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

by Walter Shapiro

  The yarmulke was in the ring.

  ******

  As the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham was rather good at keeping secrets, especially big ones about himself. Graham didn't lurk in the shadows like a CIA agent operating a safe house in Damascus. The sixty-six-year-old Florida senator logged more appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows in 2002 than any other public figure. Rather in the spirit of Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Graham was adept at hiding the truth in plain sight. Though he intimated this to no one outside his immediate family, Graham had spent most of 2002 contemplating a bid for the White House.

  This reticence was largely based on Graham's conviction that any hint of partisan ambition would undermine the joint Senate-House inquiry into the intelligence failures leading up to Sep­tember 11, which he had been co-chairing with his House counterpart, Porter Goss. Ever disciplined, Graham didn't even explicitly raise the topic of a presidential race with his wife Adele. But as she recalled, "When he was discussing the prob­lems with the intelligence investigation, I could tell he was thinking about it. You don't have to say it to feel it."

  At a family Thanksgiving, Graham jettisoned this don't-ask-don't-tell policy. He felt liberated because the congressional 9/11 investigation was finally completed (although the eight-hundred-plus-page text of the report was not released until July 2003). The senator and his wife were spending the holiday at one of the places he loves best: the farm in Albany, Georgia, where Grahams have been raising Black Angus cattle since the 1920s. With them was the eldest of their four daughters, Gwen Logan, and her fam­ily, who had driven up from Tallahassee. Unlike anyone else, Gwen had actually been talking with her father about the presi­dency, off and on, throughout the year. Now she put it to him directly, "Dad, do you have the desire to do this?" Graham admit­ted that he had the yen. He recalled the words of his late sister-in-law, Katharine Graham, that every president she ever knew had "the depth of passion to do all the difficult and sometimes unpleasant things necessary to be elected and serve." Suddenly the White House, rather than the Black Angus, became the domi­nant weekend topic. When Gwen and her father wearied of their own suppositions and speculations, they went on-line to sift through the political news and then plotted some more.

  After thirty-six years of elective office, including two terms as governor and three in the Senate, Bob Graham is the most suc­cessful politician in modern Florida history. Yet rather than immediately assembling a team of veteran advisers to map out a late-starting presidential race, Graham did nothing for two weeks. Absolutely nothing. Finally, without giving a reason, he asked his Senate chief of staff, Buddy Menn, to arrange a private meeting with the most famous political strategist in America not named Karl Rove.

  James Carville was the first outsider to whom Graham confided his deep-cover aspirations. The thirty-minute chat at the senator's Capitol Hill townhouse was conducted in the friendly but formal fashion that is Graham's natural metier. No stranger to such conversations with would-be presidents seeking their learner's permit, Carville offered his standard advice about the rules of the road: "You've got to know why you're running...It's not a position, it's a job...The one thing you know in every instance without fail is that the person with the most money in the bank on January 1 of the election year gets the nomination." Graham, famous for his color-coded notebooks in which he records the hour-by-hour details of his day, jotted down the high­lights of Carville's lecture. Although Graham never said anything definitive, Carville left the townhouse thinking, "Hey, this guy's going to run for president."

  Four days later, on December 13, ABC's "The Note" ran this intriguing one-sentence item: "For those who think the Demo­cratic field is pretty set, what would you say if you heard that Senator Bob Graham of Florida has initiated some 'serious dis­cussions' with people about whether he might put together a strong 2004 presidential campaign?" But the senator, afflicted with what seemed to be a case of the slows, still did nothing overt beyond getting ready for a six-day, pre-Christmas cruise to Mexico with Adele. Graham was literally at sea when Al Gore made the announcement that turned the presidential race into "Anything Can Happen Day" for the Democratic Party.

  For all his senatorial solemnity in Washington, Graham's hall­mark in Florida is his "work days," media stunts in which he tries to replicate the on-the-job experiences of his constituents, doing everything from mixing mortar to grooming circus animals. Work day no. 385 on December 23 involved no heavy lifting; the gray-haired senator was slated to spend the day at Radio Carnivale in Miami's Little Haiti section. It began with an appearance behind the microphone on a morning call-in show. There, in response to a series of questions about his future plans, as some callers even mentioned the White House, Graham blurted out, "I'm seriously thinking about options, including the option of running for presi­dent." Never before in the nation's proud melting-pot history had anyone ever unveiled a presidential candidacy on a Haitian-American radio show. (As Graham later explained to me, his logic for opting for Radio Carnivale over, say, Meet the Press was sim­ply that "I didn't want to be disingenuous.")

  The meticulous Graham, of course, had brought along to the radio station his tiny green notebook to chronicle the day's events, large and small. Arriving at 7:45, he wrote, "Difficulty opening door—what if they had a radio show and nobody could [get in]." Entering the studio at 7:55, he dutifully noted "round table—2 mikes," detailed his pre-interview preparations ("clear throat"), and mentioned that the announcer boasted that he was "the only talk show host with a USS," which is Graham's acronym for "United States Senator." Later in the broadcast, he described drinking "coffee—heavy sweet & sugar." Most of Gra­ham's thirteen pages of jottings for the day referred to the con­cerns of the senator's Haitian-American constituents.

  Hey, haven't we buried the lead? What about Graham's bomb­shell revelation that he was running for president? History should note that Graham devoted exactly two entries, totaling fif­teen words, to the entire topic. During the call-in portion, some­time after 8:00, he scrawled, "repeated urging to run for President." Around 8:45, Graham also jotted down the words of the host who mentioned that his senatorial guest may be "moving to a new job [on] Pennsylvania Avenue." In short, running for president got equal billing with Graham's summary of a news break: "9:45—traffic—many accidents."

  Others close to the senator, though, were more literarily exu­berant. Adele Graham, who started keeping her own set of notes on the presidential race just the day before, wrote, "'Oui,' is the sound of enthusiasm coming from Haitian Carnivale Radio. Over and over, Bob was asked if he would run for president—and finally a child brought forth a positive response. I was listening and heard a confirmation of what I had expected. The press filled in the details throughout the day announcing the possibility of a presidential run. Our youngest daughter was very surprised. Our oldest daughter [Gwen] was his greatest advocate. All four [daughters] expressing comments of excitement and concern. The phone began to ring—longtime friends who had suggested it for years."

  Two weeks later, the Grahams were back in Washington, returning home after a dinner across the Potomac in Great Falls, Virginia, with their daughter Suzanne and her husband, Tom Gib­son. As Adele described it in her journal, "Bob is on the right path. A private breakfast with Warren Buffett. A ride by the White House on the way home from dinner with the Gibsons with [Bob's] statement: 'Maybe we'll be in that house over there in a couple of years.'"

  Chapter 4

  The Money Primary

  As John Kerry peers down the long conference table at his two dozen breakfast companions on this mid-December 2002 morn­ing, it is easy to imagine that he sees dollar signs along with such familiar faces as investment banker Felix Rohatyn. Assembled in the Park Avenue office of equity-fund manager Alan Patricof are some of Manhattan's leading Democratic fund-raisers, a group shell-shocked and adrift following Al Gore's precipitous with­drawal from the presidential race just two days ago. This long-pl
anned meet-the-candidate session involves nothing so crass as the exchange of campaign cash. Rather, it is akin to a backer's audition for a Broadway musical. If the would-be theatrical angels leave humming the title tune, they will undoubtedly ante up later.

  Suffice it to say that I am probably the only person at the table who worries about paying his monthly American Express bill. I had originally gone to see Patricof, whom I knew socially, after word had leaked out that he had gathered a small group to hear a preliminary pitch from General Wesley Clark, that intriguing figure always hovering on the fringes of presidential possibility. Patricof mentioned that I also had just missed a closed-door breakfast with the little-known Howard Dean. Then he invited me to the Kerry tryout and upcoming sessions with the other can­didates. It was a surprising offer, since reporters are rarely per­mitted to witness the most clandestine courting ritual of the Invisible Primary—the wooing of checkbook Democrats. So here I am, feeling like I just landed a walk-on role in the political ver­sion of Upstairs, Downstairs.

  After two trips with Kerry during the run-up to the 2002 elec­tions, I am familiar with his standard pitch to Democratic activists in New Hampshire and Iowa. What intrigue me are the ways that he adapts his spiel to appeal to this politically sophisti­cated Manhattan audience. Running through his resume, for example, Kerry emphasizes the anti-war aspects of his Vietnam persona rather than the medals he earned as a navy officer. Liber­ated from worrying about how his comments might come across in tomorrow's newspapers, Kerry is scathing about the Demo­crats' failure to offer a coherent message during the off-year campaign and the refusal of his Senate colleagues to approve leg­islation establishing the Department of Homeland Security before the election. Kerry does not, however, go so far as to point out that the politically ill-advised battle over the lack of union pro­tections in the Bush administration's homeland-security legisla­tion was orchestrated by Joe Lieberman.

  Even though Kerry is the only man in the room who removes his suit jacket in an effort to appear informal and relaxed, he comes across as tense, defensive and curiously tone deaf. Keenly aware of the recently orphaned Gore contingent in the room, Kerry makes a maladroit effort to empathize with the former vice president. In a bizarre biographical riff, Kerry likens Gore's bowing out to his own long-ago decision not to mount a second attempt to win a Massachusetts congressional seat in 1974 after losing an initial effort in 1972. Kerry portentously explains that he chose instead to give his support to Paul Tsongas because he didn't want to contribute to the Democratic divisions in "our country...er, my state, my congressional district."

  By this point, Kerry is beginning to lose his audience; the man sitting across from me is visibly reading the New York Times. Before he answers questions, Kerry first poses a rhetorical one of his own: Can a Democrat from Massachusetts win the White House? His response, an almost word-for-word repetition of an argument he made to me in October, is that Massachusetts is not the liberal bastion that people imagine. Four of the state's last five governors have been Republicans (Kerry leaves unmentioned that he served as lieutenant governor under the exception, a fel­low named Michael Dukakis), Massachusetts voted for Ronald Reagan both times and in the 1976 presidential primary, the state backed Scoop Jackson, the most conservative Democrat in the field. As Kerry revs up the way-back machine, I half expect him to mention that a Massachusetts Republican senator blocked the League of Nations in 1919.

  Kerry's presentation provides the first intimations of a flaw in his candidacy—he tries so hard to be reassuring and is so con­scious of the "Massachusetts liberal" label that he fails to make clear his rationale for running. Stressing his own moderate cre­dentials and pandering a bit to presumed Wall Street sentiment, Kerry points out that he backed the 1996 welfare reform legisla­tion and has supported a wide variety of business-oriented tax cuts. He speaks so effusively about his tax-cutting zeal, in fact, that several Democrats in the room mistakenly assume that Kerry voted for the deficits-be-damned 2001 Bush tax bill.

  During the forty-five-minute question period, Kerry candidly outlines his fund-raising plans. Brimming with confidence, he declares that he can raise at least $30 million before the primar­ies, which, with federal matching funds, translates into a hefty nearly $50 million campaign budget. My ears perk up as Kerry casually mentions his intention to participate in the matching-funds program, under which the government doubles individual campaign contributions up to $250, Although he never spells out the significance of this declaration, I grasp it immediately. It means no ketchup money from the funds he jointly shares with his Heinz heiress wife, Teresa. Under the law, a candidate who donates more than $50,000 to his own campaign is automatically barred from receiving federal matching funds.

  Kerry also serves up a lengthy and factually accurate exegesis of how George W. Bush corralled the 2000 GOP nomination. The secret was that the leading Republican fund-raisers collectively decided in early 1999 to unite around Bush, thereby depriving such potential rivals as Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole and, yes, Dan Quayle of the cash to survive the 1999 preliminary skir­mishing. That's why the iconoclastic John McCain ended up as Bush's only serious challenger. Embedded in Kerry's narrative is an obvious lesson for Democrats who want to avoid a fratricidal nomination struggle in 2004. When Patricof asks about the poten­tial for a divisive primary fight, Kerry makes this message explicit: "Alan, it's up to you and the rest of the people in this room. You can coalesce around a candidate and squeeze out everyone else. Or we'll have to depend on everyone being on good behavior [in the primaries]."

  ******

  Kerry's unite-around-me appeal prompted memories of a boast that Gore adviser Ron Klain made to me back in mid-1998 when the vice president was trying to clear the field for an unchal­lenged romp to the 2000 nomination. "There are only 30,000 proven big givers in the Democratic Party," Klain said with unequivocal certainty. "And we've already signed up 27,000 of them. There's no way that anyone can raise the money to oppose Gore." Whoops! What the Gore high command failed to consider was that "Dollar Bill" Bradley had carefully nurtured his own fund-raising base outside those 30,000 big-ticket donors. While Bradley had liabilities as a candidate, the former basketball star was able to match Gore dollar for dollar until he was upended in the New Hampshire primary.

  These cash-and-Kerry fantasies similarly misjudged the dynamics of the 2004 money primary. In a contest without an obvious favorite, there is small incentive and large risk for fund­raisers to prematurely anoint any candidate as the Daddy Warbucks of the Democratic Party. If they bet on the wrong horse, they could end up following the next Democratic administration on CNN rather than from, say, the embassy in Stockholm. The GOP's 2000 rally-around-the-president's-son movement to Bush reflected the ingrained royalist tenor of Republican presidential politics; the disorganized Democrats, in contrast, have consis­tently failed to clear the path to the nomination for anyone, even for an incumbent president like Jimmy Carter in 1980. A handful of glowing news clips, some promising New Hampshire polls and a consultant-heavy campaign staff were not nearly enough to cloak Kerry in an aura of inevitability.

  Kerry, to be sure, ended up collecting more than $12 million during the first six months of 2003, the most of any Democrat and close to matching the pace that he had forecast at the Patricof breakfast. But measured by the quarterly reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Kerry's position in the fund-raising derby was analogous to that of Mo Udall, the liberal Arizona con­gressman who kept finishing second in the 1976 primaries. Each time around, the Kerry number prompted oh-yeah yawns from the political cognoscenti, who were galvanized by the dramatic narrative line coming from another campaign. At the end of the first quarter, John Edwards won the headlines with his ability to belly up to the bar with the trial lawyers. And on June 30, Howard Dean became the big story. The once impecunious Dean had for the first time in political history miraculously found a way to harness the small-contribution power of the Internet. The tectonic plates had
shifted, the continents had moved, and never again would campaign finance be viewed solely through the old-fashioned prism of who had the largest group of proven Demo­cratic fund-raisers in his corner.

  But for all the justified fascination with Dean's web-slinging exploits on the Internet, the relative financial competitiveness of the Democratic presidential race was also due to another far less ballyhooed factor. Yes, it is time to talk about the landmark 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign reform bill. I will concede that those who are obsessed with the details of campaign reform are like nineteenth-century devotees of Esperanto as a universal lan­guage. There may not be many of them, but their passions about the topic are so intense that they are best avoided at cocktail par­ties. But in all the abstruse debates that surrounded the legisla­tion and its subsequent Supreme Court review, little attention was devoted to a minor provision that made all the difference for the Democratic hopefuls.

  A drum roll if you please, maestro. McCain-Feingold in­creased the maximum legally permissible individual campaign contribution in a primary campaign from $1,000 to $2,000. That seemingly innocuous double-your-pleasure-double-your-fun numerical change probably kept Dick Gephardt, Lieberman and even Edwards in the race. Do the arithmetic—a candidate can now harvest twice the campaign cash from the same two hours spent in a Fifth Avenue living room or at a beach house in Malibu. For a presidential contender who must put all his begs in one ask-it, the implications are enormous. Most of the 2004 Democrats, especially in the early stages of the campaign, depended on contributors who could "max out" with a single check. During the first three months of 2003, both Gephardt and Lieberman received more than 85 percent of their funding in increments of $1,000 or more. The new $2,000 limit illustrates the truism that a rising tide lifts all candidates. Taken as a group, the Democratic hopefuls in the first quarter garnered roughly an additional $10 million in $1,000-plus contributions that would have been impermissible under the old law.