What It Takes (44 page)

And from that moment, it did not matter that Michael Dukakis had nothing to say about Iowa—in fact, knew nothing of the problems of its farmers ... in fact, had never been sufficiently interested in Iowa to visit in his fifty-three years, save once, as a college student, thirty-three years before, when he hitchhiked through, one blurry night, on his way to somewhere that did interest him, which was Mexico. Didn’t matter: the Des Moines TVs and the
Register
were there, to give the people of this state their first impression. What did he have to say? ... And Lowell Junkins, who had run and lost for Governor in Iowa, got into Michael’s car at the airport (he had to know some farming—didn’t he?), and Junkins was talking diversification: problem was too much corn and cattle and hogs. You know, Junkins said, forty years ago, the second biggest crop in this state was apples, but people lost track of that. ... So by the time he got to his first stop in Iowa, Michael was talking diversification. Sat down in a cattle barn and started telling ranchers about diversification. How about lamb ... or fruit? In Massachusetts, he said,
his
farmers had branched out into berries, lettuce ... Belgian endive. (You know what Belgian endive brings at the Stop & Shop? A fortune!) And it did not matter that these cattlemen had spent their lives raising cattle, and were looking for a way to perpetuate that life. It did not matter that, in Iowa, a Massachusetts-size farm is called the front lawn. Michael had come out to talk to farmers ... so, he talked. And he said to the cameras, after a half-day: “I’ve learned a lot. We’ve had some ... terrific discussions.”

But it really didn’t matter: the bubble is its own show. By 5:00
P.M.,
that first day, Michael steamed into downtown Osceola, Iowa, supposed to march Main Street, meeting and greeting (“Hi. Mike Dukakis. Tell me who you are ...”), and right away, the cameramen and sound men were running, six-legged, out of the Greyhound, the rent-a-cars—counting cops, seventeen cars in the motorcade now—and the lenses and mikes were poking over his shoulders, next to his ears, driving him nuts ... but Osceola will never forget. There was a Boston TV lady, Janet Wu, a
Chinese
, cabled to a satellite truck on Main Street, doing her stand-up, live, back to Boston for the six o’clock news. There were
three satellite trucks
parked in Osceola, with their dishes turned aloft to the stratosphere, while the halogens stabbed at the storefronts, and strobes whirled atop the state police cars, and, of course, people came out, stood on the street, staring, and then the diddybops grabbed them and poked tape recorders or notebooks at them: “C’nIgetchurname? ... Spellit ... Y’farmer? ...” And people were asking: “What is it? Who is it? Who?” But that wasn’t important: three high school girls were standing on Main Street in the middle of the trucks, and cables, and cop cars, and press-pack-rent-a-cars parked crazy-quilt over the curbs, and by the time he came, almost trotting, Michael Dukakis, five-foot-eight in his wing tips, almost lost in the press pack, and not too happy about it, either ... it simply did not matter. The halogen fireflies came at the girls, and it was ...
so exciting ... Oh, GOD, there he IS ... EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
... that they started to scream.

Michael only worried about the cameras. Did they have to be there? Were they always going to be there? How could you have a discussion with people while boom mikes were brushing their noses? Sasso shrugged: “This is what it is, Mike. Part of the process.” And he watched for a sign—a frown, a grimace—that would have told him Michael could not take the bubble, that he was going sour. But Michael tried to shrug it off. He talked to Kitty—of course, she thought it was ridiculous, an
outrage
, the way the camera people trampled everywhere: they could
kill
somebody ... and they wouldn’t care! But she didn’t make it an issue. She was so eager for Michael to have a good time. That night, they were going to have dinner with Governor Branstad and Governor Clinton in a private home in Osceola ... and then each Governor would sleep in a farmhouse ... to have another talk with a farm family. And Kitty professed herself charmed by these arrangements ... smiling all evening, talking hogs, chewing nicotine gum ...

Oy! A
waterbed
? ... “Oh, how delightful! We’ve never tried one!”

It was during dinner that night, while the camera people were out on the lawn, shining their halogens at the windows, standing on the flower pots, tipping two over, that their hostess, Judy Barrett, brought up the subject, life in the bubble: “I don’t see how you can stand it,” she said. “People writing down everything you say, putting it on tape. On stage every minute of the day ...”

But the process was already feeding on itself: Michael and Kitty were already inside, playing the roles assigned.

“Oh, we
love
it,” Kitty said.

“We like politics ...” Michael said, “... meeting people, talking to the people out there, today, just ... terrific.”

Meanwhile, Sasso was doing his part, out to dinner with the rest of the press, a steak joint, the only place in town. They filled up four or five tables with the Bostons, who were having a great time, knocking back a few, while Sasso worked, from table to table, like a bar mitzvah boy, dispensing quotes and the gift of his smile, his enjoyment of them. This could be fun! ...

You bet it could: the reporters knew where their interest lay, too ... a story that would take them all over the country, maybe to the White House. ... They were going
national
, not to mention all those steaks on the cuff. ... There was a TV in the restaurant, and when the local news came on, there was a bit of a hush. And then ... there it was ... The Duke, their guy, lead story! And from the Boston press rose a quiet, but unmistakable, cheer.

The startling thing about the Hart campaign, when he started out again, after New Year’s, was how quiet it was, how sane, even here in New Hampshire, where he’d won before, where he had so many friends. You would have thought that a guy thirty points ahead in the polls (no one else was even in double figures) would be packing in huge crowds, stuffing the high school gym, with a big flag behind him and a platform for cameras. But Hart was wise to that: he did not want to climb into the bubble.

What he wanted, what he got, were living rooms, holding anywhere from a dozen to forty people, places he could talk for an hour, and listen, answer questions, have everyone feel they’d met him, feel they knew why he was running. That’s how he started out, last time, ’82–’83, and it worked—better than anyone dreamed ... anyone except Hart. Of course, last time, he didn’t have a choice: a year before the first votes were cast, he
couldn’t
have packed a high school gym—nobody knew him. (One time in Portsmouth, Hart tried to work a bingo hall. “Hi, I’m Gary Hart. I’m running for President.” One bingo player turned and snapped: “President of what?”) This time, he had his choice, and he took it: he wanted it small, at the start.

It had to do with Hart’s theory of campaigning. (Hart always had a theory.) He liked to build from the bottom up. That meant all organizing was local: once a person signed on to run a town, they need only turn to the state office for supplies, resources, and requests for the candidate’s time. In the same way, the state campaigns never had to follow orders from the national staff. The national staff was there to serve the states. When Hart explained the theory, he talked about concentric circles. The base of the campaign, and the locus of his greatest effort, was that first circle. It wasn’t too big—could not be—maybe ten or twelve souls in any one state, handpicked for their energy, credibility, and contacts, who knew Hart, knew what he stood for, had internalized the message. Those ten or twelve would then create a second, larger circle: people they knew, in their neighborhoods, or places of work. They might invite a group to their house to meet Hart, or get a member of the second circle to host a coffee, with
his
friends, which would start a third circle. The point was, the message would radiate out to the final, largest circle, the voters as a mass.

It was like Amway ... or saving souls. More like the latter, because it rested on faith, ultimately on Hart’s own faith: he was the only one who fed all the circles. In ’83, Hart had to explain the theory, how it would work, over and over: forget about the polls—once he started to win, the polls would turn around overnight. Forget about endorsements: he could do more with half a dozen good twenty-two-year-old organizers than a score of State Senators who climbed on because they thought he was a winner. Before the votes went down in ’84, Hart even had to tell his people to forget about money—their salaries, which he could no longer pay. When he started to win, the money would roll in. It was the same thing he said about charisma: they called him aloof, too cool, couldn’t lift a crowd ... well, when he started to win—suddenly—they’d see the charisma. Americans love a winner, he said. They were going to love him.

And they did. After he won New Hampshire in ’84, he was instantly the candidate of charisma—funny, how he’d changed so much in a week. ... That’s what he thought this time around, when everybody said how much better he was. All the writers with him in January ’87 came away with the same psycho-political mumble about Hart—“more at ease with himself ... more relaxed ... more at peace ...” Yeah, he was more at peace: he was thirty points ahead.

But there was no doubt it was clicking, whatever “it” was. In those living rooms, Hart was self-possessed, self-assured, funny sometimes, always full of purpose. He knew what he wanted from that room, that day. He knew what he had to say, and why. His issues made sense, they hung together: it was a worldview; that’s what Hart had spent the last two years on. He had connected the dots. So, when he brought up an oil-import fee—a ten-dollar-a-barrel tax on imported oil—it may not have been a popular stand in New England (where heating-oil costs are a cutting issue). But Hart did not justify the tax just on the basis of energy policy—to spur production in the Southwest. It would also help reduce America’s killing trade deficit. It would raise money for his education proposals. Most of all, it was a national security issue: if America had to send troops to protect “our” oil in the Persian Gulf, the result, he insisted, would be disaster.

And always, in the question-and-answer sessions, he found his own overdrive, bringing the questions of policy back to the bedrock of Hart-facts. Yes, he was against protectionist tariffs. But not just because they were a bogeyman since the thirties, when tariffs caused a worldwide depression. It was because the goals of trade had changed. America could not, and would not, dominate world markets as it did after the Second World War. The goal of trade had to be a mutual enrichment, the size of the worldwide pie expanding as nations bought ever more from one another: if the America-first crowd ever won, if the U.S. somehow restored its domination, the result would be enmity, isolation, and war.

You could see it starting to sink in, in those living rooms, in the faces locked onto his. It wasn’t so much they agreed ... but this guy was the size of a President. That was the measure people were taking, a year before the voting started: Hart was of size. People asked him questions they would ask a President. People told him they wanted to help. People signed the sheet in the back of the living room, and Hart knew the follow-up would be there: those people would be brought into the circle; the machinery was in place.

Was he more at peace? Well, yes. ... He still had debt from the last campaign—a million and a half—but the money would be there. The debt was down from almost five million—of course, nobody wrote that. He still didn’t have many endorsements. (He only had one elected official in Iowa, and
that
guy just got caught getting a blow-job from his secretary in a car, so the Hart campaign wasn’t using his name.) But elected officials could read the polls. The point was, Hart was winning.

Now he’d wind up a day of campaigning with a dinner for the staff, the local drivers, all the reporters, an easy, off-the-record talk about anything. He’d even talk a bit about himself. He let a photographer take his picture, with his family ... watching football
... at his cabin
! He’d never let them near the place before.

He even sat down with
Us
magazine ... and had a good time, mugging in his mirrored shades, jumping up to turn up the Mozart on the radio ... “Gary Hart is relaxed today,”
Us
averred in surprise. “He is funny, charismatic, witty—even a bit goofy. He is startlingly unlike the Gary Hart a good portion of the public sees as aloof, too intellectual and boring....
Why aren’t you like this all the time
?”

“But I
am
like this all the time!”

The
Us
lady was in New Hampshire on one of those great campaign days, along with a few of the national big-feet, Bob Healy from the
Globe
, and Jules Witcover, the columnist. It was Healy and Jules who had the idea—hey, they were all going down to Boston to get their planes the following day: why didn’t Hart and Billy Shore join them for dinner in Boston tonight? They’d do Pier Four, have a couple of pops, kick back ... have a talk.

So they did. They were a half-dozen at table, Hart and Shore, Bob and Mary Healy, Jules and the
Us
lady, and it was fun! ... especially after a couple of pops. Hart had his white lightning special—vodka on the rocks—only a couple. He was telling wickedly funny stories: Jacob Javits’s funeral, when Hart was sitting in one of the front rows, and plop, into an open seat drops ... Richard M. Nixon!

“So the organ music is playing, and Nixon says, ‘What is it? BACH?
... or Brahms
?’ ”

Hart is a splendid mimic, and with Nixon, he had it all: the furrowed brow, the shaking scowl, the deep voice from the stiff thorax ... “ ‘BACH?
... or Brahms
?’ ...

“Then he sees Kissinger in the row ahead, but Kissinger won’t turn around.
‘Should I say hello to Hank? You think I should say hello? ... BACH, or Brahms? ... I ought to say hello to Hank
’...”