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

by Walter Shapiro

  That afternoon in Newton, Sharpton had the crowd laughing with glee as he declaimed, "Bush can't even find the weapons of mass destruction that he claimed that he had evidence of. But at least he's being consistent, since I can't find the votes that made him president of the United States." But my mind wandered dur­ing the questioning of the serious candidates (John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and John Edwards), who had reached that level of artistry in which they reflexively responded to any query with an unrelated string of practiced catchphrases. Asked about Bush's education record, for example, Edwards within seconds was talk­ing about the glories of a nation where "the son of a mill worker can run against the son of a president of the United States."

  The mostly gray-haired audience in the high-school gym was dominated by UAW members petrified that the local Maytag plant will close. Trade agreements like NAFTA may be an abstraction to most voters, but here in central Iowa they symbol­ize the ease with which good union jobs can be shifted to Mexico with the stoke of an uncaring executive's pen. No one pandered to the crowd like Kucinich, who vowed that his first act as presi­dent (ha!) would be to repeal NAFTA. I found myself struggling with equal-opportunity guilt over my instinctive avoidance of Kucinich, this short, left-wing vegetarian firebrand with slicked-down black hair.

  Didn't he warrant a brief whirl on my dance card? So I lis­tened as the former failed mayor of Cleveland railed against the iniquities of the Bush administration. "This is not their land," he declared, "this land belongs to you and me. And I can't think of any better way to conclude this than to ask you to send that mes­sage to the Bush administration and all of America as we re­capture who we are." Then, to my gape-jawed horror, Kucinich began singing, "This land is your land, this land is my land..." By the time the off-key Kucinich got to the "Gulf Stream water," I vowed that life was too short to bother probing the essence of this troubadour of political irrelevance.

  Al Sharpton was enough for any political reporter.

  Chapter 9

  In Which the Candidates Define Themselves

  Eli Attie, a young coproducer of The West Wing, looks like every other Hollywood writer as he pulls up in front of the Four Sea­sons Hotel in Los Angeles. Under Attie's arm is the telltale badge of his trade: a sixty-page printout on three-hole script paper held together with fasteners. The industry-savvy hotel parking atten­dant immediately grasps the implications of this sheaf of paper and calls out, "Good luck with your script meeting."

  The early February 2003 script meeting has everything to do with the West Wing (potentially), even if Attie has momentarily put aside his commitment to President Bartlett. Attie, who was Al Gore's chief speechwriter during the 2000 campaign, is about to reenter the real-life world of presidential politics. The TV writer's sixty-page "script" is really a compilation of a Democrat's policy positions and stump speeches—printed out on the only paper used in the fax machines of The West Wing. And the candi­date who will be joining Attie for a drink at the Four Seasons is far more Heartland than Hollywood.

  Dick Gephardt, that straight-arrow Midwesterner whose TV viewing habits revolve around satellite broadcasts of St. Louis Cardinals games, is a man of tribal loyalties. His favorite wordsmith during his long congressional career was Attie, who got his start in politics writing fiery speeches for Gephardt during the combative days when Newt Gingrich and his revolutionary cadre had seized the Capitol. So it should not have been surprising—though it was to Attie—when Gephardt phoned in early January to say, "I'm running for president, and I'd love it if you'd write my announcement speech."

  The announcement speech is the most overt act of self-definition in any presidential campaign. This is the moment when the can­didate first stands in the spotlight to enunciate the themes, the issues and the message designed to carry him to the nomination. Attie understands his responsibility: "There isn't another moment until your convention speech when you're judged on having presidential-level rhetoric." But Gephardt needed something more transcendent than just sonorous words to explain why he is seeking the presidency after failing in four successive congres­sional elections to become Speaker of the House. To a far greater degree than his rivals, Gephardt demands redefinition. He must become something more than that familiar figure from Capitol Hill railing stridently, but vainly, against the GOP legislative agenda. As Steve Elmendorf, his congressional chief of staff, put it back in December, "Gephardt has to come out of the box with a message that is some combination of big and new. He will not be successful if people view him as inside the same congressional box that he was in. If he comes across like that, his opponents are going to paint him as the second coming of Bob Dole."

  But how do you reinvent white bread? Gephardt is never going to be credible masquerading as raisin bread with cinnamon swirls, let alone pretending to be an authentic hand-rolled crois­sant. Sure, you could revamp the packaging, gussy up the label with a fancy logo and emblazon the loaf with a catchphrase: "New and Improved!" But Gephardt's image problems would not be solved with such snappy sales gimmicks. The challenge is to find the words that would present the candidate as the best pos­sible version of Dick Gephardt—words that would remind Democrats why, despite the allure of gourmet bakery products they still crave white bread.

  In his West Wing incarnation, Attie resides in a world where as he describes it, "the music swells as you're making big deci­sions about the fate of the country." Attie is about to help make big decisions about the fate of Dick Gephardt. But there is no orchestral accompaniment, aside from the clinking of ice cubes and the murmur of nearby cell phone conversations, as he sits down with the candidate and LA-based media consultant Bill Carrick. The quick drink turns into a leisurely dinner with an animated Gephardt quizzing his former staffer about the writer's life far from the madding press releases. Only gradually does the topic veer toward the February 19 rollout speech in St. Louis, which Attie has been intermittently working on after a prelimi­nary brunch with Carrick. Some things are obvious: Gephardt's life story has to be organically connected to his quarter century in Washington. The candidate intends to lambaste the Bush record, but in a "holistic way," a favorite Carrick phrase. Gep­hardt wants to stress that government must provide a way for people to succeed on their own—a concept that Attie dubbed the "Fourth Way" in contrast to Bill Clinton's "Third Way" between liberalism and conservatism. The most vigorous debate is over Gephardt's insistence that the speech contain specific policy pro­posals (the Big Ideas that Elmendorf referred to). Attie initially resists but eventually bows to the guiding principle of all suc­cessful political ghostwriters: It's his speech—not yours.

  After the dinner, planned as Attie's only face-to-face meeting with Gephardt, the writer is left blessedly alone to produce the speech. While the drama of the part-time speechwriter hunched over his computer is undoubtedly electrifying, we will reluc­tantly turn our gaze elsewhere—to Carrick, the bearded South Carolinian who was the campaign manager for Gephardt's failed 1988 presidential race. The media consultant quickly put together the ultimate Gephardt home movie, both to assist Attie and to provide grist for the campaign's pollster: just the candi­date in a suit and white shirt sitting in front of an unadorned blue backdrop responding to Carrick's questions. As Carrick explained, "I thought we ought to get Dick on tape just talking about the issues that he wanted to talk about and his own per­sonal involvement in them."

  Instead of the flag-draped razzmatazz of a thirty-second spot, the thirty-minute edited version of that performance offers a side­walk engineer's tour of a presidential campaign as a construction zone. All the raw material is here—Gephardt's steely determina­tion, the political career assembled brick by brick, the concrete policy positions—but it is all stacked around the gaping hole of an unfinished excavation. Some of the building blocks are starkly personal. Gephardt talks in a clipped but emotional tone about his son's brush with death: "1972. Matt was diagnosed with ter­minal cancer. Complete shock to us. We had no idea that there was anything wrong with
him...That was devastating to us." But in politics, autobiographical details must carry a larger mes­sage—so, on the tape, you can hear Carrick gently prodding, "What did you learn from that about the health-care system?" Taking his cue, Gephardt talks about the other, less fortunate, parents he met at the children's cancer center who were strug­gling to pay for chemotherapy without health insurance. "I will never forget the terror in their eyes," he says. "It should not hap­pen to anyone in this country."

  But Gephardt recounted another aspect of his personal story in a manner that redefined the word "soporific." His advisers knew they had to turn his lengthy congressional career into an asset—otherwise, as Carrick believed, "we will have malpracticed." But the candidate's words on the tape cry out for radical surgery. Gephardt may have spent half a lifetime in Congress, but his flat, uninflected description of the experience conjures up Bob Dole without the humor, Lyndon Johnson without the earthiness: "I became Majority Leader in 1989 and Minority Leader in 1995...I learned a tremendous amount from that experience. I learned the issues. I learned what you can pass and what you can't pass. I learned a tremendous amount about foreign policy."

  Gephardt's advisers were vexed by another section of the tape. It comes when the candidate, with his hand over his heart, tries to crystallize the unifying theme of his campaign. "My philoso­phy is that we're inter-dependent, tied together, and we've got to help everybody succeed so we can all succeed," he says. "The Republicans think we're all separate and you've got to take care of yourself. I don't believe that." Carrick stage whispers, "The Martin Luther King quote." Like a veteran actor responding to his prompter, Gephardt obligingly recites, "As Martin Luther King once said, 'I can't be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.'"

  For a presidential candidate to be what he ought to be, he, of course, requires a pollster. Enter Ed Reilly, Gephardt's 1988 poll­ster, who had been working primarily for corporate clients in New York. To test-market the themes of the announcement speech, Reilly took the Carrick tape, chopped it into bite-sized segments and showed it to ten focus groups in Iowa, New Hamp­shire and South Carolina. Like the rest of Team Gephardt, Reilly had a hidden agenda: to convince the candidate to get rid of what Carrick called "this inter-connectedness shit." Gephardt had been using the "we are all tied together" passage to end his stump speeches and now wanted to give it a starring role in the rollout address. As Reilly explained, "In any campaign, you have that list of bad ideas that come up from the candidate, his spouse, his family, the fund-raisers. It's not worth the pain to blow these ideas out of the water yourself. You let the focus groups do that."

  Beth Campbell, the New Hampshire SEIU official, once again played her Zelig-like role in presidential politics. When Camp­bell heard that union members were needed for an unspecified political focus group, Campbell eagerly volunteered even before she learned that the session would pay $75. The eight-person mid-February group grope in Londonderry began with a general discussion of leadership before the facilitator asked for initial impressions of Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Dean and, yes, Gephardt. Then Campbell and Company watched the Gephardt tape in three-minute chunks as the moderator paused after each snippet to ask the group to discuss what they had just seen and to rate it on a 1 to 5 scale. One segment, in particular, triggered an enthusiastic response: Gephardt talking about inter-connected­ness. The group's final exercise was to draw a picture of Gephardt. Campbell sketched the candidate with a union insignia on his shirt and an arrow pointing to his face with the legend "No eyebrows."

  So much for research. Campbell's focus group was not an aber­ration: Gephardt's homily about inter-connectedness scored well everywhere. A rueful Carrick admitted, "All of us cynical guys were wrong. That was all Dick. Shame on us that we missed it." Before the St. Louis speech, Reilly also conducted a national poll for Gephardt. "It was just a temperature check," Reilly explained. "I used the poll to see if you didn't have a false positive or a false negative." Attie, however, was sheltered from the hurly-burly of polls and focus groups as he worked on the speech draft. Carrick sent him the Gephardt tape, which the speechwriter mined for the section on the family. Attie, for example, lifted virtually ver­batim the candidate's description of the financial plight of one of his two daughters, Kate, an underpaid teacher. But Attie, who had written about Matt's cancer before, neglected to use Gephardt's description of "the terror in the eyes" of the parents without health insurance in the speech text he submitted on Feb­ruary 13, just six days before it was scheduled to be delivered. Carrick, in a rare intrusion, pointed out that the missing line had the imprimatur of the focus groups. Attie obligingly wove it into the fabric of the speech.

  ******

  Dick Gephardt had practiced the speech with a TelePrompTer three times: in snowbound Washington over the weekend and in St. Louis on the morning of February 19. But moments before he would stride onto the flag-draped podium erected in the packed gymnasium of his old elementary school, the candidate was over­come by emotion. Gephardt could not bear to watch the speaker who was introducing him: "If every voter would know him as I do, we'd win in a landslide." It was his son Matt, now married and living in Atlanta. So many memories revolve around Matt the child who was special to Gephardt in so many ways that he cannot articulate. It was not just cancer. It was also the long years that Gephardt and his wife, Jane, worried that Matt would be psychologically damaged by his childhood ordeal. Gephardt also carried the burden of his mortally ill mother, Loreen, about to turn ninety-five and enfeebled by a heart ailment and afflicted with lung cancer. She was here to watch a kickoff of her son's campaign—but would not live to see its win-or-lose conclusion. But such tearful ruminations had to wait. As Matt concluded, "Ladies and gentlemen, my father, Congressman Richard Gephardt," the grinning and waving candidate, with Jane by his side, entered his childhood gym for his Big Moment.

  The speech started slowly with memories of Mason Elemen­tary School before Gephardt hit his trademark autobiographical riff: "My dad was a milk-truck driver, a proud member of the Teamsters...My mother was a secretary. Neither of my parents finished high school. They didn't have much money." Then an initial quick flick at his focus-grouped theme song, as Gephardt said, "We're all bound together. We're all members of the Ameri­can family." Gephardt gathered energy as he moved into his familiar role of partisan battler decrying the Bush economic record. The lines were good: "I believe in what you might call trickle-up economics," a trope that Attie had lifted from a 1995 speech that he wrote for Gephardt. Radiating union-hall passion, the candidate declared, "I'm running for president because I've had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok in the White House."

  It was not the second coming of William Jennings Bryan—an I-can't-believe-I've-misjudged-Dick-Gephardt speech that vaulted him into the Democratic pantheon. But it was good, very good, right at the outer limits of what Gephardt could ever hope to achieve. Gephardt told Matt's story, this time describing one set of parents without health insurance and how he would never "forget the terror in their eyes." He used Matt as a bridge to intro­duce his road map to reach the Democratic version of the Holy Grail: a bold and expensive tax-credit proposal to provide health insurance for all workers. Gephardt went on to launch the other arrows in his quiver of policy proposals from portable pensions (yawn) to a global minimum wage (it tested well in focus groups). Finally he was back at the Martin Luther King quote and how "we're all bound together. If a child doesn't have health insurance, we pay the price when she shows up at the emer­gency room. If a child drops out of school and joins a gang, or goes on welfare, we all pay the price of violence, dependence and indulgence."

  In this throng of longtime supporters standing ovations came cheaply, since there were no chairs. After forty minutes, as his audience began rocking back and forth to ease leg strain, Gephardt still hadn't discussed his congressional career or directly con­fronted his shopworn, creature-of-Capitol-Hill image. Then it came wi
th a rush—and instead of prattle about the "tremendous amount" that he had learned, there was Attie's speechwriting artistry. "I'm not going to say what's fashionable in politics," Gephardt said, raising hopes of surprises ahead. "That I'm a Washington outsider, that I couldn't find the nation's capital on a map, that I have no experience in the highest levels of govern­ment." After a one-sentence nod to experience, Gephardt reached the Promised Land—the passage that would define his candidacy. "I'm not the political flavor of the month," he said. "I'm not the flashiest candidate around. But the fight for working families is in my bones. It's where I come from. It's been my life's work."

  ******

  During the first months of 2003, the Democratic contest was not yet the horse race it would later become with the consultants and the handlers spurring their mounts toward the finish line. What this early phase resembled more than anything was an old-time vaudeville circuit with the candidates playing the same houses in places like Manchester and Des Moines, but on different nights. After these tours of "the sticks," the presidential con­tenders would be summoned back to Washington for a joint appearance, the equivalent of playing the Palace for impresario E. F. Albee and all the leading critics. The NARAL convention in late January—a command performance that underscored the sway of abortion-rights activists over the Democratic Party—was the first time that the entire presidential field (then a manageable six-pack) shared the same stage. After NARAL came another big event: the two-day convocation in late February of the Demo­cratic National Committee. These 443 automatic "superdelegates" to the 2004 convention heard speeches from every member of the presidential field (now a full nine-man baseball team of ambition), save for the recuperating John Kerry (prostate cancer) and Bob Graham (heart surgery).