Campaign Journal - Ryan Lizzi - NRO Blog
KERRY ON: Des Moines, Iowa to Manchester, New Hampshire
Howard Dean is on the line. "Governor?" asks John Kerry's body man Marvin Nicholson, holding a silver flip phone up to his ear and flashing a giant, toothy grin to me and half a dozen Kerry supporters riding an elevator up to the eleventh floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines. It's about 8:50 p.m. last night, and Howard Dean is calling John Kerry to concede. He has to wait a little longer. "I'll have the senator on the phone in two minutes," Marvin says politely. He exits the elevator, and walks down the hall to suite 1014, where Kerry is sitting with his family. "Senator, Governor Dean is on the phone."
"Thank you very much," says Kerry, taking the phone. He walks into the bedroom alone, and closes the door behind him.
I don't know what Kerry said to his year-long bête noire, but the word that kept popping into my mind as I traveled with Kerry on his final stops in Iowa before the caucuses was vindication. In the late afternoon in Ames, he spoke standing on a chair in a crowded high school basement. His brother Cam, a longtime adviser who has been at Kerry's side in every campaign since Kerry's failed 1972 congressional race and who ran Kerry's campaign for lieutenant governor, stood a few feet away, beaming. He has watched his brother come back from the dead more than once. Two nights earlier Cam could be found practically quoting verbatim from the political obituaries written about Kerry over the last six months. He seemed vindicated. On Monday, Kerry even beat Dean in the former governor's strongest of strongholds: "We carried all the college precincts," Cam told me in the wee hours after Kerry's victory. "Iowa City, Drake, Grinnell, Ames."
In Ames, a few feet away was Jim Rassmann, a man whose life Kerry had saved in Vietnam and who started traveling with the senator in the final days of the campaign here, testifying to the hordes of Iowans still searching for a candidate that when Kerry "looks into your eyes, you're going to see a man of character." Rassmann was straight out of central casting, a Republican from Oregon who hadn't seen Kerry since 1969. He contacted the campaign on a lark and was flown to Iowa within 24 hours. "I'm going to go home to Oregon and change my registration," he declared. It was the perfect complement to the Kerry campaign's effort to organize for the first time some 10,000 Iowa veterans. Rival campaigns mocked the idea that veterans would vote as some kind of unified block. The press laughed at Kerry's endless invocation of 'Nam.
Up on his chair Kerry was talking about special interests. "If you look around the country today, people are hurting," he said. "This thing is rigged against them because [of] powerful moneyed interests. ... Powerful political interests walk into the White House and have secret meetings with the president." This is of course the signature--and much derided--message of Bob Shrum, the Kerry media adviser who came to be associated with the autumn turbulence in the campaign. The evening before, Shrum could be found sitting around a table at the downtown Des Moines restaurant Forty-three, with Kerry, Teresa Heinz, speechwriter Andrei Cherny, and a few other aides. They were drafting Kerry's victory speech. On the 3 a.m. flight from Des Moines to Manchester, Shrum seemed to feel, well, vindicated. He's been distant from the press for the last year, but he bounced through the aisle of "Real Deal One" and plunked himself down in the middle of the press section. "Do I feel good?" he said. "I feel really good. I started telling people two weeks ago, but nobody believed me."
In his final words before his final Iowa crowd before the caucuses Monday, Kerry implored, "Go to your caucuses tonight and don't just send them a message, send them a President of the United States, so we can say, 'Mission accomplished!'" His eyes were a little moist. "I think this was really emotional for him," said an aide after the event.
From Ames he traveled on to Urbandale High School outside Des Moines to greet caucus-goers. As he entered the building he ran into a chaotic scene. Several caucuses were about to commence throughout the building and Iowans were swarming around searching for their meetings. "Where are the undecideds?" he asked, stepping inside from the cold. Again, according to the pros, this was folly. As Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi told me earlier in the week, "Undecideds don't break here. Every year. Does anybody go back and look at results before they cover the state? They never break! Never! There's like no year in which they ever broke. They walk in, they vote undecided." But minutes before the caucuses began, Kerry was still scrounging for votes. "How do I get you over the edge here?" he asked one woman. "That's what I came to do." Trippi was spectacularly wrong. Undecideds broke. As Kerry looped around the school cafeteria, he spotted a Boston reporter who has covered him for 30 years. "A week ago, you were saying I was going to take third," he taunted.
As Kerry returned to Des Moines, I stuck around to watch a caucus at Urbandale High. My caucus happened to be close to representative of the state as a whole. After the attendees broke into their presidential preference groups, the numbers looked like this: 40 people for Kerry, 44 for Edwards, 26 for Dean, and 9 for Gephardt. When the caucus chair announced that the forlorn Gephardt supporters standing against a wall were no longer viable, the Kerry and Edwards precinct captains descended upon them like wild dogs on road-kill carcasses. A Kerry candidacy, said Corey Goerdt, the 18-year-old Edwards captain who signed up with Edwards four days before, "is not going to work in the South." And in case he needed to make the case against Dean, he was also prepared. A thick caucus field manual issued by the Edwards campaign contained detailed persuasion scripts. On the outside was the Edwards campaign logo and the words "privileged and confidential." Goerdt let me flip through it. The way to contrast Edwards with Dean, it said, is to compare Dean's biography with Edwards' son-of-a-mill-worker upbringing. "Howard Dean is a Park Avenue elitist," it advised Edwards supporters to say. But Goerdt didn't need to use the line. By the time the Dean captain figured out he was supposed to be strengthening his numbers by picking off the undecideds and the Gephardt people, the Edwards and Kerry teams had already divvied them up between themselves. Final score: Kerry 53, Edwards 51, Dean 26. Lisa Mullin, over in the Dean group was surprised. "I thought we would have more," she said. "We had a ton of undecideds in our door-knocking."
Later, at the Kerry victory party, giddy aides were stunned at how over-hyped and amateurish the Dean ground game was. "The Dean people were on the corner of the street in downtown Des Moines waving signs," one woman laughed into her cell phone. "They had no sense of organization." The Dean campaign called it the "perfect storm," which produced chuckles from Holly Armstrong, a Kerry organizer. "I kept telling everybody," she said, "in The Perfect Storm everybody dies at the end." Vindication.
A few hours later, in the dead of night, aboard Real Deal One, a buoyant John Kerry takes a victory lap through the cabin, greeting reporters. Shrum calls out, "You know you just passed Clark in the ARG poll?" Kerry says softly, "Well, I'll take it." |
