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

by Walter Shapiro

  Instead, Kerry was still working up to his answer: "The presi­dent has the power to decide if there is an imminent threat to the United States." At that moment, a cell phone went off to the eerily apt tones of the William Tell Overture. Without missing a beat, Kerry cracked, "They're summoning us to the attack. The charge!"

  After the laughter subsided, Kerry slowly moved toward the nub of his argument: the weapons of mass destruction and "Sad­dam Hussein's failure to live up to the international community's standards." After offering lengthy quotes from both his speech on the Senate floor before the vote and an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times in September, Kerry finally, mercifully, said, "My vote was cast in a way that made it very clear, 'Mr. Presi­dent, I'm voting for you to do what you said you're going to do, which is to go through the UN and do this through an interna­tional process. If you go unilaterally, without having exhausted these remedies, I'm not supporting you. And if you decide that this is just a matter of straight pre-emptive doctrine for regime-change purposes without regard to the imminence of the threat, I'm not going to support you.'"

  Okay, try fitting that on a bumper sticker or into a thirty-second TV commercial. This prolix style was Kerry's albatross all through the run-up to war. Despite vocal claims to the contrary his underlying position remained consistent every time I subse­quently heard him explain it on the campaign trail. Stripped of the verbiage and most of the conditional clauses, he supported an invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam's weapons of mass destruc­tion as long as it was launched in concert with a broad-based international coalition, preferably under U.N. sanction. But Kerry never mastered brevity. At an outdoor rally in Columbia, South Carolina, in early February, Kerry responded to a three-word shouted question—"What about Iraq?"—with a six-minute answer that even included a rambling aside about his efforts on behalf of Vietnam veterans.

  If his Vietnam service gave Kerry a political credibility that most of his rivals lacked on national-security issues, his Janus-like role in that thirty-five-year-old war had distinct similarities to his stance on Iraq. As Kerry put it at a house party in Nashua, New Hampshire, in late March, shortly after the war began, "I'm the only person running for president who has fought in a war and actually fought against the war I volunteered to fight in because I found it wrong." That was Kerry, hawk and dove in a single lanky body.

  ******

  It was a shame that heart surgery prevented Bob Graham from emerging as an active candidate until after the Iraq war was over. What voters and reporters missed was the potentially comic motif of the gray-haired Florida senator totally befuddling dovish Democratic audiences.

  While Dean railed against the blank-check congressional reso­lution, Graham was one of only twenty-three senators to actually vote no. But his damn-the-polls-full-speed-ahead reasoning was quirky. Unlike the peaceniks, Graham was a gung-ho supporter of unilateral military action against terrorism. He just believed that Iraq could wait until after we destroyed al-Qaeda and went after groups like Hezbollah in Syria. "Graham's position was in some ways a courageous one because a lot of Democrats thought it but didn't say it," said Steinberg, now the director of foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution. But Graham's Baghdad-on-the-back-burner beliefs didn't fit into any of the ideological cub­byholes that define the Democratic Party. How do you categorize a senator who was simultaneously as hawkish as Lieberman and as fretful as Dean?

  In mid-January, as he was still mulling the merits of entering the Democratic fray, I dropped by to chat with Graham in his Senate office. "Chat" may be the wrong word, since our conversa­tion turned out to have all the intimacy of a split-screen TV inter­view, owing to Graham's penchant for launching into a monologue, oblivious to any reportorial questions. Part of the distancing was physical: The senator and I were separated by his desk, which was roughly the size of the flight deck on an aircraft carrier. Any second, I expected the president to zoom in for a tail-hook landing.

  When Graham finally paused to exhale, I managed to breath­lessly squeeze in a question about Iraq. In his methodical fash­ion, Graham, who has just ended his ten-year tenure on the Intelligence Committee, ticked off his three dominant fears about the impending war. First, Graham said, there was the danger that Iraq would "use chemical and biological weapons against the attacking troops." Second, there was risk that Saddam would launch "his twenty to twenty-five Scud missiles with chemical and biological warheads against Israel." And, third, the war would prompt Saddam to break his "long history of non-involve­ment with religious fundamentalist groups," creating a 75 per­cent risk (according to intelligence estimates) of a new wave of terrorist attacks against Americans here or abroad.

  Graham spoke in the apocalyptic tone of Cassandra warning of Greeks bearing gifts, but he lacked her uncanny ability to foresee the arrival of the Trojan Horse. Looking back on this January interview, I cannot help recalling the confident fashion in which Graham offered his dire but incorrect predictions about Saddam's intentions to use chemical and biological weapons and his ability to launch Scuds against Israel.

  How much of this history is relevant in choosing a president? Since a president's judgment in the Oval Office ultimately mat­ters far more than his issue stands during the campaign, it can be argued that the conclusions the Democrats derived from ambigu­ous information about Iraq represent some of the best clues avail­able about the mind-set they would bring to the White House. But it is difficult to keep score. For example, does Graham win points for his skepticism about the war or lose them for his seem­ingly credulous acceptance of CIA estimates regarding the Iraqi arsenal?

  As an active candidate, Graham quickly discarded his courtly ways to excoriate Bush with a fury that makes Dean seem like Dale Carnegie. Projecting a sense of personal betrayal, Graham denounced the administration for its "Nixonian stench of secrecy." During a July press conference before an NAACP candi­dates forum, the Florida senator carried the Nixonian parallel to a new extreme: "If the standard of impeachment that the Republi­cans set for Bill Clinton, that a personal, consensual relationship was the basis for impeachment, would not a president who knowingly deceived the American people about something as important as whether to go to war meet the standard of impeach­ment?"

  The last-angry-man tenor of Graham's remarks appeared to be less political posturing than a symbol of the liberation of a long-shot candidate with nothing to lose by speaking his mind. His campaign manager, Paul Johnson, said judiciously, "His vote on the war with Iraq helps with some people and hurts with others. But Johnson laughed when I asked if there was anything scripted about Graham's statements about the president's deceptive state­ments about Iraq. "The whole notion of full disclosure and what did they know and when did they know it—and the whole idea of the Nixonian stench coming out of the White House—those things would have been said regardless," Johnson conceded. "We haven't sat down and plotted it out."

  ******

  A reporter types some lines so often that they become devoid of meaning. Take the phrase "the hawkish Joe Lieberman." Lieberman so personifies Democratic ferocity on national-security issues that it is easy to forget that he once flew with the doves. As a young Yale Law School graduate in New Haven in 1968, he turned against the Vietnam War and backed the presidential can­didacy of Bobby Kennedy. But gradually he moved to the right on foreign policy, though the transformation was almost invisible, since Lieberman was fixated on state politics.

  All that changed when he ran against liberal GOP Senator Lowell Weicker. "In 1987 and early 1988, no one knew what Joe's views were on foreign policy," recalled John Droney, who was then the state party chairman. "He had been quite progressive on social issues and everyone assumed, since he couldn't be that complex, that he'd have progressive views on foreign policy."

  Even after he arrived in the Senate in 1989, Lieberman was pigeon-holed as a Jewish Democrat from Connecticut, a pedigree suggesting that he couldn't be very conservative. That supposi­tion lasted until the Senate Democrat
s began plotting strategy in the fall of 1990 on how to respond to the first President Bush's determination to go to war with Iraq without congressional sanc­tion. With puckish glee, Lieberman recounted a meeting that Majority Leader George Mitchell convened with a dozen Senate Democrats. Lieberman had to leave early, and, as he got up to depart, Mitchell pressed him on his views. "I totally agree with you that this is war, and he should come to Congress for authori­zation," Lieberman replied. "But, George, I want you to know that when he does, I'm going to support him." As Lieberman described it, the response from his fellow Democrats was "one of those mouths-drop-open silences."

  We were (surprise!) riding in a van in New Hampshire, soon after the second Bush declared victory in the second Gulf War. Curious about his transformation into "the hawkish Joe Lieber­man," I had been pressing him on whether there was a triggering event for his rightward ideological migration. Lieberman freely conceded that his hard-edged views on crime were shaped by the breakdown of law and order in New Haven in the 1970s (his house was burglarized twice)—and even laughingly agreed that on this issue he fits the model that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.

  But on military matters, it was not like Lieberman caught Sad­dam with mask and gun carrying his television set out to the getaway car. "I read a lot," Lieberman said, groping for an expla­nation for the sea change in his attitudes. "I was very moved by my heroes like Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill and Harry Truman. Nothing unusual there. But those were all people who believed in strength and in using strength to protect security." Even Lieberman knew that he was being vague, so he tried again by conjuring up another hero: "John Kennedy stood for, in my opin­ion, a real internationalism, but a kind of muscular international­ism."

  That's the thing with Lieberman; you keep running into these blind alleys. Desperate for a shred of specificity, I asked Lieber­man—that Bobby Kennedy backer in '68—whether he was for George McGovern in 1972. It was a relevant question since Lieber­man's supporters at the DLC had been deriding Dean as the sec­ond coming of McGovern. The resulting dialogue with Lieberman was akin to an old-time radio drama in which the hero has amne­sia. "No," he said tentatively, before adding in a puzzled tone, "why can't I answer that question?"

  I suggested that a Freudian might use the word "repression" to explain his forgetfulness about McGovern. "Maybe I didn't get too actively involved that year," Lieberman mused, as he did the dog paddle in the waters of memory. "Who else might I have been for?" Ed Muskie? Hubert Humphrey? Somehow I didn't think that Shirley Chisholm was ever Lieberman's kind of candidate. But none of these names aroused Lieberman out of his coma. "It's weird," he said. "I can't remember."

  ******

  Richard Nixon, McGovern's opponent in that 1972 election, expressed the belief that the country didn't need a president to run domestic policy, since a competent cabinet could handle the job for him. But in foreign policy, Nixon said, a president is indispensable. This was admittedly an extreme view that fit Nixon's Republican sensibilities. But some Democrats veer toward the opposite end of the spectrum. Unlike the other lead­ing Democrats, Iraq-war supporters Gephardt and Edwards con­veyed the impression that foreign policy was something that you had to get through in order to have the freedom to concentrate on domestic issues.

  Maybe I'm becoming as forgetful as Lieberman, but if either Gephardt or Edwards expressed a single original foreign-policy thought during the long run-up to war with Iraq, I can't remem­ber it. This was not to say that they were silent or vague. In early October 2002, Gephardt negotiated with Bush the final wording of the congressional resolution endorsing an invasion—and then, to the consternation of House Democrats, appeared (with Lieber­man) at a White House pep rally in support of passage. Although Edwards, a co-sponsor of the president's resolution, took a far less prominent role in the congressional debate and ducked a last-minute invitation to the White House, he too enlisted early in the on-to-Baghdad brigade.

  Yet in private conversations and during public appearances, I picked up a persistent sense that the first major war of the twenty-first century failed to arouse the passions of either pro-war candidate. Some suspect that Gephardt, who voted against the 1991 Gulf War, had made the calculation that supporting the Iraq war was good politics—and then was chagrined to find him­self on the wrong side of the Democratic fault line. With Edwards, never much of a world traveler before he was elected to the Senate, it was more subtle. After he won a politically useful seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee in early 2001, Edwards was shrewdly advised by Sandy Berger to pay particular atten­tion to terrorism. The North Carolina senator did his homework, convened briefings by experts and developed a veneer of expert­ise. But you get the feeling that with Edwards this is all book learning; his views seem to be based more on borrowed concepts than on real-world experience.

  What was intriguing about both candidates was the dramati­cally different ways they chose to present their pro-war views to skeptical audiences of Democratic activists. Granted, style has an annoying way of trumping substance in political coverage. But in this case, Edwards's and Gephardt's stylistic differences were far more revealing than the intricacies of their foreign-policy deci­sion making.

  The North Carolina senator consistently presented himself as a determined truth teller seeking to win plaudits for his honesty rather than his ideological orientation. If Bill Clinton could denounce Sister Souljah to a black audience in 1992, then Edwards could take on Saddam Hussein in Iowa. You could almost see Edwards calculating: I'm so likable and so nice that I can get away with expressing an unpopular viewpoint as long as no one thinks I'm hiding anything.

  On the eve of the invasion, Edwards faced down angry chants of "No war! No war!" at the California state Democratic conven­tion, declaring, "I have the responsibility to have the backbone to tell you directly what my position is." Speaking to an Iowa forum organized by dovish Senator Tom Harkin in the midst of the war, Edwards didn't mince his words: "I believe in this cause. I believe that we're doing the right thing. I know that there are a lot of you who disagree with that. But I believe it is the right and just thing to do." For Edwards, it all came down to Saddam's pur­ported—and now discredited—nuclear-weapons program. "He believes he is entitled to dominate the Arab world, and his ticket for getting there is not chemical and biological weapons, but nuclear weapons," Edwards said. "He can never, ever be allowed to have a nuclear capacity. It's been my position for a long time. It's still my position, and I stand behind it. Period."

  Gephardt, to the end, clung to the illusion that somehow the U.N. Security Council would saddle up and save America from a go-it-almost-alone war with Iraq. Not since Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations had a Democrat placed so much faith in the international community. On a Saturday in mid-March, just four days before the Iraq war began, Gephardt was in Concord, New Hampshire, pounding the drums and sounding the trumpets on behalf of his signature cause: health care. Leaving a plant store where he had just met with the employees, Gephardt was confronted by two anti-war protesters holding an emotionally potent sign: "Our Son Is a Marine—Don't Send Him to War for Oil." Pressed to explain his pro-war position, Gephardt kept talk­ing about his belief in working through the Security Council. One of the protesters asked, "What if the U.N. says no and George Bush says yes?" With his voice dripping with earnest sincerity, Gephardt replied, "I don't want anybody to go to war."

  An encounter in the parking lot of a garden store in New Hampshire will never be confused with the serene deliberations of the Council on Foreign Relations. But Gephardt repeated that unrealistic proposition, a stance that was belied by every news­paper headline, at a reception that evening at the home of Peter Burling, the Democratic leader of the New Hampshire state house, who later endorsed him. Asked about Iraq, Gephardt expressed a dreamy, otherworldly view of the recalcitrant Secu­rity Council. "Still tonight," Gephardt said, speaking of Bush, "he's trying to get the U.N. lined up. And I hope and pray that he still can. And fo
r those who have given up hope, I urge you to remember that when 1441 [the original Security Council resolu­tion that passed 15-0] was being put together, there was no hope before it got put together."

  Listening to Gephardt advocate peace on the eve of a war that he had voted for, I was reminded of a medieval mathematician trying to square the circle. You knew that the endeavor was sheer logical folly, but you had to reluctantly admire his persistence in trying.

  ******

  The Iraq war became a character test for Howard Dean. He deserves plaudits for his position, which has stood the test of time. But the ungoverned way that the former governor some­times expressed it got him into trouble. As the drums of war reached a crescendo in mid-March, Dean attacked Kerry and Edwards before the left-leaning California Democratic conven­tion for pretending that they were against the war. Kerry could be rightly derided for never uttering the word "Iraq" in his speech, but Edwards, who later received a handwritten note of apology from Dean, unequivocally reiterated his support for the looming invasion.

  Another embarrassing moment came in mid-April, a few days after Baghdad fell, during a debate sponsored by the Children's Defense Fund. At one point, Dean offered this grumpy assess­ment of Saddam's ouster: "We've gotten rid of him. I suppose that's a good thing." Rarely have two innocent-sounding words like "I suppose" revealed so much about a candidate. The com­ment—which Dean later unapologetically defended on Meet the Press—illustrated the downside of the Dean difference: the can­didate's stiff-necked stubbornness.