One Car Caravan - On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In

by Walter Shapiro

  Behind a lectern, Lieberman is adept at feigning a pseudo-intimacy with his soft-spoken tone that seems free of bombast even when he is making naked political claims. In Manchester, he introduced a critique of Republican attack ads by confiding, "I was on the treadmill literally, not figuratively, at the fitness cen­ter here this morning watching television. And I got to see some of the ads, the negative stuff, the slashing back and forth." As he would throughout the day, Lieberman went on to portentously announce, "How the Senate and House go will be determined here in New Hampshire." Lieberman then took this obvious boil­erplate line and gave it a twist. "I don't want to put too much pressure on you," he added amid growing laughter. "But the fate of Western civilization hangs in the balance." The humor was conspiratorial, signaling to his audience a rye-with-corned-beef detachment from aggressive partisanship, even as Lieberman was claiming that if the Republicans control Congress "nothing will protect us from the far-right agenda."

  On occasion Lieberman gently mocks his own religiosity. Emerging from his car in Keene outside—yes, you can do it from memory—the former Masonic temple that is now the Democratic headquarters, Lieberman suddenly bent over to touch the ground. Then turning to me, he announced, "This is not some weird Jew­ish ritual. I'm just stretching." Lieberman's speech in Keene was mostly notable for the exuberant and decidedly non-ironic praise that he lavished on Katrina Swett (the congressional candidate who will endorse him in early 2003), gushing about "the extraordinary experience that she possesses and the great experience that she has." Had Lieberman slathered on fewer superlatives, Swett might well have ended up backing Dick Gephardt.

  There was a good-humored quality, as well, to the way Lieber­man handled what he called his "unique situation," his promise not to run if Al Gore, his political benefactor, sought the 2004 nomination. That pledge was so ironclad that Lieberman had ear­lier waved off a reporter (Nick Lemann from the New Yorker) who provided a series of passages from the Talmud explaining religiously acceptable reasons for breaking an inconvenient promise. But during our interview between New Hampshire stops, the only time I am allowed to ride with the if-Al-doesn't-I-will candidate, Lieberman explained what turned out to be his prescient strategy. "I decided that I had to do a lot of things that a potential candidate would do just to keep my options open," he said. "What it means is raising money, helping Democrats around the country, giving them money and campaigning for them."

  No matter what the topic, there is a rehearsed quality to Lieberman, a sense that every syllable has been lifted from a prior conversation with someone else. Some of it may be learned behavior, stay-on-message techniques Lieberman picked up from the press-averse 2000 Gore campaign. During our interview, Lieberman recalled being instructed by his vice-presidential han­dlers not to wander to the back of the campaign plane to talk to reporters because "you'll step on your own story." (That is, Lieberman's impromptu comments would have overshadowed the scripted sound bites of the day's speech.) The almost-vice president also admitted, with some embarrassment, that a "devil­ish reporter" in 2000 lured him into a politically ill-advised dis­cussion of interfaith marriage in which he expressed "a more benign view than some Orthodox Jews." Oy vey, we must talk to the rebbe about this.

  So sure, I could call Joe Lieberman "my homey" in a strictly Connecticut sense. Sure, I could laugh at his jokes and enjoy the act that has been called "Shecky Lieberman." But I couldn't delve beneath his avuncular veneer. And I couldn't shake the feeling that Lieberman brandishes his surface affability as a weapon to keep other people, especially reporters, at a dis­tance.

  ******

  Every time I see Dick Gephardt, I remember with embarrassment our initial encounter in late 1987, at the beginning of the St. Louis congressman's first race for president. I had been invited to speak at a conference on "Campaign '88" at Dartmouth, and my wife Meryl and I were flying to Hanover that Saturday morning on a puddle-jumper from LaGuardia Airport. As the lead political writer for Time, I had pulled a news magazine all-nighter getting home from the office just in time to shower and dress for the trip to Dartmouth. In the midst of this sleep-deprivation experiment, social graces, such as modulating my tone aboard the plane, fell by the wayside. Rehearsing my talk on the candidates for Meryl in an inadvertently stentorian voice, I worked myself into a scornful fury about Gephardt: "What a joke, the guy has no eye­brows. And that fake populism and all that posturing about how we're losing jobs because of trade. Who does he think he is? The second coming of William Jennings Bryan?" At that moment, the red-haired man seated a row in front of me, whom I had not noticed, abruptly moved to a vacant seat in the front of the plane. It was only later—when the moderator of the Dartmouth panel announced, "And we have with us today presidential candidate Dick Gephardt" and I glimpsed a familiar shade of red hair—that I shamefacedly figured out who my traveling companion had been.

  It wasn't as if I had spent the ensuing fifteen years making amends. Over the years on Capitol Hill, I had seen Gephardt work himself into an apocalyptic frenzy about "Republican greed" at countless press conferences and heard him mouth focus-group platitudes about "kitchen-table economics" during interviews. Even being invited, along with two friends who are political reporters, to an off-the-record dinner with the then House minority leader in early July 2002 did not inspire me to overhaul my all-too-glib assessments. During a post-interview drink with my journalistic colleagues at the bar at Washington's Tenpenh restaurant, I mockingly announced, "The dinner made me feel better about Gephardt. But not that much better."

  Cynicism is to political reporters what combat fatigue is to sol­diers, an occupational hazard that comes from living too long in the trenches. As an antidote to this temptation toward overly facile mockery, I was in St. Louis on a Saturday morning just before the 2002 elections to visit Dick Gephardt's political roots. This journey of rediscovery began at a community center with a get-out-the-vote rally for St. Louis County Democrats. Here the dress code was simple: Wear a windbreaker, preferably inscribed with a union logo like "Sprinklefitter Local 268." Gephardt had opted for a simple blue jacket over his khaki slacks, while his wife Jane went with a tan leather coat. As Gephardt began to speak to this hometown crowd, he announced, "This is like fam­ily." But familiarity did not deter Gephardt from reminding his political kinfolk of the biographical detail that is his touchstone: "My dad was a Teamster, a milk-truck driver." He went on to talk about "the values that we all grew up with," as he pointedly added, "That's what my mother told me every day." Hearing those words about her ninety-four-year-old mother-in-law, Jane Gephardt murmured, "Still does."

  The local-color selling point for this trip was getting to watch Dick and Jane Gephardt reprise the good old days when they were both precinct captains in the mid-1960s and when he was run­ning for Congress for the first time in 1976, tirelessly knocking on virtually every door in the district. But a congressional leader who will soon be running for president can't go home again...without an entourage. In addition to Dick and Jane, the Saturday morning door-knocking party consisted of several aides with registered voter lists and brochures, a press secretary, Gephardt's post-9/11 security guard, a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a two-man C-Span team filming for later broadcast, longtime press-bus colleague Roger Simon from U.S. News, accompanied by a pho­tographer, and me. Lambeth Street, a cul-de-sac in blue-collar Lemay Township, didn't know what hit it. As the posse approached the first doorway, Gephardt made the obvious joke: "They probably think we're from Publishers Clearing House."

  There was a jaunty mood to the Lambeth walk past brick bun­galows with tidy lawns and festive pre-Halloween displays of skeletons, witches and goblins. At one of the first houses we reached, the yawning middle-aged woman who answered the door matter-of-factly explained that she had worked until 2:00 in the morning in the back office of a local brokerage house, while her husband was on the day shift. And they have four children. In short, husband and wife barely saw each other five days a week. As we
departed, Gephardt said to me with fierce intensity, "That's why it's so hard to educate our children. The parents are working so hard. My mom was there for me after school until I was in the sixth grade." A few houses later, we encountered eighty-one-year-old Dorothy Pauley, who told Gephardt, "You made it possible for me to go to computer school at the senior center. You got a grant for the program." She added for good measure, and you could just see Gephardt beam, "You care for the little people, that's why I like you." Then like a Democratic pollster's fantasy, she urged, "Do something about the cost of medicine. That's my problem."

  Every presidential candidate extrapolates his image of America from that which is most familiar. Michael Dukakis, to give an extreme example, always believed that his affluent, ethnically diverse hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts, represented a microcosm of the nation. Dick Gephardt entered the twenty-first century as one of the last Old Economy Democrats—and voters like Dorothy Pauley constantly vindicate his belief that elections are won, and lives are uplifted, by government programs. This truth was underscored at a house up the street where Gephardt found a set of house keys lying in the driveway. The desire to return the keys, rather than the need to add to the ersatz meet-the-voters drama, prompted him to knock loudly and repeatedly on the front door. Finally, a portly, shirtless middle-aged man answered, blink­ing at the bright autumn sunlight. "They're my mother's keys," he explained. "I must have dropped them when I came in from the night shift." As we walked down the driveway, Gephardt said, "What you learn doing this, what you see everywhere, is how hard people work." That comment would seem tinny and phony at a Capitol Hill press conference. But here on Lambeth Street, it reflected the striver reality of Dick Gephardt's America.

  ******

  Just as tourists form premature mental images of their vacation itineraries by devouring guidebooks, political reporters prepare for a maiden voyage with a presidential candidate by wading through electronic clip files. Often the clichés embedded in these prior news stories take on the power of self-fulfilling prophesies much as a first-time visitor to Japan is pre-disposed to constantly search for women in kimonos and salarymen practicing phantom golf swings on Tokyo train platforms. My armchair impression of Howard Dean, before my initial 2002 trip with him to New Hampshire, was that of an accidental politician—a doctor who was dabbling at being Vermont's part-time lieutenant governor before he was elevated into the governor's office by the sudden death of the Republican incumbent in 1991.

  But during our lengthy backseat conversation, I discovered that Dean was, in fact, a "pol" in the best sense of the word, with a shrewd grasp of the tactics and strategies that accompany his second career. My first glimpse of the calculating side of the stethoscope-wielding governor came when I asked him to explain an odd detail that I had gleaned from the news clips: his 1988 endorsement of Gephardt for president, a peculiar choice given that Dukakis was the governor of an adjacent state. "Part of it had to do with the fact that I would have been the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth person in New England who was in on the Dukakis bandwagon—and the first for Gephardt," Dean said with the frankness of an old-time ward boss explaining the rules for awarding sewer contracts. "Also, I just liked the guy. He was an up-and-coming congressman who was smart and doing all this stuff with tax policy. He's a very decent person, I think." Against the backdrop of the 2004 race, it was intriguing that Dean's initial visit to Iowa came in the role of a little-known lieutenant gover­nor stumping for Gephardt before the 1988 caucuses.

  Darting from topic to topic in a conversation designed as much to pass the time as to probe Dean's fitness for the White House (which at that moment seemed an outlandish proposi­tion), I began to understand the advantages of running for presi­dent with the non-Washington perspective of a governor. Unlike his congressional rivals for the nomination, Dean presciently grasped the political implications of George W. Bush's so-called No Child Left Behind education bill, which he ridiculed in his speeches as the "No School Board Left Standing" bill. As Dean explained to me, "School boards around the country are getting what this bill does and they don't like it. And that means that the taxpayers won't be far behind. The bill is a disaster from an edu­cational standpoint. It's going to lower standards and raise prop­erty taxes. The folks in Washington had no idea what they were doing." (A year later, virtually all the Democrats running for pres­ident were emulating Dean by studding their speeches with vitri­olic attacks on Bush's failure to properly fund his education plan).

  It is a time-honored journalistic technique to enliven sit-down interviews (even one conducted in a moving vehicle driven by a Vermont state trooper) with detailed descriptions of the subject's body language. But Dean, who removed his suit jacket for the journey but was otherwise crisply attired in a button-down white shirt and striped tie, presented a challenge to colorful writing.

  From his salt-and-pepper hair to his shined lace-up black shoes, Dean is a compact man who seemed to be constructed with absolutely no wasted bodily attributes and who disdained flam­boyant gestures. At the Democratic dinner in Keene, I kept losing sight of him in the crowd. Dean struck me as less a presidential candidate than as prime spy material, since he is blessed with the uncanny ability to blend into the background. During our car talk, whether in daylight or in rain-drenched darkness, the only thing distinctive about Dean was the unabashed self-confidence in his voice.

  At this early stage of the race, Dean was his own campaign manager and strategist. But even sixteen months before the Iowa caucuses, Dean the Pol displayed a deft understanding of how to position himself for the long haul. A prime example was his skepticism about far-reaching national gun-control legislation, a staple of liberal Democratic orthodoxy. "My position on guns for the presidential race is that states can do whatever they want," Dean explained. "And if California wants to have gun control, let them have as much gun control as they want—just don't pass it nationally. We should close the gun-show loophole. We should have that and the Brady bill, and then just let the states do what they want and get it off the Democratic agenda."

  Now I am about as likely to keep a pet camel in my Upper West Side Manhattan apartment as I am to own a gun, but I also recognized the electoral logic behind his argument. Dean—a political realist who understands rural America as well as the limitations of feel-good liberal legislation—argued, "There is no point in pushing gun control in states like Vermont and Wyoming, all it does is get Democrats defeated." The shoot-from-the-hip governor went on to say, "You'll lose 6 to 10 percent of union members on this issue alone. It's ridiculous."

  Ever since Illinois-born Hillary Clinton shamelessly an­nounced in the midst of her 2000 New York Senate race that she had always been a closet Yankee fan, I have become a tad cynical about the shifting baseball allegiances of political figures. So when Dean mentioned that he had recently undergone a religious conversion and had begun rooting for the Boston Red Sox, I immediately thought, "How convenient for the New Hampshire primary."

  Normally, the governor of Vermont would be assumed to be a life-long member of the Red Sox Nation, but Dean grew up as a passionate Yankee fan in Manhattan and still cheers for New York basketball and hockey teams. Yet the thing about Dean is that, even when you suspect ulterior political motives, he offers a superficially convincing explanation. His Yankee-go-home trans­formation was prompted by the conduct of Bronx Bomber pitch­ing ace Roger Clemens who beaned Mike Piazza, the star catcher for the Mets, during the 2000 regular season and then threw part of a broken bat at him during the World Series. "So I became a Red Sox fan," Dean explained. "And I understand for the first time, the futility and the pain involved with that." But then, who better than a long-shot presidential candidate to appreciate the allure of rooting for the underdog.

  ******

  I love New Hampshire living rooms. No setting better conveys the wondrous intimacy of the Invisible Primary. It seems out­landish that in the twenty-first century a candidate theoretically can go in little more than two years
from standing in front of a fireplace addressing seventy-five voters to governing a nation of 280 million. That is why, whatever happens in the coming elec­tion, I will long remember my first living rooms of the 2004 cam­paign season.

  This being New Hampshire, politics was, of course, the attrac­tion on this Saturday night in the early summer of 2002. The event in this sprawling post-modern farmhouse near Portsmouth was nominally a fund-raiser for the state party, but none of the seventy-five Democrats working their way along a lavish buffet table overflowing with smoked salmon or milling around in small groups as they sipped pricey chardonnay believed that cover story for a moment. They were here, as the sun set on a plowed field visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, to watch John Edwards try out for the biggest role of his life.

  Edwards, who had the gumption or the temerity to get ready to seek the Democratic presidential nomination just three years after he arrived in the Senate, had been auditioning all day. He began with a brunch with party activists in an unadorned living room in Mount Vernon, located in the back of a vintage farm­house whose wide-beam floors probably were already sagging when Daniel Webster first entered politics. This late-morning crowd throbbed with cause-oriented earnestness, epitomized by a woman with a shaved head who hectored the senator on the evils of suburban sprawl and the woeful expansion of the tourist industry. Then it was on through the pouring rain to a Democra­tic Party pig roast in Wye, where Edwards shared the celebrity limelight with Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen. There the sen­ator's wife, Elizabeth, on only her second out-of-state trip of this exploratory season, already had a glazed look in her eyes as she confessed, "I have no idea where we are. I just go where they take me."