Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Now, as then, a fusion ticket or copresidency was a nonstarter. So who would Kerry choose? Often, when we are chasing a big story, we have to juggle. That weekend, over the July 4 holiday, I was also substituting for Tim Russert on Meet the Press. Tim has made the show “must-see TV” for people who follow politics, building on a long tradition—the program first went on the air in 1947 and is the longest-running television show in history. It has always been rigorous, but Tim has made his preparation an art form. His sequence of questions is built as carefully as an architect’s model. Grown men and women cringe when he produces a quotation or, worse, a video clip, with a contradictory or incriminating statement. Sometimes, they’ve forgotten they even said it until Tim comes up with the evidence.

  I’ve learned from hard experience that the only way to get ready for Meet the Press is to do your homework. That means spending days reading and selecting the issues, then honing the questions and choosing which quotations to put up on the screen. And, as I’d learned a year earlier when the Joe Wilson story broke late Saturday night, you have to be ready to switch directions at the last minute if news happens. Fortunately, Tim and his producer, Betsy Fischer, have the best team in television news.

  Our guests on the Sunday before Kerry’s announcement of a running mate were Senators John Warner and Joe Lieberman and former national security advisor Sandy Berger, all on Iraq, and a segment with Ralph Nader about his quixotic quest for the presidency. I’ve known Nader for years, and respect his brains, if not his judgment. What many people don’t know is how secretive he is about his movements. For a profile about him for Nightly News, we had to meet at a restaurant. When bringing him to the studio for a show, you have to pick him up on a street corner. Under questioning, he’s just as hard to pin down. He refused to concede that his candidacy in 2000 had taken more votes from Al Gore than George Bush, and insisted that if anyone were the spoiler this time, it would be Kerry, not him.

  I also had another role that weekend. That Sunday was July 4, and as Alan’s wife, after Meet the Press I should have been preparing for our annual Independence Day party at the Federal Reserve. But instead, I spent most of the day calling every source I knew, trying to winnow the list of Kerry’s possible choices. In a significant development that day, ABC had reported that Kerry had had a secret meeting with his likely choice in Washington the previous Thursday at the home of Madeleine Albright. Since Edwards was known to be on vacation with his family at Disney World, ABC concluded erroneously that the meeting had been with Dick Gephardt. We started speed-dialing our sources. During a series of conference calls led by our political director, Elizabeth Wilner, and our New York producers, Wilner and I both concluded that ABC was wrong.

  Monday was a federal holiday, part of the three-day weekend. I was told that John Edwards was still in play, but that Kerry was also taking a late look at Florida senator Bob Graham. Graham made a lot of sense from an Electoral College standpoint. He was enormously popular in his home state, having served as its governor. He’d led the Senate Intelligence Committee and had plenty of foreign policy experience. But he’d not shown a great deal of skill as a national campaigner in his own race for president, and had dropped out the previous October.

  To cover all bases, the Today show had correspondents prepare reports for Tuesday morning on all the possibilities. In addition to Edwards and Graham, the list included Iowa’s governor Tom Vilsack and Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt. I was assigned to profile Gephardt. He was clearly the safest choice, and I wrote the story, but all day Monday I was picking up signals that he had been eliminated. The argument for Gephardt was that he could appeal to voters in the Midwest, especially labor groups long loyal to him. But labor’s support had not brought him success in Iowa. And it wasn’t even clear that he could help the ticket carry his home state.

  Edwards was a much riskier pick. Kerry and Edwards had clashed repeatedly during the primaries, although Edwards was always careful not to let it get personal. But four years earlier, Kerry had been openly dismissive of Edwards when they were both finalists on Al Gore’s short list of running mates. At that point, Kerry told people that Edwards was unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office because he had only been in politics for two years.

  But Sunday night, I was told that Kerry’s feelings about Edwards had warmed. Edwards had, in fact, been the suitor Kerry had met with secretly the previous Thursday. Edwards had interrupted his Disney World vacation to fly back to Washington. Kerry had waited until the reporters outside his home left for the night, had sneaked out a back door, and then walked the two blocks to Albright’s house, where Edwards was waiting. The meeting had gone well, greatly improving Kerry’s comfort factor with the younger man.

  As Monday evening approached, I kept working the phones until I reached someone who told me it was Edwards. But it was a single source. To prevent leaks, Kerry was not going to call the “losers” until the next day. Until he did, he could always change his mind. I called New York and we had another conference call, this time with Elizabeth Wilner; Brian Williams; our top New York producers, led by Mark Lukasiewicz; and Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News.

  To the world outside television news, it may seem like a silly competition, but in our business, it was the World Series and the Super Bowl combined. We all became journalists because we love to chase stories, and this was a story worth chasing. Kerry’s decision would open a window into how he perceived his own strengths and weaknesses and whether he had enough self-confidence to risk being upstaged by a better campaigner. Trying to puzzle this out was also like a giant game of Clue. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it’s fun, like being hooked on detective novels. All those Nancy Drew mysteries I’d read as a child weren’t that far off the mark.

  That night, Brian’s sources told him that Secret Service agents had arrived at an airport in North Carolina, Edwards’s home state, and were putting together a motorcade. But we decided even that wasn’t enough proof. They could have been doing the same thing for all the potential choices, and we just didn’t know it. One of our best “embedded” campaign reporters, Felix Schein—who had started his career as my researcher—was working the story hard in Pittsburgh, where Kerry was huddled with his wife and advisors. An Internet site was reporting that the campaign was restenciling the candidate’s plane to include Edwards’s name. But Felix couldn’t get into the hangar to confirm it.

  For hours, we debated whether we had enough to go on, and if so, how and when to break into the network’s entertainment programming. As it got later, there were fewer remaining “windows” during prime time. At that point, after Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien were off the air, I took a break and went home to change clothes and clean up for the Today program. It was too late to get any sleep.

  Tuesday morning, we felt confident enough to hint broadly at the choice of Edwards at the top of the Today show. At 7:01, I reported, “John Kerry is very likely to pick John Edwards as his running mate.” But to play it safe, the program still ran a previously scheduled segment on all the other possibilities. Then, twenty minutes later, Katie Couric came up with another source. We finally had it cold, and were able to break the Edwards story just before seven-thirty a.m. Speaking to Katie, I said, “My understanding is that John Edwards is the pick, that John Kerry decided that he wanted to choose John Edwards and felt that in a series of meetings he increased his comfort level (with Edwards).” We pointed out that the two men had been competitors during the primary, but that Edwards appealed to Kerry because “He’s got a lot of sizzle, he’s got pizzazz. He is a very good vote getter.” Kerry had planned to announce it in an e-mail to supporters, and then appear together with his choice at a nine a.m. rally. We had beaten him to it.

  In picking Edwards, Kerry was acknowledging that he had to add some spice to the ticket. Edwards was a vibrant, young face, and as a Southerner might appeal to swing voters in those crucial states. He also had a compelling personal story and a beautiful, y
oung family. At the same time, it was a stretch. He’d been in politics only six years. He’d have to go head-to-head with Dick Cheney in a debate. He was a trial lawyer, an unpopular profession with many voters. And he still had to prove that he could keep his ambitions in check and not overshadow John Kerry. But party leaders like Ted Kennedy really wanted him. He polled well, and was a favorite of congressional Democrats, even though Gephardt had been their leader.

  Breaking the story was even sweeter because that day The New York Post had a screaming front-page headline: KERRY’S CHOICE: DEM PICKS GEPHARDT AS VP CANDIDATE, with file pictures of Kerry and Gephardt grinning at each other so affectionately they looked as though they were about to lock lips. It wasn’t quite DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, but it was close. The Washington Post media story the next day was headlined, NBC BEATS THE PACK; N.Y. POST GETS BOOBY PRIZE. The flip side of feeling good about our work was what happened that morning with Bob Graham. As part of checking whether Kerry had notified the others on his list, I’d called Graham, who picked up the phone breathlessly. He had not yet heard from Kerry, and I was in the awkward position of telling him that he would not be running for vice president. He was crestfallen, but could not have been nicer. I felt truly lousy.

  With Iraq still at war, and so much happening on my foreign policy beat, for the first time I didn’t get out as much as I’d have liked to cover the candidates in the field. Still, I discovered that not being one of the “boys on the bus” gave me some useful distance from the day-to-day tumult. Helped immeasurably by the research of Libby Leist, a rising star at the network, we were among the first to dig into the so-called 527 groups, the supposedly independent groups that circumvent spending limits mandated by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law by exploiting a loophole. At first, it was largely Democrats who figured out how to beat the Republicans at the money game. Eventually, the Republicans caught on. But none of these groups had as much impact as a previously unknown organization called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

  Perhaps Kerry set himself up for the attack when his fellow swift boat veteran Jim Rassmann showed up in Iowa, validating the candidate as a Vietnam hero. By “reporting for duty” at the convention in Boston, he was making his campaign all about his past, not about Bush’s record or America’s future. The Democratic nominee was ripe for the Republicans’ counterattack. We traced the group’s organizers to some of the same players who’d hit John McCain with anonymous attacks four years earlier when he’d run against Bush in the primaries. The shadow campaign of the 527 groups, in both parties, was now totaling more than $100 million. Before it was over, the election would cost $1.2 billion, an obscene amount of money unless you were a campaign consultant or a local television station raking in the ad dollars.

  While filing these carefully researched and scripted stories for Nightly News, I had another, more freewheeling, job on cable as an occasional sidekick to MSNBC’s political anchor, Chris Matthews. Chris and I have known each other since my days as a young reporter in Philadelphia, Chris’s hometown. As a result, we understand something about each other’s political DNA. I’d known him when he worked for Tip O’Neill on the Hill and as a columnist for The San Francisco Examiner. Now he was putting his encyclopedic knowledge to use as the anchor of all our campaign coverage on cable.

  With his frequent interruptions and rat-a-tat style, Chris is inimitable, except when Darrell Hammond is doing him on Saturday Night Live. MSNBC’s president, Rick Kaplan, figured out that the best way to let Chris be Chris was to turn him loose with a live audience, building on the success Chris had had four years earlier when he hosted a Hardball College Tour from campuses across the country. Kaplan’s genius was to put Chris outside on the street where he could get down off his set and interact with passing crowds.

  From the first night, our coverage of the Democratic convention in Boston was raucous and unpredictable. Rushing over from the convention, where I’d been doing interviews all day, I was afraid I’d have trouble finding the set outside Faneuil Hall. I needn’t have worried. In the center of the square, held back from the set by a few police barriers, a huge crowd was cheering Chris. Executive Producer Tammy Haddad, the energetic ringmaster of this circus, was juggling panelists and guests.

  On the set, Chris had assembled an eclectic group: former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough, and Howard Fineman from Newsweek. I slipped into my chair and occasionally got in a word, but it was a tough crowd—especially after Teresa Heinz Kerry’s speech, which Scarborough immediately panned as “too long.” He added that people close to Kerry were “horrified that there’s going to be that one Teresa Heinz Kerry moment that’s going to alienate a lot of people in middle America.”

  All I could say was, “Now you know why there’s a gender gap.”

  The atmosphere got even more interesting later, when Cheers and the other pubs bordering the square emptied out. We had a large live audience, but I doubt that very many of them were sober.

  Over the next few months, different players joined the set as our traveling road show crossed the country. At times, the panelists included Ron Reagan, actor/activist Ron Silver, Pat Buchanan, former congressman J. C. Watts of Oklahoma, and, with his special gift for politics and history, Jon Meacham of Newsweek. Through the conventions and the debates, there was no shortage of opinions. We were also encouraged to blog, in a melding of mainstream and new media. It was an informal way to give the public a behind-the-scenes look at the convention. On August 30, I posted a blog about the difficulties involved in even getting into Madison Square Garden each day during the Republican convention because of ever-changing security checkpoints.

  It was stream of consciousness, but in an unstructured way, the blogs captured some of the color and chaos of the circus that is a political convention. As Nicolle Devenish of the Bush campaign said, blogs had become what talk radio used to be. Information, both accurate and inaccurate, was now flying through cyberspace faster than candidates, or reporters, could either absorb it or test its accuracy.

  Without knowing the source of a blog, there was no way to determine whether you were being manipulated by an organized advocacy campaign. In a further blurring of lines, Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s former manager, liked to call the bloggers “cyber journalists.” The new media were exciting additions to the campaign’s rhythms, but I still resist calling an anonymous blogger a “journalist” unless I know more about the writer’s dedication to the truth, as well as reporting skills. True journalism involves seeking new facts, testing them with conflicting points of view, and presenting them in a balanced fashion. Blogs are something very different. That said, the bloggers instantly became important players in September 2004 when they quickly debunked the documents 60 Minutes II used to attack the president’s National Guard service. The bloggers were the first to figure out that the CBS documents were probably created on a computer and couldn’t have been written during the Vietnam era, as Dan Rather’s story had claimed. The resulting exposé severely damaged CBS’s credibility, and Rather’s reputation. They later struck again, helping to force the resignation of a top CNN executive after compromising comments he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos. These episodes helped establish the bloggers as a new factor in the national debate.

  With the advent of twenty-four-hour news, our deadlines had already become constant. Now, with the Internet, there was no escaping a torrent of political information. The Internet had also become a powerful organizing tool for campaigns, helping the candidates compile vast lists of contributors and volunteers. Both sides were sending out nonstop e-mails to challenge opposition claims. In particular, the Republicans were adept at circulating instantly what they claimed were Kerry’s goofs. The Democrats, in turn, were quick to figure out how to raise money on the Net. But what we all missed, because it was so hard to find, was an even more important developing story: how the Internet had become the Bush camp’s secret weapon to get out the vote, particularly in Ohio. A
s far as I can tell, it didn’t surface in local news reports, either.

  Kerry was running a far more traditional Democratic campaign, depending on the union movement, campaign workers, and volunteers to urge people to vote. But since the highly effective Democratic get-out-the-vote effort in 2000 (much admired by the Republicans, even though Al Gore did not get elected), White House strategist Karl Rove had been working on a Republican alternative. Nearly invisible to the national news media, the Republicans ran an underground voter mobilization effort, largely organized on the Internet. And the Republicans had enough money to finance their grassroots organization from regular campaign funds, unlike the Democrats, who had to set up parallel groups to circumvent campaign spending limits. The Republican effort was therefore far more efficient, and more difficult to spot. They mobilized their base with a simple get-out-the-vote message—well-targeted and highly effective.

  I’d first gotten a hint of the new Republican initiative from the vice president during a dinner conversation on August 9, the thirtieth anniversary of President Ford’s swearing in to replace Richard Nixon. The alumnae of the Ford White House, including Alan, were gathered in Statuary Hall at the Capitol to honor the former president. In talking about the campaign that night, Dick Cheney told me that the Bush organization had been badly beaten four years earlier by the Democratic ground campaign, and this time was trying to compete by fielding a much more sophisticated grassroots operation.

  Until 2004, big turnouts usually indicated a Democratic victory. In the Bush-Kerry race, conventional wisdom was turned upside down. In Ohio and other battleground states, the Bush campaign used computerized databases to leapfrog over the Democrats and seek out Bush supporters, or those leaning toward the president. Millions of rural Bush voters were carefully identified and then, in the last seventy-two hours, marched to the polls. By Election Day, 1.2 million Republican volunteers had reached 1.8 million people. Another advantage for the Republicans: most of the Bush volunteers were residents of the states in which they were working; the Kerry volunteers were often college students from out of state, less likely to win the confidence of potential voters as they went door-to-door.