A campaign plane is like a Japanese office: everyone knows his or her place. There is a beguiling comfort in the routine from the assigned seats and detailed itineraries to the unvarying rhythms of speeches and filing times. But it is also a self-contained universe in which real voters, penned up behind Secret Service rope lines, become little more than the faceless Hollywood hordes in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. When you are aloft in a campaign plane, most of America is viewed as part of the great flyover. From 30,000 feet, the presidential race is reduced to an abstraction of states, media markets and demographic groups. Inevitably the campaign takes on the cynical trappings of an us-versus-them contest—and they are not the opposition candidate and party, but rather the poor rubes stuck on the ground.
How different it is at the beginning of the journey, when everyone from the fledgling candidates to the ever hopeful reporters are rubes on the road to the White House.
Chapter 2
Testing the Waters
John Kerry looks more like a president than any other Democrat poised to run in 2004—tall and lean, with a thick no-Rogaine-needed shock of gray hair and a chiseled face that seems to belong on a Roman coin. But sometimes a public image can mask private disarray.
So it is with Kerry on this Boston Sunday morning in mid-August 2002. An aide has ushered me into the dimly lit downstairs study of the senator's townhouse on Louisberg Square, one of the grand properties that he owns with his second wife, the heiress Teresa Heinz. Feeling a bit like the intrusive tabloid reporter portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, I take an inventory of the furnishings: several large-scale models of whaling ships in the foyer; a macabre oil painting featuring a skull over the fireplace; and a wall of books ranging from Winston Churchill's World Crisis 1915 to Jules Witcover's account of the 1976 presidential race, Marathon.
My Architectural Digest ruminations keep being interrupted by sounds akin to a wildebeest on a feeding frenzy. It is an over-wrought Kerry rooting around in the adjoining conservatory, frantically searching for a missing cell phone. The distressed senator, dressed in a light green polo shirt and white Dockers, eventually wanders into view long enough to nod at me before resuming his search. Kerry even borrows the aide's phone to call the van waiting on the street in front of the house to see if the missing object is on the front seat. Finally, World Crisis 2002 is averted when the absent-minded senator discovers the phone in his briefcase. "Rock and roll," Kerry announces, a Vietnam-era phrase he frequently employs to signal movement.
Kerry is something of a stranger to me. After intermittently watching him for more than a decade in the Senate, my impression is that he is a haughty, overly ambitious patrician who is a bit too slick in his eagerness to exploit his heroism in Vietnam. In short, I'm not imagining a buddy movie in which I play Ben Bradlee to his Jack Kennedy. But I'm also open to the possibility that I may have misjudged Kerry from afar. The point of these initial journeys with the leading presidential contenders is to get beyond the shallow Washington clichés and the snarky back-of-the-press-conference put-downs. Lurking behind every cardboard campaign poster is a real person—sometimes as complex as Bill Clinton, sometimes as one-dimensional as George W. Bush—and the challenge of political reporting is to find him.
On the thirty-minute drive to Hanscom Field, a private airport outside Boston where we take off for Keene, New Hampshire, Kerry keeps up a running travelogue for my benefit. He points out the Mormon tabernacle, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney worships, before wistfully musing, "I wish I knew more about comparative religion." As we pass through Lexington, Kerry offers his practiced Gray Line tour guide spiel, pointing out the road along which the Minutemen marched on their way to "the rude bridge that arched the flood." A stand of oak trees prompts Kerry to recall dragging his daughters (now adults) on fall foliage tours of New Hampshire, adding the mournful note that he told them, "When I'm dead, think of me when you see a tree." Just as I begin to dismiss the cell phone interlude as a strange aberration, I get a brief glimpse of Kerry's control freak side. As we approach the barred gate of the airport, Kerry pointedly instructs the woman staffer driving the van to back up and try again so that she won't have to open the door to announce his arrival on the speaker phone.
Maybe, in originally arranging my day with Kerry, I should have noted something suspicious when press secretary David Wade asked, "You don't mind small planes, do you?" That question did not invite an honest answer—unless I yearned to be left on the ground as the candidate flew to New Hampshire. Perhaps, on the drive to the airport, I should have listened more carefully when an aide told the senator that there would be an air show in Keene. Kerry immediately joked, "Maybe I'll try some barrel rolls on the way in."
That should have been my first whiff of danger. But I can be pretty oblivious. Only after I am strapped into the back of the twin-engine Cessna 340 do I notice that the pilot, the trained professional who owns the rented plane, is sitting in the wrong seat. For unless Massachusetts is a fly-on-the-left state, Kerry (yikes!) is my pilot in more than a metaphorical sense.
The short flight, on this sparkling August Sunday, is uneventful (and free of barrel rolls) until Kerry begins the long turn to line himself up for landing in Keene. At that moment, the lost-and-found cell phone in Kerry's back pocket begins to ring. "Don't answer it," I pray. The man who wants to pilot the nation's destiny reaches for the phone in an overconfident display of multitasking. I am thinking, "It's illegal in New York, where I come from, to talk on a cell phone while driving a car. And we're landing a plane. Is this what New Hampshire means with its license plate slogan, 'Live Free or Die'?"
Luckily, the real pilot takes the ringing instrument from Kerry. But this trained professional can't figure out how to work the flip-top phone. So Kerry grabs it, opens it, hands it back—and then proceeds to make a perfect landing in the center of runway 2.
Kerry's cell-phoniness can easily fit the caricature of him as a heedlessly arrogant and self-important politician. But that would be grotesquely unfair. That morning, the senator's eighty-nine-year-old mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry, made an unexpected return visit to the hospital with life-threatening bronchial problems. Kerry's cell phone has become a symbolic lifeline to his mother's bedside—the number that his sister, Diana, would repeatedly use to call from the hospital.
It is a reflection of Kerry's fortitude, and his ambition, that he gamely stuck to his heavy, prearranged New Hampshire schedule. The senator at times radiates eagerness about the coming Democratic contest, saying, "I feel that people are ready to get things going with the presidential race. It can't happen soon enough." But during long periods in the van driving between events, Kerry would sit silently in the front seat seemingly absorbed with his briefing book, which contained nothing more than the day's itinerary and brief bios of local political figures. He would at times feign animation, for example, telling media consultant Jim Margolis and myself about his tour of Google headquarters on a recent trip to the West Coast. Midsentence the cell phone would ring, and there would be a hushed conversation with Diana about the latest medical reports. Then Kerry would again turn toward the backseat and, picking up where he left off, start asking, "Do you know how many searches Google has on an average day? Three hundred million."
On that afternoon filled with private turmoil, Kerry is still months away from commissioning the stump speech and the scripted sound bites that would someday define his campaign for the White House. Instead, like all the other Democratic hopefuls at this premature stage, his speeches are a personal "Greatest Hits" album—applause lines from his Senate campaigns, tropes that he has been using for years, flights of rhetoric salvaged from his mental attic—fascinating in their own right as a Baedeker to his political persona.
There is a time warp quality to Kerry's words as the calendar keeps drifting back to the 1960s, the decade that carried him from Yale to the Mekong Delta as a navy officer (where he re
ceived a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts during two tours of combat) and eventually transformed him into a disillusioned crusader against the Vietnam War. Part of this '60s nostalgia is linked to the lost Kennedy legacy, which Kerry invokes both painfully and passionately. Standing on a chair in the old Masonic lodge in Keene, now the local Democratic headquarters and already a familiar spot for me, Kerry begins his speech to about one hundred party activists with the tired jibe that Massachusetts is an Indian word "for land of many Kennedys." In a passage that is a staple of his campaign oratory, Kerry also recalls returning to California on a troop ship, after his first tour of duty in Vietnam, on that searing 1968 evening when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Kerry solemnly repeats the slightly mangled George Bernard Shaw quote that served as the epitaph of that foreshortened Kennedy campaign: "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask why not." Then, because he has yet to find the words to top Kennedy quoting Shaw, Kerry concludes awkwardly, "Our politics needs to get back to asking why not and dreaming a little bit."
Late that afternoon at a party fund-raiser in Londonderry, standing this time on a rock in a sprawling backyard, Kerry speaks with fervor about another 1968 campaign—the anti-war insurgency of Gene McCarthy. Fatigued after three lengthy speeches and brooding over his mother's health, Kerry offers raw emotion rather than polished diction as he conjures up the turbulent decade that molded him: "One thing that was authentic, honest, that came from the gut and the passion of people was the notion that as individuals we could make a difference in the life around us. And when people saw that the war was wrong, Gene McCarthy and a bunch of kids came up here, the peanut-butter-and-jelly brigade, and they went out there, living off those sandwiches and knocking on the doors. And he sent the president of the United States a message that he couldn't continue to be president of the United States and wage that war."
Despite the White House's orchestrated aria of operatic challenges to Saddam Hussein, Kerry is not alluding to the contemporary anti-war movement. Rather he is riffing on Democratic idealism, but his vague conclusion fails to support his dramatic peroration. "They gave birth to a still unfinished agenda in this country," he declares. "They gave birth to the environment. We didn't have an EPA, we didn't have a clean water act, a clean air act, a safe drinking water act..."
Huh? How did we go from the Gene McCarthy crusade to a history of Nixon-era environmental legislation? I get the sense that Kerry is still trying to work through the '60s, still trying to capture something elusive from his youth, and yet the answer remains just beyond his mental grasp like an emotion-laden dream that vanishes with the first rays of daylight.
Throughout the long day, I have been clutching my tape recorder waiting for the proper moment to pose the standard reporter's questions about Kerry's presidential plans. But in deference to his mother's health, I continually hold back, not wanting to intrude. Still, I recognize that I have gotten an unexpected glimpse of Kerry Unplugged, alternately emotional and wistful, solitary and gregarious. Now, after the last event of the day, a low-key meeting with his fellow veterans, I am waiting awkwardly in the darkness on a lawn in Manchester for a good-bye handshake with Kerry. When he finally wanders over, I mention that I didn't press him with questions in light of the burden he is bearing. Kerry looks directly at me, taps my right shoulder with his fist and says, "Thanks, man. We'll do it again."
******
Short of designing the compensation packages for Enron executives, it is difficult to conceive of a more selfish endeavor than campaigning for president. Sure, the Democratic candidates all harbor sincere dreams about the programs they would sign into law in the White House Rose Garden and stud their speeches with uplifting visions of the future. But the sheer act of running turns each personal encounter into a functional transaction. Every handshake and hurried conversation brings with it the hope of a vote, a check, or a favorable press clip. At their most human and vulnerable, presidential candidates crave reassurance: "How did I do?" But mostly, every moment of their day, every decision about what to do and whom to see is predicated on a single question: "What's in it for me?"
For these ego-driven presidential contenders, no torture was more exquisitely calibrated than the off-year 2002 congressional elections. Rather than blatantly trumpet their own cause, the candidates were compelled to pretend to subordinate their egos as they stumped for other Democrats and raised money for the party—a charade that reduced them to the political equivalent of warm-up acts on a Jerry Lewis telethon. By chance, both Iowa and New Hampshire were battleground states with hard-fought statewide races and five Republican-held House seats theoretically in play. So the presidential contenders dutifully warbled the praises of such House candidates as Katrina Swett in New Hampshire and John Norris in Iowa, only to watch from the sidelines as all the non-incumbent Democratic congressional candidates in both states—including New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen running for the Senate—were upended in November. Only Senator Tom Harkin and Governor Tom Vilsack at the top of the ticket in Iowa emerged unscathed from the Democratic debacle.
Yet the value of these initial forays into Iowa and New Hampshire cannot be measured by the dismal Election Day 2002 scorecard. The self-abnegating presidential hopefuls snagged some key endorsements. After the election, Norris signed on as Kerry's Iowa state director and Swett, the daughter of California Congressman Tom Lantos, ended up backing Joe Lieberman. But more than anything, the 2002 campaign offered a low-risk environment in which the Democratic contenders could begin the arduous process of self-definition, which is the centerpiece of a successful presidential candidacy. Sometimes a spontaneous throwaway comment at a house party in Portsmouth will produce a refrain that becomes transformed into a guaranteed applause line in a stump speech. Sometimes a story that was successful in prior political travels consistently falls flat and is stricken from the candidate's repertoire. (Memo to Kerry: Ax the "land of many Kennedys" joke.) No presidential candidate (not even Bill Clinton in 1992) is born with perfect pitch. The melody that comes to define a candidate is assembled note by note, speech by speech, in the continuous feedback loop that is grassroots politics.
With the exception of Bob Graham, who kept his presidential yearnings in a private lockbox until after the congressional elections, the five other leading presidential contenders logged more air miles and stumped for more candidates in 2002 than virtually anyone in the Democratic Party. (Their only challengers for this all-good-men-must-come-to-the-aid-of-their-party crown were Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe and Senate leader Tom Daschle, who was poised to enter the presidential fray in early January 2003 until he was stricken with a last-minute change of heart.)
Each of these five early birds strode onto the stage with his own musical accompaniment. You could almost imagine Howard Dean with a top hat and a cane tap-dancing his way from the back row of the chorus line to center stage, clicking his heels at the sheer I-was-nobody-and-now-I'm-Fred-Astaire improbability of it all. Every time John Kerry evokes the failed idealism of the 1960s, you cannot but hear the sadder-but-wiser voice of Richard Burton recalling the faded glories of Camelot. Joe Lieberman's have-tallis-will-travel-except-on-Saturday good humor and his upbeat only-in-America message definitely require the lilting refrain of "Hava Nagila." (No one with a wife named Hadassah can complain about ethnic stereotyping.) How about an old-fashioned barbershop quartet crooning "Sweet Adeline" for fair-haired Midwesterner Dick Gephardt? Assuming, of course, that all the harmony makers are paid-up members of the musician's union. And John Edwards—the handsome, always smiling, preternaturally youthful North Carolina senator—should be introduced to the sound of the smooth jazz you might find on an easy-listening station, with just a hint of a Clinton saxophone solo in the background.
******
At this early phase, as the orchestra is still playing the overture for the presidential procession, there is an incestuous no-sec
rets quality to the maneuvering in which the slightest stage whisper is immediately amplified on the Internet. This political echo chamber effect was demonstrated for my benefit in Manchester on a Monday morning in mid-October 2002.
I was chatting with Peter Sullivan, a New Hampshire state representative, as we waited to hear Joe Lieberman speak to a small party rally. Sullivan mentioned that Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, had just been in town meeting with Democrats to discuss a putative presidential bid. This odd but intriguing rumor made me feel as if I'd already panned a small nugget from the stream after just ten minutes of on-scene reporting. Moments later, I ran into James Pindell, an energetic young reporter for politicsNH.com, an online newsletter. Pindell proudly announced that his exclusive story about Clark's expedition was ballyhooed in the ABC political digest "The Note," which I had not read because I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning to fly to New Hampshire. Such is the speed at which buzz travels in contemporary politics. I was sadly behind the curve because I was reporting in New Hampshire rather than sitting at home in New York reading the online gossip sheets.
I will confess a residual affection for Lieberman, an affinity that is primarily based on our shared Connecticut heritage. I grew up in Norwalk, just ten miles from Lieberman's hometown of Stamford, a city where my father, Salem, was urban renewal director in the 1960s. This is an admittedly fragile bond, but reporters are not immune to the blandishments of Tip O'Neill's dictum that "all politics is local." Lieberman, whom I had interviewed maybe a dozen times on topics ranging from the Clinton scandals to his hard-line foreign-policy views, has the knack of remembering to ask about my ninety-four-year-old father. But this connection only carries me so far. For all his engaging manner, I have always found the 2000 vice-presidential nominee to be strangely impenetrable. There are questions, there are answers, but the transaction only takes you so far. As I discovered anew on this pre-election visit to New Hampshire, it is impossible to get too close to Joe Lieberman.
One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In Page 3
