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

by Walter Shapiro

  With this Iraq attack on Kerry, Dean has found a medium to match his message. Watching Dean master the rat-a-tat of quick-response campaign press releases is a bit like sitting on the copy-desk next to William Randolph Hearst as he composes his first screaming yellow-journalism headline. It all seems like harmless fun and games until, before you know it, you're in the middle of the Spanish-American War.

  Okay, the Dean-Kerry feud has not yet inspired dirty-faced newsboys to scream, "Remember the Maine! But with both New England candidates competing for the same upmarket Demo­cratic constituency, it amounts to a real war. The quarrel mirrors divisions in the Democratic Party that go all the way back to the anti-war furies of the 1968 primaries. During that tempestuous year, the real cleavage on the left was between the purist parti­sans of Eugene McCarthy and the pragmatic politics personified by Bobby Kennedy. That Democratic dilemma endures: How do you weigh dewy-eyed idealism against partially flawed electability? In his righteous anger, Dean can be seen as the spiritual descendant of McCarthy, while Kerry never shies away from wrapping himself in the Kennedy myth.

  Two weeks later, Dean was in Iowa, a state where caucus-going Democrats are so dovish they make Mahatma Gandhi seem bellicose. Colin Powell had just come before the United Nations Security Council in early February to deliver the Bush adminis­tration's case against Saddam Hussein. But here in the heartland, Democrats were bristling with no-war-for-oil fervor. This was Howard Dean's moment—the maverick candidate was trans­formed from an ego-tripping outsider to the embodiment of a cause. Not since Vietnam had an insurgent Democrat become so identified with a single transcendent issue so early in the presi­dential campaign cycle. Dean's original dream was built around lighting an Iowa prairie fire. But the blaze was slated to erupt in early 2004, not eleven months before the caucuses.

  Arriving in Des Moines, Dean again chided his tongue-tied rivals by declaring, "I think there are a lot of folks dancing around on this one because they voted for the resolution and now they're trying to figure out what to say." That night in Ames at the Story County Democrats' annual soup supper (no, I don't recommend the cream of mushroom), Dean won standing ova­tions without resorting to souped-up rhetoric. Something big was happening when an audience rose for thirty seconds of thunder­ous cheers in response to uninflected lines like this: "We ought not to resort to unilateral action unless there's an imminent threat to the United States. And the secretary of state and the president have not made a case that such an imminent threat exists." But at the back of the room, Dean adviser Joe Trippi, making his first trip with the candidate, sounded a cautionary note about premising an entire campaign around anti-war fever. "You don't know how it will play out," Trippi said nervously. "What if we win the war in three days and three guys have bruised knuckles from going over a wall? What if everybody then forgets that they were against it?"

  After the dinner, I headed off with a group of Dean aides to a raucous sports bar, the only place we could find in Ames to get a Saturday night drink. Struggling to hear above the din, I listened as Trippi, the media consultant who was soon to become cam­paign manager, explained the difficulty in getting Dean to accept the tedium of an all-purpose stump speech. "Howard's problem is that he'll get bored with the same spiel and he goes off in an entirely new direction," Trippi said. He cited Dean's riff, which I had heard often, that America faces the danger of becoming another Argentina in forty or fifty years if we keep running unsustainable deficits. For Trippi, the problem was that voters didn't want to hear dire prophecies about America becoming "a second-rate nation." When Trippi pointed this out to Dean, the candidate promised to banish the offending phrase from his lexi­con. So in his next speech, the ever obedient Dean warned that America risked becoming "a third-rate nation."

  A presidential contender spends more time visiting college campuses than an itinerant drug dealer because nowhere is it easier for a candidate to gin up a respectable-size audience. But there was nothing ersatz about the crowd of roughly three hun­dred students and faculty members waiting for Dean the next afternoon in the student lounge at Grinnell College. These weren't the curious but the already converted, eager to see the object of their anti-war ardor. While the smattering of nose rings and hair colors never seen in nature spoke to a twenty-first-century sensibility, the red beanbag chairs that dotted the room sparked nostalgic memories of the 1960s. Dean's speech was also something of a throwback as he triggered a rolling thunder of applause by angrily declaring, "If we're going to send our chil­dren, your age, and our grandchildren to die in Iraq, the presi­dent has got to do better than Saddam is an evil man."

  For all his crowd-pleasing critique of the administration's facile arguments, Dean was walking a tightrope on Iraq. If he took even a small step to the right, he would tumble off his anti-war perch as the only serious Democratic contender loudly opposing a go-it-alone invasion. But if he veered further left, he risked plunging into the McGovernite black hole reputed to doom dovish Democrats to irrelevance.

  That helped explain why Dean disappointed the militants during the question period at Grinnell by stressing that he was not a disciple of the war-is-not-healthy-for-children-and-other-living-things school of international relations. "Remember," he declared, "I did not say that I would not use unilateral force against Saddam. What I said was 'He is not an imminent threat to the United States.'" Unilateral American action would be justi­fied, he argued, if Saddam ever acquired nuclear weapons or if it were proven that he was sharing chemical or biological weapons with terrorist groups.

  On the ride to the next stop, Dean tried to define the larger stakes in this Democratic donnybrook over Iraq. "I think the war is emblematic of a lot of differences," he said. "There is a rest­lessness in the Democratic Party over exactly what I talk about, which is not trying to be all things to all people." Then he took the unorthodox step in challenging the political legacy of the man who, despite it all, remains the nation's most popular Demo­crat. "What a lot of people learned from Bill Clinton is that if you accommodate and you co-opt, you can be successful," Dean argued. "And Bill Clinton was very successful. But that role doesn't work for everybody, and it's not the right time for it any­more. It's a new time to be blunt, to be direct, and to stand up for what you believe. That's really the fault line—and the war is a piece of that."

  ******

  Sure, there are other fault lines among the Democrats on issues such as health care and trade. But there is a wisp of the theoreti­cal to these disputes over domestic policy, since any Democrat in the Oval Office would have to completely revise his proposals be­fore submitting them to a Congress that is likely to be Republican-dominated. But Iraq remains tangible, immediate and real. It is the Rorschach test by which all would-be presidents must be judged.

  The trick is to make sense of the patterns. Based on their ideo­logical predispositions, voters could see in the candidates what they chose to see. With the conspicuous exception of Dean and to a lesser extent Bob Graham, all the leading contenders can be said to have used the war to toughen their national-security cre­dentials and to demonstrate that even wimpy Democrats can be warriors. But if you turn the ink blots, you can reach a different conclusion. The Democrats—again excluding Dean, Graham and sometimes Kerry—proved that the shell-shocked party could pander to the gung-ho, trumpet-blaring excesses of Bush foreign policy without ever sounding a note of skepticism. Another twist and it was all about politics—and under this cynical reading, only Dean, the hawkish Joe Lieberman and the idiosyncratic Gra­ham ever publicly expressed their honest opinions.

  Even after the war was over, Iraq played havoc with Democratic harmony. It was not just the continuing American casualties, the AWOL alert for Saddam's elusive weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration's comically inept efforts to explain how gremlins inserted sixteen deceitful words about African uranium into the State of the Union Address. For the Democrats, Iraq became a metaphor for something larger. In late July, Dick Gep­hardt, presumabl
y seeking political cover for his flag-waving sup­port for the war, delivered a blistering speech in San Francisco attacking George W. Bush for manhandling the peace. "When Pres­ident Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and declared victory in Iraq, I think he chose the wrong backdrop for his photo-op," Gephardt said. "If you ask me, if he really wanted to show us the state of affairs in Iraq, he should have landed on a patch of quick­sand." A few days later, Lieberman went after Democrats like Gephardt—and of course Dean—by warning, "Some in my party threaten to send a message that they don't know a just war when they see it and, more broadly, are not prepared to use our military strength to protect our security and the cause of freedom."

  I cannot write about Iraq without admitting my own biases. As a dove, though one who was sympathetic to the human-rights case for working with the United Nations to eventually oust Sad­dam, I came down close to the Dean side of the debate. In hind­sight, Dean's repeated argument that Saddam presented "no imminent threat" looks prescient now that no one can credibly argue that Iraq was secretly preparing to nuke Cedar Rapids. But for all my dovish plumage, I also respect Kerry's early contention that the unilateral nature of the war represented a failure of Bush administration diplomacy. In New Hampshire, three days after the first cruise missiles landed in Baghdad, Kerry said that if he were president he would have waited another forty-five days to try to reach a diplomatic consensus at the United Nations. He made a similar statement in Iowa in late July: "It would have been my preference to work another thirty days with other nations to try to resolve it." The current military and financial burdens of reconstructing Iraq would obviously have been far less onerous had the administration worked longer and harder within the Security Council.

  A Democratic wag cleverly pointed out that a major reason why Dean turned out to be so right on Iraq was that he was the only leading candidate who never received a top-secret intelli­gence briefing. All the congressional Democrats—even Graham, who voted against the Iraq resolution—shared the belief that Iraq was poised to launch its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. But none of them, not even Graham or John Edwards, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, were privy to the internal disputes between the CIA, State Department and the Pentagon over the validity of the evidence. The Iraq war was Bush's mega box-office cinematic epic, a Saving Private Ryan for the twenty-first century, and the Democrats in Congress were reduced to the role of uniformed extras on the beaches at Nor­mandy. Only Lieberman was as gung-ho as Bush to go to war, even with ambiguous intelligence information and only Tony Blair as an ally.

  Political reporters, myself often included, have a tendency to elevate clichés into immutable laws that have governed elections since Pericles's first campaign in Athens. Within the echo cham­ber of the Invisible Primary, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that if three campaign consultants working for different candidates all make the same argument, it has to be true. And nothing in politics invites more blather than the presumed weak­ness of the Democrats on foreign policy.

  Oh Lordy, how many times have I heard pollsters claim that the 2004 Democratic nominee must be able to neutralize the pres­ident's national-security credentials. By this exacting standard, a Dean victory in the primaries would presage a fifty-state wipeout and an Edwards nomination would unleash scathing attacks on the ability of a one-term senator to match Bush's mastery of the intricacies of foreign policy. Even Gephardt's quarter century on Capitol Hill may not measure up to the president's globe-girdling greatness. This oft-repeated equation would prematurely narrow the Democratic field to an unabashed hawk (Lieberman) and a certified war hero (Kerry) with a possible opening for the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (Graham). Casting it in self-serving terms, Lieberman argued during May's South Carolina debate that the voters are not going to elect "anyone who sends a message that is other than strength on defense and homeland security."

  As the right fielder on the Democratic nine, Lieberman has to stress his purported electability. But there is something danger­ously simplistic to the notion that so far in advance of the elec­tion, the Democrats' help-wanted sign must read, "Only Hawks and Heroes Need Apply." Like stock-market mavens and budget analysts, the political community assumes that all current trends will continue in straight-line fashion until the election. In truth, not even Dick Cheney can confidently predict the national-security environment in the fall of 2004 or even which countries Halliburton will win federal non-competitive bidding contracts to rebuild. Beyond the obvious foreign-policy uncertainties, like the number of body bags coming home from Iraq, there is also the unanswerable question of how the victorious Democratic nomi­nee will demonstrate that he is prepared to lead the nation in per­ilous times. Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser during his second term, sounded like Lieberman when he said, "The American people are not likely to elect anyone in 2004 who is not as tough or tougher than these guys [in the White House]. That's the threshold." But Berger, who is quietly advising most leading Democrats, recognizes that toughness is often measured through personal qualities rather than explicit policy positions. A vigorous performance against Bush in the debates, for example, may register a higher reading on the 2004 toughness meter than the candidate's two-year-old statements on war with Iraq.

  But the Democrats seem no more willing than the fractious Iraqis to settle for permanent peace. Appearing before a group of young Democrats in New York in mid-May, Lieberman was hissed and dissed for his pre-war pro-war stance. The Lieberman camp seemed more comfortable with Old Testament eye-for-eye justice than those new-fangled gospels about turning the other cheek. That same week in May, the centrist Democratic Leader­ship Council, whose CEO, Al From, is one of Lieberman's staunchest backers, unleashed a scathing attack on Dean—a fore­shadowing of the bitter charges to come. A memo signed by From and mild-mannered DLC president Bruce Reed bluntly stated, "What activists like Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democ­ratic Party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism. That's the wing that lost 49 states in two elec­tions, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."

  Hey, guys, tell us what you really think. With its venomous assault on the Democratic Party's standard-bearers of two and three decades ago, the DLC memo brought to mind the famous put-down of the Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVI: "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." The same, alas, can be said of the Democratic Party as it perpetually searches for new venues in which to refight the Vietnam War.

  ******

  The response from the Democrats in Keene, New Hampshire, was so electric that Kerry never got to finish his sentence. On this summer day in August 2002, the Massachusetts senator was talk­ing passionately about energy independence. "We need to create renewable energy," he thundered, "so that we never again have to send young men and women abroad to die..." A wave of applause drowned out Kerry's efforts to offer a final phrase that could have been "in Iraq" or "in the Middle East." But none of the party activists cared about Kerry's interrupted syntax. They knew that he had just expressed his full-throated opposition to the president's determination to unleash a new war against Sad­dam Hussein.

  Or had he? In the car afterward, I casually mentioned to Kerry that I was impressed by the way that he tapped into the growing fervor of the anti-war movement. The senator looked at me in non-comprehension as if I had just started speaking in tongues. "That was all backward looking," he said with exasperation in his voice. "It was about Kuwait. It has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction."

  For me, this was an emblematic moment that underscored the danger of making glib assumptions about Kerry's foreign-policy beliefs. His views, particularly on Iraq, were complex, subtle and politically tinged—and often the shadings got lost in translation, opening him up to charges by both Dean and the press of two-faced duplicity. "I think Kerry's enormously thoughtful on these i
ssues," said Jim Steinberg, the deputy national security adviser during Clinton's second term. "He may know foreign policy better than anyone in the Senate. But does it cohere into a world view? The big challenge for Kerry as a candidate is to take his wisdom and his world view and turn it into a compelling message."

  There were moments when Kerry's twin passions for politics and foreign policy became comically entwined. In Maine, a week before the 2002 elections, Kerry was on his cell phone with his scheduler in his Boston office. He was talking animatedly about the details of the day he was scheduled to devote to campaigning for Shannon O'Brien, the Democratic candidate for Massachu­setts governor who was trailing badly in the polls. Suddenly, in the middle of a discussion of the logistics of a planned rally, a new thought crossed Kerry's mind. "When we're done," he said to the scheduler, "can you get me Kofi Annan on the phone?" Much to my disappointment as a potential eavesdropper, the U.N. secretary-general was temporarily unavailable.

  That afternoon at a small Democratic fund-raiser in Bangor, the senator was pressed to justify his recent controversial vote in favor of the president's Iraq resolution. His answer was revealing, both for its endless outpouring of run-on sentences and for its core of difficult-to-summarize logic. "It was one of the toughest votes that I've cast," Kerry began, "because votes are yes and no. But my vote was not yes or no, nor does the issue lend itself to yes or no." This was the moment when I wondered whether Kerry was about to update Humpty-Dumpty and declare, "When I cast a vote, it means what I choose it to mean, nothing more nor less."