The Life of the Party
Democratic Activist Keeps Campaigns -- and Process -- Alive
By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 26, 2003; Page A01
First in a series of occasional articles
DUBUQUE, Iowa -- Teri Hawks Goodmann lives at the bottom of a cul-de-sac street on the southern bluff of a river city that cannot be reached by interstate, yet she never has trouble getting people to her door.
Another crowd filled her living room a few nights ago. Agnese Hays showed up with loaves of banana bread. Mary Lee Hostert came in from the cold with her chocolate marshmallow dessert. Young Jake Braun carried the freshest reports from campaign headquarters down at First and Locust. Sister Mary Ellen Caldwell brought her latest ideas on how to pull young people up from cynicism. And Teresa Heinz Kerry, who had traveled the farthest, arrived to deliver an extemporaneous riff about war and peace and the presidential prospects of her husband.
That the guests were there to see the rich and colorful wife of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) is obvious, but perhaps not as important as the fact that they saw her at Teri Goodmann's house.
At age 50, Goodmann is a political phenomenon. She has never run for public office and has never attended a national party convention. She is not on the Democratic National Committee's lists of big money donors and, as she readily confesses, her favorites for the Democratic nomination rarely make it all the way. Her choices don't even carry great weight close to home.
One of her four children, Eddie, a freshman at Loyola of Chicago, is all for Howard Dean, and her husband, John, a well-known insurance man in town, has told her he will stand for Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) on caucus night, though he finally relented last week to promise Teri that he would go for Kerry if Edwards's cause seemed hopeless in their precinct. The neighbors next door, after asking Kerry pointedly when they saw him at Goodmann's house this fall, how he thought a liberal from the Northeast could possibly win the presidency, nonetheless decided to go with Dean, another liberal Northeasterner.
Yet Teri Goodmann is inarguably one of the essential political figures in the earnestly political city of Dubuque. If the Kerry campaign is faltering nationally, torn by internal disputes and shaken by the unanticipated rise of Dean, it remains fortunate to have Goodmann still working away at the grass-roots level, head down, not so much oblivious to the larger difficulties as determined not to give in. At her house the other night, after the speech by the candidate's wife, and after the capture of Saddam Hussein in his spider hole, she reminded her troops that the campaign could shift again, that a transformative event could hurt Dean or help Kerry, and their job was to be ready if that happened.
Goodmann and people like her cannot win a campaign for a struggling candidate, but they can make it possible for him to stay alive. She is the one person every campaign wants, a civic dynamo who knows everyone, respects the process, thrives on the tedious tasks of organizing and has participated in every presidential caucus since 1976. She is the embodiment of the old Tip O'Neill line that all politics is local, though she prefers to say that all politics is personal.
There are several ways of looking at Iowa's caucuses, where the presidential winnowing begins every four years. The most obvious way is to focus on the positioning of the Democratic candidates; what seems to be the neck-and-neck race for first place between Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), the neighbor with labor, and Dean, the Web-rousing peace doctor, with Kerry in third and hoping for a surprise showing.
Another way is to focus on the oddity of the process. Here is a contest that does not use secret ballots; that allows the participation only of registered Democrats or Republicans, not independents (referred to with disdain by Iowa activists as "No Party People"); that requires citizens to leave home on a cold winter night and publicly declare a preference by literally standing for their candidate; and that involves hours of hanging around a school gymnasium or church cafeteria while people in the know finagle and horse-trade and calculate the arcane mathematics of assigning delegates.
From either of these angles, the question can be asked: to what end? With the notable exception of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter's decisive northern march through the state in 1976, the year that made the Iowa event famous, the caucuses rarely have been reliable predictors of winners. If they were, the roster of White House residents also might include presidents Gephardt and Dole. The possibility of repeating the Carter phenomenon lures many candidates here still, yet the uneven history has allowed others -- this time Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark -- to dismiss Iowa as unrepresentative and pull their campaigns from the state.
But a season spent watching the 2004 election from Dubuque -- as this series will do -- brings a wholly different perspective. The means are not simply arcane rules that must be followed on caucus night, and the ends should not be defined only by winners and losers. The revelation of the caucus process here is the city itself and its citizens, people like Teri Goodmann and her family, friends and neighbors -- liberals, moderates or conservatives drawn to politics not for power, money or fame but because they thoroughly enjoy it and think it is important. Their embrace of politics at the ground level, far from the often cynical hum of Washington and New York, serves as a continuous lesson in the basic grace of American democracy.
A Natural Leveling Process
Long ago, when Harold Ross, the founding editor of the New Yorker, described his magazine, he underscored its eastern sophistication by saying it would not be edited for "the little old lady in Dubuque." There are old ladies here who read the magazine, even if it isn't edited for them. And there are political junkies here who know the difference between Stephanopoulos and Russert. But they hold more dearly to the evocative little things that they have seen first-hand. There is no call for pretense in Dubuque, where midwestern informality and a seminal place in the election process create a natural leveling influence.
This is where Gephardt arrives at the front steps of the Goodmann home at the cul-de-sac of Tomahawk Drive, finds his place on a living room couch, the sun setting through a picture window behind him, and patiently details his national health insurance plan to Teri's husband and college-age son, hoping that in the process he might recruit the real family prize, Teri. This is where a retired John Deere clerk, Bob Clark, wearing his black-and-yellow Iowa Hawkeyes cap, turns to Lieberman in the back patio of a meat inspector's house on Delhi Street (a few weeks before Lieberman pulled out of Iowa), and says, matter-of-factly, as though he were shooting the bull with his pals at Breezy's Café, "Well, Joe, you know this Iraq thing, Joe. We don't need to use taxpayer money, Joe."
And it is where all the candidates eventually have to negotiate a cadre of caucus-going antiwar nuns at the mother house of the Sisters of St. Francis, including a feisty Sister Dorothy Hennessey, 90, who served six months in jail for an act of civil disobedience at Fort Benning, Ga., and wants to know if anyone besides Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) is as committed to peace as she is.
A city of 57,686 that rises from the river flats up and over seven hills, Dubuque is by no means a microcosm of anything larger. There are too few minorities; less than 2 percent African American and a small if growing Latino population. But the city has a singular geocultural and civic definition that makes it more than just another aging Middle American town surrounded by shopping malls and fast-food corridors.
Lock and Dam No. 11, built during the New Deal, guards the wide Mississippi to the north, below the cliffs of Eagle Point, and bridges span eastward to Wisconsin and Illinois, whose borders touch on the other side, but all roads decidedly do not lead to Dubuque. There is no interstate highway, and for decades the place felt so isolated from the rest of Iowa, politically and economically, that it became known as "the State of Dubuque." Even today, some Dubuquers claim more affinity for Minneapolis and New Orleans, up and down the river, than for Des Moines or Iowa City.
Dubuque is by heritage a Catholic town, largely Irish and German, with two Catholic colleges, seven religious orders, its own "Little Dublin" and jokes about mixed marriages when Duggan weds Rhomberg. There is about the place a feel of salt-of-the-earth labor, though the meatpacking plant known colloquially as "the Pack," is several years gone, and the John Deere plant is a skeletal remnant of its former muscular self. Behind the brick-and-furnace façade of the old city, a refashioned economy is rising, built on insurance and tourism, with casino gambling and a world-class river-themed aquarium. Still and always, Labor Day is honored as a holy day, and citizens crowd the sidewalks to watch carpenters, electricians, plumbers, autoworkers, union-label cement trucks, antique McCormick Farmall tractors and 24-wheelers rumble majestically down Main Street.
A Passion for Politics
Its colorful labor history, the Catholic flavor, the recent economic transformation, the connection to the Mississippi River, the irrepressible intensity of its caucus politics -- many of the essential characteristics of Dubuque are captured in the single personality of Teri Hawks Goodmann. With her frizzy black hair and frenzied schedule, she is not so much a Type A personality as Type A to Z, constitutionally incapable of doing fewer than four things at once. Over the last month, she has been promoting a referendum for a new minor league baseball stadium in Dubuque, raising money for the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium -- where she serves as development director -- running her family and maintaining her intense involvement in presidential politics.
"This lady can get you anywhere you need to go," said Dubuque's mayor, Terry Duggan, a real estate executive and conservative Democrat (leaning to Bush in 2004), who grew up in the "Little Dublin" neighborhood and was a childhood pal of Teri's husband. Duggan and others say it was Goodmann's will and energy, along with her personal relationships with Washington officials, that helped create the aquarium, the symbol of the city's recovery.
Although she has come to represent Dubuque's refashioned tourist economy, Goodmann's political passions reflect her roots in labor and progressive politics. Her maternal grandmother, Monica Vorwald, worked at a mitten factory and belonged to Local 349 of the Branch of Trade Gloves, and her grandfather, Elmer Vorwald, helped build Lock and Dam No. 11 and later became an active member of the International Association of Machinists. His yellowed union card, with its "dues paid" stamp, is among his granddaughter's prized keepsakes. Goodmann's interest in the political world beyond Iowa was stirred by a nun from the Blessed Virgin Mary order who taught her in eighth grade. Sister Mary Agnes Paul had a way of compelling students to confront larger themes. She assigned them to write pen-pal letters to soldiers in Vietnam, connecting them personally to the distant war.
Her introduction to the Iowa caucuses came at their most famous point, in the fall of 1975, when she was a 21-year-old senior at Clarke College, a Catholic women's school up on one of Dubuque's seven hills. Rob Resnick and Bobby Isaacson, two confident organizers on leave from Cornell, wandered into the student cafeteria during the lunch hour. They said that they were members of the "Peanut Brigade" and were there to recruit "warm bodies" for the caucuses for Carter, the Georgia peanut farmer.
As student body president, Teri was, figuratively, the warmest body. She was leaning toward Rep. Morris Udall (Ariz.), but was won over to Carter by the energy and persuasiveness of Resnick and Isaacson. They taught her how to go door to door, room to room; how to set goals; how to meet targets and round up enough people to go to Wahlert High on caucus night. And they reinforced a deeper lesson. "All of life is personal relationships," she would say later, explaining the political philosophy she carried from then on.
In the decade after the Carter campaign, as she married and began her family, Goodmann incrementally developed her own personal political network through the local Democratic Party. She ran voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote campaigns, and often visited high schools to talk to students about democracy and the two-party system. It was, in fact, more than a political network. Of the people she met along the way, she said, "They shared recipes, and the stories of their lives. They provided support and encouragement when John and I had our babies. . . . We were joined by shared values. . . . It is closer than family to belong to this group."
On New Year's Day 1986, Goodmann received her first telephone call from a man who wanted to be president, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.). After meeting Biden at the Coach House, a roadside supper club that served as the old-line Democratic hangout in Dubuque, Goodmann agreed to join his Iowa steering committee. Biden dropped out before the caucuses, but all of life is personal relationships, and by then Goodmann and her husband and children had developed a friendship with Biden and his family.
Out of respect for Biden, who thought about running again this time, Goodmann remained neutral until midsummer when he called her at home and said, "Teri, I wanted to tell you I won't be a candidate for president this year." He sounded disappointed, she thought, and she was disappointed, too. But by then she had become immersed in the other candidates. She had hosted a brunch for Kerry that drew more than 150 people to her home on Tomahawk Drive. She invited Gephardt to stop by one evening, and let him make his pitch. She helped set up a visit to Dubuque by Edwards's wife, Elizabeth. She went with her kids to see Dean. She became friendly with Kucinich's local organizer. And she and her family and friends took part in an endless conversation about the issues and backgrounds of the candidates, weighing their pluses and minuses, which she said is "pretty much a state pastime in Iowa."
Most of the labor people in town, men such as Looper Lynch and Dave Baker of the Teamsters local and Mel Maas of the food workers, blue-collar guys who revered Grandfather Vorwald, were going with Gephardt. John Goodmann was interested in Gephardt, but was drawn to Edwards, whose Iowa campaign was being run by his closest childhood friend, Rob Tully. Mike Connolly, the state senator from Dubuque, who came up through the teachers' union and runs the caucus at the Lifetime Center for Seniors in the Sixth Precinct, had supported Gephardt in 1988 and still agreed with him philosophically, but dreaded his call for support this time. When it came, Connolly found himself saying, "Dick, you're a great man, but I don't think you can win." He was going with Kerry.
The Hennessey sisters, Dorothy and her little sister Gwen, 70, who were related to Teri's grandmother, were attracted to Kucinich when he said he would close the School for Americas at Fort Benning, a controversial training ground for Central American soldiers that they had been protesting for years. As veteran caucus-goers, the sisters realized Kucinich might not reach the delegate threshold, so they were open to Dean. Teri's son Eddie attended a rally for Dean and was struck by his grass-roots support among young people, which he said "is what the party needs right now, what we have been neglecting." He began keeping up with the Dean effort, receiving thrice-weekly e-mail updates.
In the end, Teri Goodmann decided to go with Kerry, thinking he had the best combination of experience, commitment to the issues she cared about, and chance of defeating President Bush. She had been nudged in his direction all along by Jake Braun, 27, an organizer from Omaha (via Loyola of Chicago) who had been sent to Dubuque in 2002 by the national Democratic Party to run some local campaigns in preparation for the presidential cycle, and returned to handle Kerry's Dubuque headquarters. In Braun, with his open nature and eagerness to grasp the characteristics of Dubuque and its people, she was reminded of the Peanut Brigaders and saw some of her younger self, as well. He became part of her political family, and she in turn became the person he could call every day from his little storefront office downtown across the street from the A&W and around the corner from Paul's Tavern.
When Kerry stopped in Iowa over the Labor Day weekend on his national announcement tour, Goodmann made the 31/2-hour drive to Des Moines to witness it. She was among a dozen insiders to greet Kerry on the airport tarmac, and she stood in the front row as he delivered his speech downtown. She met his family and Vietnam buddies, and she was one of those called onstage to stand behind him when the music blasted and the balloons fell.
From October through December, there were more strategy meetings at her house. She served soup to a hundred people as they talked about how Dean had become the darling, and how Clark had no traction in Iowa, and how Gephardt appeared to be picking up. At the top, Kerry seemed uncertain and his staff was in chaos, with people being fired and bailing out, but this was barely felt locally. He was leading Dean in Dubuque. Kerry understood that Dubuque was playing an important role in keeping him alive, and he visited the city twice in December. The second visit, which drew more than 300 people last Sunday night, was hosted at Happy's Place about a mile from the Goodmann home. The first, less noticed, came late on a snowy night, when Goodmann and Braun took 20 precinct workers to the Holiday Inn to meet him.
Goodmann was tired that night, worn down by the thought that Bush would be hard to beat, that the odds did not seem in their favor. But when she felt fatigued, she would tell herself that she was a commando. Put on your boots and go to work.
Kerry had spent the day in Davenport, Tipton and Maquoketa, and he was feeling sick, probably from a meal of spaghetti, but he stayed in the lobby and spoke to each of the precinct workers, asking them about their lives. Most of them were students or retirees, and as Goodmann watched she was struck by how the ordeal of a presidential campaign, despite all the focus on money and television and image, can still come down to this: an inconsequential moment to everyone but the score of people who were there and will never forget it, deepening the sense of political family and lending a grace note to the democratic process in Dubuque, Iowa.
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