Coffee to Go
Part II:
There are fringe elements drawn to the spectacle: Lyndon LaRouche groupies caroling for attention, Jehovah's Witnesses handing out booklets on Satan. There are the campaign equivalent of candy stripers, volunteers giving out Dean playing cards, Dennis Kucinich CDs (Track 19: "Imagine the Dream Team (Whoolilicious and Deeelicious"; Track 20 "Electable -- Yes!"). There are busloads and busloads of press, the many-headed Beast corralled behind nylon ropes.
We drove halfway to Clark's event in Nashua, about 40 miles south of Concord, but then realized we'd never make it back to see Edwards, who was leaving for South Carolina. As it happened, Edwards was a half-hour late. By this point, the press, jammed into a corner, was getting surly.
Page Belting makes leather belts for machinery; on the campaign trail it's known as the site of "The Moment." As lore has it, last February Edwards brought some women here to tears with his pitch to forgotten Americans. Actually there were no tears; still, Edwards established himself as the next Clinton. In a campaign where the currency is the ability to "connect," Edwards is the richest; with his parents (father a mill worker, mother a postal worker), his southern accent and his experience persuading juries, Edwards can easily charm a small crowd.
Thirty or so workers wearing jeans and sweatshirts sit in folding chairs in a circle; at least three times as many reporters and cameramen are gathered around them. Edwards can sense immediately that with every little nod broadcast to the world, self-consciousness will set in and a "moment" will be harder to come by this time.
"Well, guys, this is a little different than last time I was here," he begins. "There weren't all these people here listening to me talk to you," he says, and then gives his stump speech, perfected a month ago, about two Americas, one for the rich and one for everyone else, two tax codes, two school systems, two medical establishments. Once he lapses into the generic "the American people" and then quickly corrects himself: "You."
"Right? You know what I'm talking about?" he says. "You folks work hard to pay your taxes, right?"
He delves into vivid specifics, not just about his own health care plans but about the grit of an average family struggle. Sometimes, for example, he talks about the flu. Today it's about predatory lenders. "People, you know what to do when you see 'zero percent interest,' don't you?" And a woman from the audience yells out, "Read the fine print." Edwards then proposes a plan to make credit card companies list their terms in big print, simple as that.
"Last time we all talked without these folks around," he ends it. "Now this time around, don't be shy. Tell me what's on your mind. Because that's why I'm here." And they do, first about the general issues of companies shipping jobs overseas, and budget deficits, and then eventually they zoom in to their pensions, their overtime, until by the end he has a Vietnamese woman in halting English talking about her Blue Cross plan.
"Before I leave I want to say I have such a clear memory of, a little less than a year ago, our conversation here. . . . And I want to say you are why I'm running for president," Edwards says.
The event leaves you moved, but mindful of how the New Hampshire primary distorts the presidential race. On the one hand it makes the candidates accountable to voters, humbles them into meeting the people they serve face to face. On the other it places excessive importance on charm, turns the president into Oprah, skilled at extracting confessions, projecting empathy. Americans now demand the same thing of their president as they do from all authorities -- doctors, deities -- that they behave like a best friend, with infinite patience to address their needs. At one point, Edwards was bogged down in the minutiae of the woman's co-payment plan, details better sorted out by an insurance adjuster than the potential next president of the United States.
At noon Kerry is speaking at the Jewish Federation of Greater Manchester a half-hour away. Kerry's buzz is now measured in units of unreal, as in "It's unreal, I got here an hour ago and it was totally packed," says Judy Reardon, his state director. "Since then at least 200 more people have showed up. It's unreal."
The event is held in a small theater. In a reversal of performer and audience, about 50 cameramen stand on the stage straining to catch his every tic and gesture. As the front-runner in this frenzied late stage in the race, Kerry has a near deity status. Endorsers are not really here to endorse but to be endorsed, to soak up some of the glory.
Former senator Max Cleland quotes from Shakespeare's "Henry V." Sen. Fritz Hollings riffs, mostly about his own war experience, his own time running in the New Hampshire primary. About Kerry he is brief and perfunctory. He makes a joke about the liberal from Massachusetts, then says, by way of compliment, "This man knows the government."
More than even the day before, Kerry has gotten more accustomed to his new position. He sits, slouching on the stage. He indulges himself in a 25-minute talk. He talks very little about his positions, instead telling long and haunting stories about vets encountering death and the various ways they cope with it.
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