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Fits and Starts
Newsweek
Late-night comics liked to joke that Kerry had married Teresa for her money to pay for his presidential race. (Jay Leno: "[Kerry] once raised $500 million with two words: 'I do'.") But, in fact, Kerry had signed a prenuptial agreement that kept almost all of Teresa's fortune (inherited from her first husband, the Heinz ketchup heir) in her hands. Under the campaign-finance laws, Teresa could give the Kerry campaign no more than any other donor—$2,000. True, the system is full of loopholes. Teresa could have found a legal dodge to use her vast fortune to help Kerry—she could have established some kind of trust in his name—and, indeed, she had vowed to spend her money if Kerry's opponents tried to destroy his character. But the "optics" of such a move, as the media consultants liked to say, would be terrible. It would vindicate all those late-night jokes about Kerry as a kept man.
Kerry would have to find some other way to raise the money to pay for his campaign. He had been virtually broke when he married Teresa. He was confined by the campaign-finance laws, which matched what a candidate could raise by private sources up to $18.7 million, but put a cap on spending in each primary state ($729,000 for New Hampshire, $1.3 million for Iowa).
Kerry had been a strong supporter of campaign-finance reform, but like any presidential hopeful, he envied George W. Bush—who, as a candidate in 2000, had raised so much money he didn't need matching funds from the Feds. A candidate could opt out of the campaign-finance system—"bust the caps," in campaign jargon. With his Internet money machine, Howard Dean was on track to raise more than $50 million before the first primary, and in November he decided to abandon the federal campaign-finance system so he could spend it all. On Nov. 6 and 7 he held a laughable Internet "plebiscite" to get permission from his faithful Deaniacs (most of whom were pro campaign-finance reform but were willing to put aside their scruples to win).
Jordan had been trying to conserve Kerry's money so that there would be enough left to buy ads after the primaries began. Shrum was agitating to spend more money on TV advertising, and he wanted to bust the caps. Shrum's partner, Tad Devine, put it to Kerry. Devine, a seasoned political hand who had effectively run the Gore campaign in 2000, was known for being willing to speak truth to power. In late October, Devine told Kerry: get out of the campaign-finance limits or get out of the race.
Kerry seemed to be "hand-wringing and dithering," said Jordan. "John's not an instinctive politician. He doesn't understand the rhythms of a campaign. He's a very gifted man in ways that are more analogous to being a good president than a goodcampaigner."
In fact, Kerry was following a familiar path on the campaign trail. A lackluster beginning—and, just as it seemed to be almost too late, a hard charge for the finish line. On Saturday, Nov. 8, he summoned Jordan to Boston and fired him. Kerry started by flattering Jordan, but then he insisted that Jordan resign and tell people it was his idea. Jordan refused, and the frustrations bubbled up. ("We did plenty of screaming at each other, and toward the end the 'f--- yous' got kind of loud," said Jordan.) The same day, Kerry opted out of federal financing and began the arduous business of trying to raise tens of millions of dollars and to resuscitate a campaign that was widely regarded as doomed.
First came some discipline. Ted Kennedy's no-nonsense chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, took over as campaign manager. (She had been watching the campaign, she said, with a "horrified fascination.") Cahill, white-haired and matronly in a steely sort of way, shut off the back channels to Kerry by turning off his cell phone and letting it be known, like a nun rapping knuckles, that she would not tolerate any more petty bickering.
Then came a marked improvement in the candidate. Kerry's speechwriter, Andrei Cherny, had been trying to think of a way to convey that Kerry was ready to go toe to toe with President Bush on national security, the Democrats' weakest front. The expression "Bring it on" popped into his head. He wrote the line into a Kerry speech to be delivered to the Democratic National Committee in October, but Shrum crossed it out. "Bush-type bravado," he sneered—too undignified for Kerry.
But with the press reporting his campaign in meltdown, Kerry needed to do something to change his soporific style, and at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines on Nov. 15, he used Cherny's "Bring it on" line. The crowd loved it. (Kerry later apologized to Cherny for not using the line earlier. "I was wrong," he said. But a few weeks later Cherny was purged by Shrum as a Jordan holdover whose punchy style did not suit the candidate.)
Strong, crisp—and presidential—Kerry was a hit at the JJ dinner, an important annual rite and showplace for the candidates. Kerry's campaign packed the crowd with supporters chanting "Real deal," Kerry's latest slogan (the real deal: that is, a candidate who could win in November, unlike Dean). It was a sign, if anyone had been looking, that Kerry should not be counted out. There were other omens that the race was far from over. Before the dinner, a curious event took place. The Dean campaign, eager to show off its vast army of Deaniacs, took reporters out on the skywalk in downtown Des Moines to watch 40-plus yellow schoolbuses rumble into town—shock troops in the Dean onslaught to get out the vote for the January Iowa caucuses, the first electoral test on the road to the nomination. One of the reporters noticed something odd. "Is it just me, or are they empty?" asked Liz Marlantes of The Christian Science Monitor. The other reporters tried to peer through the tinted-glass windows. All they could see was row after row of empty seats.
But in New Hampshire, Dean's polls continued to soar, while Kerry's remained flat. The press had already begun to look for someone else to play the role of spoiler to Dean, maybe Gen. Wesley Clark, who had entered the race late (in September), stumbled about as a campaign neophyte, but still held allure for Democrats paranoid about their own perceived weakness on national security. The capture of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 made Democrats despondent. Iraq was looking like a worthy cause after all; the violence seemed to be abating there. Bush looked invincible. Actually, Saddam's capture was good news for Kerry: it helped remind Democrats that in the end the nominee had to be electable, and that Dean was too far to the left and Clark was unready for the national political stage.
All this would become clear—in perfect hindsight. On Dec. 9 Al Gore showed the political fingertips that lost him the 2000 election. He endorsed Howard Dean, probably at the precise moment when Dean had peaked and was about to head down. Gore's endorsement came as a blow to Kerry, who had thought Gore was his friend, or at least his political ally. When the Kerry camp heard the rumors that Gore was endorsing Kerry's opponent, Kerry tried to call the former veep to find out if it could be true. Kerry had Gore's cell-phone number and called him. "This is John Kerry," he said when Gore answered. The phone went dead. Kerry tried to call several more times and never got through. He was hurt. "I endorsed him early. I was up for consideration as his running mate," he complained to an aide.
Kerry's revival was underway, slowly—imperceptibly to the press and the political establishment. Back in September he had made the brave—and difficult—decision to bet most of his resources on Iowa, not New Hampshire. Kerry had been expected to do well in his neighboring state, but he was getting drubbed by Vermonter Dean. (One poll showed Dean at 45 percent in the Granite State, Kerry at 10 percent; nationally, Kerry was about even with Al Sharpton.) He needed to do something to change the dynamic. He needed to win somewhere else.
Polling for the Iowa caucuses is notoriously difficult: it is hard to measure whether people will actually show up in the middle of January to spend two or three hours to cast their votes. But Kerry's pollster, Mark Mellman, had begun to notice that on a comparative basis, Kerry was doing better versus Dean in Iowa than in New Hampshire. The only way to come back in New Hampshire, he reasoned, was to create a slingshot effect, to pick up enough momentum in the Iowa caucuses to convince New Hampshire voters, who went to the polls a week later, that Kerry was the only electable candidate. "Iowa is the key to New Hampshire," Mellman told the Kerry team.
That meant shifting the campaign's limited resources to Iowa—in effect, to bet it all on the quirky Iowa caucuses. There was really no choice, argued Mellman. "There are two things we could do in New Hampshire," he argued at a strategy meeting in September. "One, we could save a drowning child in the Merrimack River [which runs through southern New Hampshire]. Second, we could have him [Kerry] do well in Iowa. The second is easier to arrange."
Kerry was persuaded, but barely, and by December he was having second thoughts. Losing New Hampshire would be a painful humiliation for him. "We need to be in New Hampshire," he would say. He was gambling more than his name. He had taken a $6 million mortgage on the house in Boston to bring some desperately needed cash into the campaign. (Under the prenup, Kerry had part ownership in one of Teresa's five houses.) His brother, Cam, worried that Kerry was betting his daughters' inheritance in a game he could not win. In early January, Kerry's best friend from school days and his former brother-in-law, David Thorne, called Shrum and asked if Kerry really had a chance of winning. "If it looks hopeless," said Thorne, "let's talk about it so he can stop spending his own money."
Shrum knew it wasn't hopeless because he knew Kerry. He understood that at just such moments Kerry had a way of rallying, of rising to the challenge, of even enjoying the sensation of risk and trying to control the uncontrollable. The staid, buttoned-up Kerry concealed a more passionate, audacious side. Shrum, a romantic, had been drawn to the Kennedys as a young theology student/law graduate turned politico. Kerry was not JFK—Kerry's own idol as a teen—but the similarities were more than superficial. Both JFKs liked fine and stylish people and things, thought deeply about history and the world—and were not afraid of risk.
Kerry does not like the daredevil label. He emphatically rejected it in an interview with NEWSWEEK, saying that he avoided really dangerous sports (he mentioned bungee jumping) and was always in control when he took on scary-seeming physical challenges, like kite boarding (a kind of airborne windsurfing). But control is a relative thing, and Kerry clearly likes to look for the edge. For instance, he said he performed aerial stunts only in a plane above 5,000 feet, so that if something went wrong, he'd have time to parachute.
Before Christmas, Shrum drove back to Boston from New Hampshire with John and Teresa and stayed at the house on Louisburg Square, the one Kerry had mortgaged, an elegant brick mansion in the old Brahmin quarter of Beacon Hill. It was snowy outside, and the old friends opened a bottle of wine and began reminiscing. They recalled an earlier crisis, in the fall of 1996, when Kerry had been faltering in his Senate re-election race against Governor Weld. Kerry had invited Shrum to dinner and asked him to take over the campaign. He had shoved a poll across the table and said, "We're behind in 14 of the 15 internals"—the important polling benchmarks on questions like "Who do you trust more?" and "Who is a better leader?"
With Shrum's help, Kerry had rallied in the '96 Senate race, as he always had, and beaten Weld cleanly. "I've been in tougher situations than this before," Kerry said that snowy evening, as he, Teresa and Shrum sat around sipping their good wine in front of the fire. Shrum knew that Kerry was thinking about Vietnam. "When he's in a tough situation, he thinks at least they're not shooting bullets," says Shrum.
Shrum had taken some more tangible comfort from his friend the pollster Stan Greenberg, who believed that the voters of Iowa would inevitably take a second look and ask: Who is presidential? Who can take on Bush? Kerry needed to be there, front and center, because the answer would not be Howard Dean.
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