilly’s numbers showed them ahead by a hair in Texas, closing in Florida, tied for the lead in Georgia ... of course, Missouri would be a lock for Dick. With the magic in South Dakota, they’d even have some money—close to a million for Super Tuesday ...

  “You wanna see something?”

  Doak led the way to the mailroom, opened the door. The bright fluorescents banished the early-evening darkness, shone on Doak’s hair as he looked to the floor. There, gleaming white, purple, and orange ... were seventy-five Federal Express packs filled with ad tapes ... lined up in stacks, as neat as bullets in a cartridge clip.

  For an instant, as he looked up, the lights flashed in Doak’s eyes. The next day, those packs would blanket every market in seven states. Doak chuckled again, more in satisfaction than mirth.

  “You’re lookin’ at it,” he said.

  He didn’t have to explain what it was ... it was the next hope.

  How could he have known, that same night (faster than FedEx could travel), Michael Dukakis would hear the vote from South Dakota (forty-four percent for Gephardt, thirty-one for Dukakis) ... and know he’d made a mistake. Of course, he wouldn’t say that ... but he’d have very much the same it in mind when he’d tell Nick Mitropoulos they could go with the ads on Gephardt.

  “I’m not gonna let it happen again,” Michael would say. “Anywhere.”

  115

  The Plane from Hell

  REPORTERS WERE CALLING IT the Plane from Hell—even while Dole was still winning. South Dakota, Minnesota were good states for him—wide-open, clean-living, midwestern places where Bob Dole could be “One of Us.” Bush meant to duck both states. Dole couldn’t lose.

  Still, Dole’s charter—a dingy 727 from Presidential Airways—was filled with the smell of death. Too much room, for one thing: on some hops, there were eight or nine reporters rattling around the back, where there was space for fifty. Up front, it was emptier: just Dole and Glassner and sometimes a field guy; no one to talk politics, no one writing anything for Dole; there wasn’t a typewriter, much less a computer, a fax, even a phone. Mari was still aboard, supposed to deal with the press, but she was so sick with pneumonia, it was all she could do to haul herself along. Dole was sick, too, but not like Mari—mostly sick at heart. He’d sit up front, staring, silent: he didn’t understand his schedule, why he was doing these events. He had no idea what he was supposed to be saying. There was no plan, no sign of activity at L Street. What were they doing? He’d call headquarters from the airports—couldn’t even find any Klingons! They must have split when the money ran out.

  That’s why he called Dave Keene to come along—actually, he had Judy Harbaugh call Keene:

  “Senator wants you to meet him at the airport, 7:00 A.M.”

  Keene had grown increasingly sour since Brock and the Big Guys froze him out. “I don’t think a meeting’s going to do much good.”

  “No, he wants you. He wants you to go along on the plane.”

  So Keene climbed aboard the Plane from Hell, and Dole at least had someone to complain to. “Senator, don’t get too down,” Keene told him. “Things can happen with Bush, too. I know Bush: he can get down if he has setbacks. He might have trouble, handling ...”


  Dole snapped at Keene: “I can handle ... losing. You tell me I’m gonna lose sixty-forty, I can handle it. Don’t say I can’t handle it! ... But I’ve got a right to know what’s going on. Don’t tell me I’m gonna win sixty-forty when I’m not.”

  Dole said no one was telling him anything! “They give me the schedule, but they won’t tell me why we’re doing anything ... look at this!” He showed Keene the schedule for Tuesday—Dole was supposed to sit in Missouri on the night he was winning Minnesota, South Dakota.

  Keene couldn’t figure that, either: “We need good news.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. ...” Then Dole asked: “What does Devine think?”

  “He’s in Minnesota.”

  “You think he’d come with us?”

  “He would if you asked.”

  “You get him.”

  So then it was Keene and Devine—just like old times! Keene was spouting lines for Dole mile-a-minute (“Why don’t you start asking, ‘Where’s Bush?’ Haven’t seen him anywhere! How can he write off the heartland of this country?”) ... And Devine was hunched over his computer (he had a laptop!), trying to figure out where Dole might win delegates—maybe delegates enough to ... make this a fight! They couldn’t fight Bush all across the South, but they could pick off Missouri, Oklahoma ... North Carolina, surely—a district or two in Florida? ... They were actually nosing toward a plan ... and Dole started to perk up. He kept hovering over Devine:

  “What about the delegates? Aghhhh ... you got ’em?”

  “Yeah, I got ’em,” Devine said. “But I’m not telling you because you’ll hold me to the numbers.”

  “Nooo,” Dole said. “I won’t do that.”

  Keene said: “Yes, you will!”

  And they started to laugh. It was the first time in a week anyone had heard laughter on that plane.

  “Just tell me,” Dole said. “Can we still do it?”

  Devine said: “You can do it.”