Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (13 page)

There is no buffer between local officials and their constituents. That’s why voters in big cities often relate to their mayors in a very personal way. They know them as people, their strengths and foibles. They watch them closely. They connect with them in much the way Americans do their presidents. No other position in the political galaxy promotes that kind of relationship, or affords an officeholder the chance to make as visible a difference, day by day.

At the height of Daley’s popularity, his name periodically came up in connection with open governor and U.S. Senate races as well as for cabinet positions in Washington. He invariably laughed the rumors off. “Why would I give up this job for that?” said the man who would eclipse his father’s record for longevity in the Chicago mayor’s office. “Here you can actually do things without a bunch of bureaucrats standing between you and actually getting things done.”

Harold and Daley gave our political consulting venture its start. Over the next two decades, we would help elect mayors in many of America’s largest cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, Houston, and Washington, DC. Some of these candidates broke racial and gender barriers, but all of them had to negotiate diverse constituencies. To win and then to govern, all had to find a way to reach across the sometimes enormous social and economic chasms that can divide one city neighborhood from the next.

 • • • 

Shortly after Daley’s election, I got a call from the campaign manager for a long-shot candidate for mayor of Cleveland named Michael White. White had devoted himself to public service, as a City Council aide and then a councilman before winning a seat in the Ohio Senate. In 1989, at the age of thirty-seven, he joined a crowded field to replace George Voinovich, the popular if pallid outgoing mayor.

Like Chicago, Cleveland was racially divided, and the conventional wisdom was that the field would winnow down to a runoff between a black candidate, City Council president George Forbes, and one of the white candidates. Mike White was a talented and charismatic speaker, but was thought to lack the organization and money to challenge the favorites. He made up for that, in part, by roaming the streets of Cleveland, listening to the radio and driving to the scene of breaking news, particularly when the story gave him a platform to discuss crime, education, or some of the other central issues of his campaign. Yet there was one momentous event that turned the tide in his favor.

It was tradition in Cleveland that all mayoral candidates participate in a luncheon debate at the City Club. The city’s flagship paper, the
Plain Dealer
, and local broadcast outlets would provide intensive coverage of the event. The debate in 1989 featured five candidates, almost all of them eager to praise the outgoing Voinovich, a low-key, moderate Republican who was highly regarded for restoring equilibrium to Cleveland after the brief and stormy reign of populist mayor Dennis Kucinich. George Forbes, an irascible and incendiary figure as City Council president, depicted himself as Voinovich’s governing partner and the candidate of “continuity.”

Mike White, once an aide to Forbes, had a starkly different message.

“One of my opponents talked about continuity, and I think in some respects we should and must have continuity between the Voinovich years . . . a continuity in conduct that says no matter how we disagree—business community, civic community, and City Council—we will find a way and we must find a way to get along,” White said. “But I want to say to each and every one of you here, ladies and gentlemen, that I do not want continuity on the crucial issues affecting this town.”

As White spoke, passionately and with few notes, about the challenges of the city—drugs, crime, and a shortage of police; population flight; poor schools and a politicized school board; and racial divisions that stood in the way of progress—he slowly rallied the crowd behind him. After each refrain, he punctuated his critique with the same message: “Continuity just won’t do.”

“I think we need a mayor who will say, yes, we must go forward. Yes, we must have a town that provides an opportunity for all of its citizens, black and white. And we must have a mayor who has the same understanding as Andrew Young, that while we all came over on different ships, ladies and gentlemen, we in Cleveland and our suburbs are in the same boat now. Continuity just won’t do.”

By the time he’d finished, even tables of people there to support opposing candidates were standing and cheering, especially when White called for unity and a shared vision for Cleveland’s future.

It was one of those electric moments when a leader emerges by seizing an opportunity. Soon after his rousing performance, the
Plain Dealer
endorsed White. Voters, black and white, tipped his way. With his appeal for unity and change, White defied the dreary and conventional political calculus by unexpectedly winning a spot in the runoff with Forbes. Anticipating a ferocious contest, I quickly wrote and recorded a script to foreshadow the attacks we anticipated. “The experts said that our campaign was a dream that would end in the primary, but thanks to you, the dream is still alive,” White told Clevelanders in the TV ad. “A dream of a Cleveland that rises above racial politics and name-calling. A dream of One City, working together to fight drugs, crime, poor schools and neighborhood decline. In these final weeks, the forces of division will launch their last stand. They will say or do anything to keep us from working together. But, you know, it’s hard to stop a dream whose time has come!”

Indeed, it was. White’s momentum proved unstoppable. He won in a landslide, driven by a multiracial coalition of Clevelanders drawn to the ideal of fighting problems instead of one another. White went on to become Cleveland’s longest-serving mayor. I didn’t keep in close touch with him after the election, though I knew his long tenure didn’t entirely live up to its great promise. Still, he had some significant accomplishments, among them new sports stadiums and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which would attract tourists and help revive a fraying downtown. Idealistic as his appeal was at the start, governing is always more difficult than campaigning. The problems of the city proved stubborn, and in the end, he would be tarnished by corruption charges against one of his closest friends and allies.

Nonetheless, White’s 1989 election and the diverse coalition he built were inspiring. Its quixotic nature appealed to my idealism. Beyond that, it taught me a valuable lesson that has informed my understanding of mayoral and presidential elections ever since. When incumbents step down, voters rarely opt for a replica of what they have, even when that outgoing leader is popular. They almost always choose change over the status quo. They want successors whose strengths address the perceived weaknesses in the departing leader. Voinovich, a Republican, defeated the volatile Kucinich and was a well-regarded mayor. Still, after a decade of his placid leadership, Clevelanders were looking for a dynamic figure to usher in change, and they chose White.

I would store that lesson away. Though the places where I went on to work could appear, at least on the surface, entirely different, my underlying principles and understanding of urban politics would travel with me from campaign to campaign, from one city to the next.

Mayoral campaigns would be a staple of my work for many years, and the lens through which I would continue to confront the prominence of race in our politics.

In one election, I helped Fernando Ferrer, a longtime Puerto Rican officeholder in New York City, build an unprecedented multiracial coalition of black, Hispanic, and liberal voters at the end of Rudy Giuliani’s reign as mayor.

For Ferrer to win, he would have to give voice to the millions of New Yorkers who weren’t beneficiaries of the Giuliani years: middle-class families and those struggling just to get there, who were being squeezed by the high cost of living; parents vainly searching for good schools and for after-school programs for their kids; minorities clamoring for a balance between securing the streets and protecting their civil liberties. He needed to shine a bright light on the other New York. Grabbing these edgy issues was unnatural for Freddy, whose political instincts were decidedly mainstream and “go along to get along.” Yet as the race wore on, he grew into this more contentious role of advocate, challenging the status quo on behalf of the forgotten New York—and became more genuine in identifying himself as part of it.

One day, as Ferrer began to move in the polls, a member of the city’s business elite took him to lunch at an exclusive Midtown club. “You see these people,” the man said quietly, gesturing to the well-heeled crowd absorbed in conversations around them. “These people will never let you become mayor, Freddy. You’re not from here.”

“What do you think he meant by that?” Freddy asked, recounting the story. “‘You’re not from here.’ The hell with that. Let’s win this thing.”

We didn’t. We were on the brink of victory on primary day, September 11, 2001, when planes struck the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan and the world emphatically changed. By the time the rescheduled primary took place, Giuliani was leading the city through its darkest calamity, and our message lost a little of its efficacy. Ferrer was the candidate whose campaign focused on the two New Yorks at a time when New York had suddenly been united as one.

That conversation in the club that Ferrer reported sticks with me to this day. I’m sure there were similar conversations in generations past about the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews. My dad “wasn’t from here,” but he came because of the promise of America, and as its barriers fell, America grew stronger.

Redeeming that promise, expanding its reach, was a worthy cause.

I
N
THE
EARLY
1990
S
, our
C
hicago campaigns had caught the attention of another voracious consumer of politics, the young governor of
A
rkansas.
S
o when
B
ill
C
linton came through town prospecting for money and talent in advance of his 1992 presidential bid,
I
was asked to say hello.

Like so many others, I was immediately taken with Clinton. He was palpably brilliant, but as a southerner with a great personal story, he spoke in a colloquial way folks could grasp. Moreover, Clinton shared my view that, to win, the Democratic Party had to update its vision and speak to (as well as for) an increasingly embattled middle class. I’ll admit that I also sensed that Clinton probably left
everyone
he met with the feeling that he shared their view. That is a valuable, if not wholly admirable, asset in politics, and Clinton was so good at it that I didn’t mind.

If his purpose was to corral me, Clinton succeeded halfway through that first meeting. Unseating the then popular incumbent, George H. W. Bush, would be a daunting task, I thought, but Clinton had what it would take to run a strong race. Later, I was among the many people Clinton invited to Little Rock to confer with him in the weeks leading up to his campaign launch, and the significant one-on-one time he gave me was flattering. After his announcement, I received a handwritten card thanking me for my help and noting that he had incorporated my thoughts on the middle class. His note was no more than a line or two, but it meant something to me, as he knew it would. Clinton understood this part of politics as well as anyone I would ever know. Even as I recognized that he had probably written hundreds of such cards and that my wisdom on the middle class was hardly original, I appreciated the gesture and was amazed by the effort.

Clinton’s admiration for the Daley operation was apparent. In the fall of 1991, he hired David Wilhelm as his campaign manager. My old collaborator from the Paul Simon race, Wilhelm had gone on to manage Daley’s campaign, winning plaudits for his work. He, in turn, recruited Rahm Emanuel, who had raised huge sums as Daley’s finance director, to shake the money trees for Clinton. When salacious stories nearly capsized Clinton’s campaign as the make-or-break New Hampshire primary approached, the millions that the relentless Rahm had raised for crucial TV ads would help keep it afloat.

A month after that primary, when the campaign moved to Illinois, Clinton had righted the ship and was the clear front-runner for the nomination. Since he already had a media consultant, my role in the campaign was limited. Still, Wilhelm asked me to be the campaign’s point man on arrangements for a March 15 presidential debate that would be held in Illinois.

Before the debate, I had a beer with James Carville, Clinton’s brilliant and colorful strategist, who was a bundle of raw nerve endings. Born and raised in Louisiana, the former marine had bounced around politics for years as an itinerant campaign manager, off the radar of Washington’s political elite. He didn’t win his first statewide race until 1986, at the age of forty-two, when he engineered the upset election of Bob Casey as governor of Pennsylvania. In 1991, Carville and his redoubtable sidekick, Paul Begala, returned to Pennsylvania to help Harris Wofford, the longest of long shots, defeat a popular former Republican governor, Dick Thornburgh, in a special election for the U.S. Senate. Wofford had pinned his entire election on one issue, national health care, and the stunning result was seen as a harbinger for the upcoming presidential race. It also made Carville and Begala the hottest consulting team in politics.

Clinton won the derby for their services, and Carville, with his serpentine looks and endless supply of memorable Bayou-isms, became an overnight celebrity. Beyond the amusing, Ragin’ Cajun character he played on TV, James was a very shrewd strategist. Unlike many in Washington, he had a great gut for what working-class folks thought, and was more than willing to flout conventional wisdom. Now Carville, who had been broke and on his way out of politics a decade earlier, was on the cusp of winning the biggest campaign of his life—but he wasn’t ready to claim victory.

“This guy is really, really good,” Carville told me, as we huddled in a corner of the bar at the Chicago Hilton where Clinton’s team was staying. “He’s smart. He loves this shit. The only question is whether there is anything so important to him that he would be willing to risk losing for it. That’s the big question he has to answer.”

Little was expected from the Illinois debate. Then Jerry Brown, the pugnacious former California governor, making his third run for president, enlivened the evening by accusing Clinton of “funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business.”

As Brown finished his broadside, Clinton erupted. “I don’t care what you say about me,” the red-faced Arkansan fired back, his pointed finger about two feet from Brown’s face, “but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife.”

It was great TV, and in the short run, it redounded to Clinton’s benefit. After weathering charges of marital infidelity, he welcomed the opportunity to stand up for Hillary’s honor, and eagerly, deftly seized the moment. Still, the underlying charges Brown made would linger, and how to deal with the aftermath was the immediate postdebate concern. Wilhelm asked me to stop by Clinton’s suite to chew it over.

By the time I arrived, the Clintons were casually dressed. Hillary lay on the couch gently resting her head on Bill’s shoulder. What struck me then, and since, was the obvious affection there was between the couple. Whatever storms they had already endured and would endure again in the future, it was evident that they really did love each other. Clinton’s indignation at Brown’s attack had been more than just theater.

Now the question on the floor was what to do the following morning, when the Clintons were scheduled to campaign together at an El stop in the city. I was new to the group, but Wilhelm asked for my view.

“If it were me, I would not send Hillary out,” I said. “If she’s there, she and the debate confrontation with Brown will be front and center. I’d send the governor out on his own.”

By now Hillary had left the room. Mickey Kantor, the campaign chairman, and Kevin O’Keefe, a Chicago attorney who was a childhood buddy of Hillary’s, dismissed my concerns.

“Hillary can handle herself,” Kantor assured me. O’Keefe confidently seconded that view. Being an outsider to the group, I nodded and shut up.

The next day, a throng of reporters descended on the Busy Bee, a café next to an El stop on the city’s near Northwest Side. Looking for a way to keep the story alive, they were eager to follow up on the previous night’s contretemps. Hillary took the bait.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” she said, when pressed on Brown’s conflict-of-interest charge. “But what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.”

Whatever her intent, with that one comment, Hillary appeared to be demeaning every stay-at-home mom in America—I quickly heard from Susan, who was irate about it—and opened up a culture war that would dog both Clintons for a long time to come.

That dustup notwithstanding, Clinton handily won the Illinois primary, and all but secured the nomination. Wilhelm called me a few weeks later.

“We’ve got this thing pretty well nailed down,” he said. “Governor Clinton wanted to know if you would come down here for the general and be his communications director.”

I was overwhelmed by the prospect. Clinton was going to be the nominee. I believed in him, and felt close to my old comrades who were now key members of his team. It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Then my thoughts turned to Susan and the kids. As it was, I was already an absentee father far too often, leaving my wife to manage our very challenging home. Lauren’s struggles were only getting worse. The seizures were coming more frequently. The clusters were becoming harder to subdue, requiring that we blast her full of Ativan, a heavy sedative, to slow them down.

Lauren’s episodes almost always began at night. Susan and I would sleep lightly, ears peeled to a baby monitor, so we could pick up the guttural sounds that foreshadowed a seizure. More than once, I would watch as Lauren seized again and again, coming around just long enough to grab Susan’s hand and cry out, “Mommy, make them stop!” And Susan and I would cry together in the darkness because we could do nothing to make them stop.

Epilepsy took its toll on Lauren. After ten years of seizures, her developmental delays were much more evident, as the gap between her and her peers grew. It was painful to see other little girls begin to take the first turn into adolescence, with all that that foretold, while Lauren lagged behind, functioning more like a five- or six-year-old. Her life became increasingly lonely. Moreover, the many different drugs, diets, and procedures she had endured had contributed to sharp, sometimes violent mood swings. And many times, her younger brothers unfairly bore the brunt of her fury.

Michael was just nineteen months younger than Lauren. When he was a baby, we often would have to swaddle him in a blanket and hand him off to neighbors while we rushed Lauren to the hospital. He and little brother Ethan had sacrificed playdates, birthday parties, and vacations to Lauren’s illness. And like most siblings of children with chronic illness, at times they were angry about what they had lost, and then angry at themselves for feeling angry about what they knew their sister could not control.

If I took the job working for Clinton, it would be seven months away from home. And if Clinton won, it would be hard to turn down the chance to serve in the White House. Would I move my family away from Lauren’s doctors and all of Susan’s support?

Wilhelm’s offer was alluring—a chance to vault from my modestly successful campaign practice to the highest echelons of American politics. Who knew when, or if, such an opportunity would come again? Yet it took me just a day to say no. I recognized that this great opportunity would likely destroy my family. It was a watershed moment in my life. As driven as I was, I discovered that there was something more important to me than the job of my dreams. As imperfect a husband and father as I had been, I loved my wife and children. Leaving them at such a critical time would have been a shameful thing to do. I had been scarred by one driven parent who always put her career first, and by another who left me on my own when I was far too young. I wanted to do better for my kids. For someone bred to aspire, that recognition provided an oddly liberating moment.

I called Wilhelm back the next day and turned him down. “What are you going to do with that spot now?” I asked, out of curiosity.

“I guess we’ll give it to George,” Wilhelm said, referring to a plainly bright young refugee from Capitol Hill who had been a traveling aide to the candidate.

History would suggest that it all worked out well for Clinton, for George Stephanopoulos, and for me.

Beyond my family considerations, the prospect of landing in Washington also troubled me. I was all too familiar with the town’s pathological focus on “who’s up and who’s down.” It’s a place where you are always being measured, which seemed like the worst possible environment for someone who was all too prone to his mother’s compulsive need for approval. Moreover, I truly believed that I was a better political strategist living outside the Beltway, where the conversation and concerns are almost always starkly different from the self-involved chatter in that one-industry town. In DC, it’s all about elections and power. Everywhere else, folks are focused on their day-to-day lives. It’s why, as Gary Hart once wisely shared, “Washington is always the last to get the news.”

This would come back to me with force years later, shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal first broke. Stephanopoulos, who had made a smart transition from politics to journalism after a tumultuous ride with Clinton, called to feel me out about the story. “Do you think he’ll have to resign?” he asked, as talk of the president’s tryst with an intern filled the airwaves. Several similar calls came in that morning from Washington, where the early betting was that Clinton was finished.

Later that day, I grabbed lunch at Manny’s, a delicatessen on the Near South Side where I frequently go to clog my arteries and clear my head. When I reached the register to pay, an elderly cashier named Helen called me aside. “You know,” she said, “I’m not here because I want to be. I’m here because I have to be. My husband’s sick. Social Security and Medicare don’t cover everything. So I have to keep working. And this guy, Clinton? I think he’s trying to help us.” Helen’s eyes narrowed. She leaned forward and lowered her voice to make a final point, which was as salty as Manny’s corned beef. “So why don’t they get off his ass? I don’t care about his sex life. That’s his business. All I care about is that he’s trying to help us.” It was a jarring message, especially coming from the mouth of this blue-haired old lady. After lunch, I called George and the other reporters I’d heard from to relate my conversation with Helen. “Don’t count this guy out,” I told them. “I bet there are a lot of Helens out there.”

 • • • 

Working outside the Center of the Political Universe meant Axelrod and Associates was not on the radar screen for many A-list candidates, who naturally turned to DC’s big, brand-name firms for their political advice and media. We were more like the main character in
Jerry Maguire
, the plucky little guys fighting for our share. Still, you were less likely to bump into the Helens of the world in Washington, and my small, scrappy team and I were sharper for that. So, though we had to work harder than some of our Washington competitors to land campaigns, we pitched our outside-the-Beltway status as a virtue, indeed a difference maker. Our reputation, developed through our mayoral campaigns, helped open doors around the country.

In 1990 one of those doors opened in Nebraska, where we worked for a candidate for governor named Bill Hoppner. Hoppner, a longtime aide to Bob Kerrey, that state’s war hero senator and former governor, was a brilliant student of government, but lacked the charisma of his boss. And he faced a tough opponent in Ben Nelson, a wealthy insurance executive who had committed significant personal resources to the race.