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

by Walter Shapiro

  The same can be said of Democratic donors. Many investment bankers, accustomed to writing $50,000 checks to the party and receiving deference from the likes of Tom Daschle in return, have neither the time nor the inclination to assemble the same amount for a presidential candidate by putting the arm on twenty-five sep­arate donors for $2,000 each. In the new fund-raising universe, it is less a question of your personal net worth than how much you are worth in casting the net. "Guys with a lot of money are now irrelevant," says Gregg Hymowitz, a Wall Street money manager who is national co-chairman of the Gephardt campaign. "What you want are guys with a lot of friends." The best hard-money fund-raisers are those with a large social network built around a latticework of mutual obligation based on business, friendship or charitable giving. A member of Kerry's fourteen-person New York (fund-raising) steering committee boasts that his personal "A-list" consists of people who only ask about the candidate when they want to know what name to put on the check.

  Wealthy New York Democrats, especially those who had been keening for Al Gore to run, have been slow to commit to a presi­dential candidate. This post-Gore indecisiveness explained the prevalence of occasions like the Patricof breakfasts—events where a candidate makes an hour-long appearance just as he does at a fund-raiser, but collects nothing in return other than the names of possible prospects to add to future call lists. Small wonder that campaigns bristled at these frequent only-in-New-York tryouts. As one campaign fund-raiser sniffed, "Now that soft money is gone, showing up late means getting a seat at the back of the bus."

  As a reporter, I found these prospecting sessions to be far more revealing than the half dozen private closed-room New York fund-raisers that I also wangled my way into. It was the differ­ence between watching an eager-to-please candidate try to win over an audience of doubters and seeing that same presidential contender confidently translate the well-practiced cadences of his New Hampshire stump speech to the social setting of a sprawling loft in Soho.

  For example, when Lieberman appeared before the Patricof group, he was confronted with the question that has consistently cast a pall over his fund-raising efforts: Can a Jew really be elected president?

  Lieberman first responded with the answer that I have often seen him give in public settings, an only-in-America trope that begins, "The 2000 experience was really inspiring, we didn't face any anti-Semitism at all." But the audience sitting around the table in a Park Avenue conference room wanted more than just another gooey remembrance of the Gore-Lieberman campaign. Prepared for this skepticism, Lieberman came equipped with polling numbers or, as he preferred to call them, "data points." In 1960, the year of the Kennedy-Nixon election, only 71 percent of Americans said that they would vote for a Catholic for president. "Today," Lieberman declared, "asked about voting for somebody Jewish, it's 92 percent."

  But there were more goodies in the grab bag of data points pro­vided by pollster Mark Penn. "You'll get a kick out of hearing about one of the polls I did nationally before I decided to run," Lieberman said. "All the candidates were described in a positive way [without their names]. And in my description to half the sam­ple, we didn't say what my religion was. And in the other half of the sample, we said I was Jewish." Lieberman paused as if he were the announcer in the old which-hand-has-the-M&Ms TV commercial. Then with an open-palms gesture, he revealed, "I ran better in the half in which they said I was Jewish. So go figure."

  Even though he had a hard time winning converts, Lieberman, who is after all the senator from an adjoining state, can easily project a New York state of mind. But I never figured that Dick Gephardt—whom I always picture in a union windbreaker pledg­ing to "fight for working families"—would ever play well here. Seeing Gephardt in Manhattan seems akin to meeting Ed Koch on a safari. Sure travel is broadening, but this is ridiculous.

  But on a mid-January morning, a year before the Iowa cau­cuses, Gephardt had been speaking for ten minutes to two dozen influential Democrats who were raptly following every word in his rap. There was a sense of drama in the room (this Patricof prospecting breakfast was held at an East Side restaurant) as Gephardt told a story that I have heard before about his White House meeting with Bush the day after the World Trade Center towers crumbled. "I told the president," he recounted, '"You've got to trust us and we've got to trust you.'" But with his voice ris­ing in anger, he then detailed all the ways in which Bush has betrayed that trust. "This president," Gephardt declared, rapping the table for emphasis, "is not talking to the American people about the nature of the challenge we face." This was not a crowd used to presidential candidates using tables as punctuation marks, but somehow, strangely enough, it worked.

  Unlike Kerry in his appearance before the group, Gephardt came across as confident rather than defensive. After Patricof challenged him by saying, "A lot of people in New York are con­cerned about your class-war rhetoric, beat the rich," Gephardt offered a lengthy tour of his economic views that ended with a self-deprecating anecdote about a friend who told him, "Dick, you're such a nice man, why are you always screaming on televi­sion?" Gephardt was also repeatedly pressed on everything from his opposition to the 1993 NAFTA treaty to the perception that he is in the pocket of the unions. Other politicians might have pandered ("I'm as concerned with business as I am with labor") or groveled ("NAFTA was then, this is now") or even grown testy ''It's easy for you to criticize working families"). Instead, Gephardt just doggedly plowed ahead with an opaque refusal to recognize the semi-hostile nature of the questions.

  Afterward, I found myself chatting with Ellen Chesler, the biographer of Margaret Sanger and friend of Hillary who heads reproductive-rights programs at George Soros's Open Society Institute—in short, the quintessential upmarket Manhattan Democrat. "If I had time to get involved, I really might support him," she said to my surprise. Another friend at the breakfast whom I consider the Mikey of presidential politics ("He hates everybody"), confided, "I thought Gephardt was pretty good. I walked away more impressed than I thought I would."

  Much like Scarlett O'Hara vowing that she will never be hun­gry again, presidential candidates swear they will never be down to their last thirty-second commercial. Gephardt, unlike his rivals for the nomination, knows from bitter experience what it feels like to become the Invisible Man on TV screens at just the wrong moment. As Gephardt frequently tells it (he used this anecdote at the Patricof breakfast), he came south for the 1988 Super Tuesday primaries with just $1 million compared to $3 million each for Dukakis and Gore. (Against the free-spending backdrop of con­temporary politics, it seems ludicrous that a presidential nomina­tion could ever be decided based on who had $3 million.) The Missouri congressman recalled checking into a Texas hotel room late one night, switching on the TV set and enduring three Dukakis ads and three Gore commercials in half an hour with nary a Gephardt spot in sight. With the pain from that poignant memory audible in his voice, he said, "That's when I knew it was over."

  Yet Gephardt seems doomed to always be singing the "St. Louis Blues" when it comes to money. It probably stems from that same glitz-and-glamour gap that makes him the least likely Democratic hopeful to be profiled in Vanity Fair. During the first half of 2003, he finished fifth in the fund-raising derby with $7.4 million, though he augmented that figure with $2.4 million that he had squirreled away in his House re-election account. An inherent danger in political reporting is over-emphasizing the predictive importance of early green-eyeshade fund-raising numbers. Yes, history does show that the candidate with the most cash going into the primaries generally wins the nomination. But since presidential campaigns are only waged every four years, truisms that cover the last quarter century are actually based on a limited number of occurrences. Nothing this time around dictates that money will be the determining factor in a wide-open race. So for all of Gephardt's fund-raising woes, let us violate the norms of journalism for a brief moment to accentuate the positive.

  Picture an early June evening at the River House, the leg­endary Ma
nhattan apartment building on Sutton Place. The win­dows of a long, cream-colored living room, decorated with modern art that might make the MOMA envious, were open wide to admit the late spring air and to display the classic view of the East River and the sparkling lights of...well...Queens. The four dozen Democrats assembled here—an eclectic mixture that includes former United Nations ambassador and every Demo­crat's putative secretary of state Dick Holbrooke, Bette Midler and my friend Ellen Chesler—had all responded to an invitation that read, "Lady de Rothschild and Ambassador Felix Rohatyn Invite You to the Gephardt Fund-Raiser Reception."

  After a brief introduction from Rohatyn (who had played a similar role at a Kerry event the prior week) and a few welcoming words by Lynn Forester (married to Lord Evelyn Rothschild), the candidate, the Robespierre of the union halls, took the place of honor in front of a marble fireplace. "Let me first thank Felix and Lynn for doing this; they are dear friends," he said. "It's always a little difficult to get involved in a primary election. But they have been willing, along with all of you, to give me some help at an important time in the campaign."

  The words that followed were far less important than the occasion at which they were spoken. For on this glittering evening, the long financial struggles of Dick Gephardt were momentarily forgotten as he nurtured the hope that maybe this time he would not be left bereft in a strange hotel room watching the TV commercials of his well-heeled rivals as his dreams of the White House vanished before his eyes.

  ******

  Presidential fund-raising would be a lot more convenient for Capitol Hill Democrats if George Washington had not been seized by the wacky notion of moving the nation's capital from New York to a dreary swampland between Maryland and Virginia. While California, Florida and all those flyover states play major roles in the money primary, the greed-locked streets of Manhat­tan remain the spot for one-stop shopping. In the spring of 2003 you literally couldn't cross a block in midtown without encoun­tering a presidential hopeful. One day, John Edwards was leaving lunch at Rolling Stone magazine when he spotted a familiar driver standing by an empty Lincoln town car on the other side of the street. Calling out to the chauffeur, whom he had employed on prior trips to New York, the ever-friendly Edwards asked, "Who are you driving for today?" Back came the answer: "Senator Bob Graham."

  That same evening, Graham was at a cocktail party in the Fifth Avenue apartment of Richard Gardner, a former ambassador to Spain and Italy, now a law professor at Columbia University. Designed to introduce Graham to Manhattan's Democratic elite, this no-contribution-required reception was the kind of prospect­ing event that the other presidential contenders held earlier in the campaign cycle. But Graham was starting late, in part because he had lost six weeks in February and March to heart surgery. As tuxedo-clad waiters circulated among the three dozen guests with trays of melon wrapped in smoked salmon and potatoes topped with sour cream and a dollop of caviar, it was apparent that Graham had attracted the right bold-faced names—former Governor Mario Cuomo, George Soros, cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder and Kennedy administration legends Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger. Danielle Gardner, the hostess, had pointedly set out a plate of bakery-fresh Graham crackers in honor of the candidate.

  As the silver-haired senator got ready to speak, positioning him­self in front of a window with a stunning, normally only-seen-in-the-real-estate ads view of the Central Park reservoir, Adele Graham noticed that the setting sun would be shining right into the eyes of his audience. Taking her husband by the sleeve, she led him to the other end of the living room. In his new venue, Graham began in his trademark orotund style, "My wife, who is an extremely wise as well as beautiful person, has urged me at consid­erable risk to my personal well-being to be brief." Then Graham announced with a bizarre slip of the tongue, "I'm going to answer two questions: Why am I running for president and why do I think I can beat Clinton?" (No one in the well-mannered crowd broke in to inquire whether Graham was inadvertently referring to the for­mer president or the current junior senator from New York.)

  There was a gracious formality to Graham as he predicted to this roomful of friendly strangers, "As you come to know me, you will have a comfort level that will allow you to support our mis­sion." But the candidate was not above the language of the count­ing house. In response to a question, he candidly explained, "I think the overall primary campaign which will get us to January, when we get federal matching funds, will have to be in the range of $15-$20 million. We think we can raise 40-50 percent of that in Florida. We have already raised $6-$7 million or have what I consider to be reliable commitments."

  These commitments, alas, turned out to be as reliable as the promises of Florida real-estate hustlers during the 1920s land boom. Graham ended up collecting a paltry $2 million in the sec­ond quarter for a half-year total of $3.1 million. Asked about this embarrassing shortfall, Graham campaign manager Paul Johnson ruefully responded, "I think what Senator Graham is learning, and what most of us already knew, is that you have to discount what people promise. One gentleman pledged that he would raise half a million dollars. He didn't have that ability, but he tried really hard."

  That is the gimlet-eyed reality of politics—TV stations in Iowa do not take promissory notes. In a perfect world, presidential can­didates would be judged on the weight of their ideas, not on the heft of their campaign bank accounts. But for all the noble ideals of democracy, for all the old-fashioned courting of individual vot­ers in New Hampshire and Iowa, for all the romance of the cam­paign trail, the quest for the most powerful office on this whirling orb of a planet invariably comes down to, as Wordsworth put it, "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

  Chapter 5

  The Staff of Life

  Jano Cabrera's life is in disarray, even by the permissive single-beer-in-an-otherwise-empty-refrigerator standards of young polit­ical operatives. The diminutive and puckish Cabrera—a veritable Hispanic elf—has just returned to Washington in mid-January from a vacation in London, which had been repeatedly resched­uled because of Al Gore. Cabrera is moving to a new apartment, which means that the suits and ties of his adult wardrobe are all in storage. And, oh yes, Joe Lieberman wants to meet with him immediately to discuss the job as his campaign spokesman.

  After earning his wings in the rapid-response "war room" dur­ing the 2000 campaign, Cabrera had been Gore's public voice during the will-he-or-won't-he phase of the Invisible Primary. Jano (as he is universally known in politics without any more need for a last name than Madonna) earned a footnote in modern aviation history on that fateful December Sunday when Gore sud­denly decided to go on 60 Minutes to announce his presidential plans. Unaware of his boss's intentions, Cabrera was aboard an early afternoon US Airways shuttle, heading back to Washington following Gore's appearance on Saturday Night Live. Moments after the plane pulled away from the gate, Cabrera illicitly answered a cell phone call from a Gore staffer instructing him to rush back to Manhattan for an emergency meeting. With artful persuasiveness, Cabrera convinced the US Airways crew to return the airplane to the terminal so that he could hop off.

  Now, a month later, Cabrera is the former Gore staffer most coveted by other presidential campaigns. But he lacks the clothes to close the deal. He sheepishly alerts Lieberman recruiter Jim Kennedy—the senator's longtime press secretary now working for the post-presidential Bill Clinton—that his sartorial options are closer to PU than GQ. Retrieving what passes as his best sweater from the dry cleaner and still looking like a high-school student on his first field trip to Washington, Cabrera nervously arrives at the candidate's Senate office for the interview.

  "I thought you'd be wearing sweatpants," Lieberman says by way of greeting. For the next fifteen minutes, Lieberman banters with Cabrera, whom he knows slightly from the Gore campaign, mostly asking questions about his hometown (Pomona, California) and his family. This is not the kind of probing interrogation that Cabrera had come to expect from a presidential candidate who would be picking th
e person to serve as the public face of his cam­paign. As Lieberman continues to crack jokes instead of breaking out the bright lights and rubber hoses, Cabrera realizes that this campaign could actually be fun. Finally, as the interview draws to a close, Lieberman asks if he needs more time to make a decision. "Yes," Cabrera says, "I'd like to talk things over with Vice Presi­dent Gore." As for Lieberman, he's convinced. "We want you," he announces as if the matter were never in dispute. "I know what your concerns and issues are [a reference to matters like salary and title] and as far as we're concerned, they're settled."

  (As Cabrera tells me this story, I find myself drifting back to 1976 when I was an impoverished writer for the Washington Monthly desperately angling for a job with Jimmy Carter's cam­paign. My wardrobe in that era was limited by both finances and, embarrassing in hindsight, taste. On the summer day that was to seal my political fate, I was wearing an exuberantly rainbow-hued Madras jacket, electric-blue pants and a drip-dry shirt. Suddenly the phone rang with the encouraging news that senior Carter aide Stu Eizenstat wanted to interview me in just twenty minutes before he caught a plane. Even though my outfit was not touted by dress-for-success manuals, I was filled with the youth­ful certainty that my coat of many colors could not possibly blind the Carter campaign to my inner merit. Boy, did I learn a life les­son! The look of horror on the face of Eizenstat, an uptight Atlanta lawyer, eloquently instructed me that the interview was effectively over before we had a chance to shake hands.)