Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (14 page)

Kerrey was deeply involved in the campaign strategy. We wanted to make abortion rights an issue in the primary, where, contrary to the state as a whole, a majority of voters were pro-choice. Yet the senator vetoed our recommendation. “The less said about abortion, the better,” he told us, worried that such a tack could complicate the general-election campaign. Still, we went into the final week within hailing distance of Nelson, and were prepared to launch an endorsement ad we had taped with the wildly popular Kerrey, when the senator called. “I just spoke to Ben Nelson, and he reminded me that I had promised him I wouldn’t do an ad. So we can’t run it.”

It was a stunning development. The Kerrey endorsement was always meant to be our closing pitch and would certainly have made a difference for his friend and protégé. Now we were left to scramble, while Kerrey’s closest supporters privately hammered him for pulling the rug out from under Hoppner. At 5:00 p.m. on the Friday before the primary, Kerrey called back. “You know, I’ve been talking to folks back home, and I feel like I owe Bill more,” he said. “Go ahead and run the ad.” Yet Kerrey, an experienced politician, almost certainly knew when he placed the call that the state’s TV stations had closed their advertising logs for the weekend. It would be very hard to place the ad at that hour. So, our fine young media buyer, Debra Schommer, went into overdrive hunting down and browbeating traffic managers at TV stations around the state, and somehow got half of them to reopen their logs to make room for our ad. Where it aired, Hoppner surged. It wasn’t enough. After a long recount, Nelson was declared the winner by 42 votes—the closest gubernatorial contest in state history.

I thought about that episode when, the following year, Kerrey announced his candidacy for president, touting his political courage. This was one case, but certainly not the only, when, upon closer inspection, I found a political figure of some stature wanting. And often, the politicians—even the genuinely introspective ones like Kerrey—lacked a clear-eyed view of themselves.

Then there are those who are exactly as they appear to be, for better or worse.

The senior U.S. senator from Illinois, Alan Dixon, was a grinning, glad-handing pol from downstate. “Al the Pal” was the quintessential go-along-to-get-along politician. He had risen through the ranks of the party, from the legislature to statewide office to the Senate, by cutting deals and carefully calibrating his positions on issues. Over a decade in Washington, his votes seemed more about defusing potential Republican electoral challenges than advancing the public interest. In 1991, I felt that Dixon went too far by being one of the very few Democrats to vote for the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. If Dixon’s position had been rooted in principle, it might have been palatable. Yet I suspected that “Al the Pal” had cut a deal with the White House, trading his critical support for Thomas’s nomination in return for the promise of a weak Republican opponent in 1992. (Investigative reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson later confirmed my hunch in their superb book on the Thomas nomination.) Outraged by Dixon’s vote and his general approach to legislating, I was determined to find an opponent willing to take him on in a Democratic primary.

Months earlier, I had met with Al Hofeld, a wealthy Chicago trial lawyer and Daley supporter who wanted to explore the possibility of running for office. After a very general discussion, we agreed to stay in touch. Following the Clarence Thomas vote, I called Hofeld back and suggested that he consider challenging Dixon in the Democratic primary, which was just five months away. I didn’t know Hofeld well, but he appeared to be perfectly cast for the job, an attractive political outsider with a good up-by-the-bootstraps story. Hofeld had made his living persuading juries. Now he could indict Dixon and the system of squalid horse trading that had come to characterize politics in Washington. Moreover, Hofeld had the personal wealth to underwrite his own campaign, which was the only way a challenger could overcome the incumbent’s ample war chest. After a few weeks of contemplation, and some polling that confirmed Dixon’s vulnerability, Hofeld jumped into the race. We launched with a simple, direct-to-camera ad that amounted to a declaration of war, on not just Dixon, but politics as usual.

“My name is Al Hofeld, and I’m about to break the rules,” the shirtsleeved challenger began, speaking directly to voters, in an unadorned setting. “I’m running for the United States Senate, where the rules say you should be everyone’s pal, sell yourself to the special interests, and tap dance around the tough issues.”

The allusion to Dixon was unmistakable.

“Well, I refuse to take a dime of special interest PAC money because we won’t get national health care until we’re ready to take on the insurance lobby,” Hofeld continued. “And we won’t get guns off our streets until we’re ready to take on the NRA. You see, Congress is all tied up in knots by the special interests, and they never get around to giving us what we need: tax relief for middle-income families; a shot at college for every kid; and a trade policy that’s as fair to us as it is to them. So if you feel you’re being heard in Washington, then I’m not your guy. But if you’re fed up like I am, then let’s break the rules.”

The ad and others that followed struck an immediate chord with voters. Yet our opponents had done probing research on Hofeld that we, in our haste to find a candidate, had not. Eager to subject this deep-pocketed newcomer to a thorough hazing, the news media were willing consumers for that opposition research. Even before the ads began, stories surfaced that Hofeld had failed to vote in many critical elections. His depth of knowledge on public policy was suspect. His prodigious campaign spending became an issue. It was a learning experience for me. Instead of finding the ideal challenger, I had tried to take a flawed candidate and make him conform to my ideal. That rarely works. Meanwhile, another candidate seized the opening that the Dixon-Hofeld face-off created.

Carol Moseley Braun was the Cook County recorder of deeds—not your typical springboard to the U.S. Senate. She had burst on the local political scene in 1978, a bright, charismatic former federal prosecutor elected to the legislature from Hyde Park as an anti-machine Democrat. Yet Carol had never quite lived up to her promise, which once seemed as bright as her incandescent smile. Still, with two competitive white men in the race for the U.S. Senate, Carol had a chance to salvage her career. It turned out to be a good bet. While Hofeld and Dixon savaged each other in TV ads, Moseley Braun charmed voters who were looking for an alternative. She galvanized African Americans, liberals, and suburban women, who were thrilled by the opportunity to elect the first black woman to the U.S. Senate.

With 38 percent of the vote, Moseley Braun won the nomination, ending Dixon’s forty-two-year political career. Hofeld was reduced to the role of blocking back, spending millions to create the hole through which Carol ran to history.

I had mixed feelings. The candidate I urged to run had lost, despite prodigious spending from which, it was widely noted, our firm had profited handsomely. Royko wrote a snarly column about me, armed with a couple of friendly letters I had written to Dixon’s aides. One was written six years earlier, when I was hustling races to bring to the prospective partnership with Doak, Shrum, and Caddell. “I have great affection for Alan,” I wrote then, seeking the Dixon campaign account. “It is a campaign I would feel good about doing.” Royko also had been lagged a second letter I had written the Dixon aide in 1990—before the offensive Thomas vote—calling “nonsensical” the rumors that I was planning to field a candidate against him in ’92. It hardly took a writer of Royko’s rapier wit to carve me up as a shameless mercenary. Still, given our history, he warmed to it with special enthusiasm. My old
Tribune
colleague Steve Neal, now a
Sun-Times
columnist, called me “the Mr. Flexibility of Illinois politics.”

It was the first really rough treatment I had received in the media. Yet I had set myself up for it with my disingenuous letter sucking up to Dixon years earlier, chasing business for Doak, Shrum, and Caddell. I had walked away from that union, in part, because I didn’t want to treat campaigns simply as paydays, taking any candidate who could pay the freight. I wanted to work for candidates in whom I believed. Over the years, I can’t say I never chose a clunker or allowed business considerations to creep in, but Mr. Flexibility? That’s not who I was or wanted to be.

The greater fallout from the race was that I also got crosswise with my old friend and mentor Paul Simon, in whom I
did
believe. Dixon and Simon had been friends for nearly forty years, and Paul pulled out all the stops to try to save him. I never doubted Paul’s honesty or integrity, but he always had a greater tolerance and affection for characters like Dixon than I thought he should. It bothered me that he would vouch for Dixon, and in a childish fit of pique, I told a reporter for the
National Journal
that Simon was “an aspiring hack trapped in a reformer’s body.” My understanding was that the comment was off the record, but I was sophisticated enough to know that it was too pungent not to find its way into print. In any case, it was a terrible thing to say about a guy to whom I owed so much. I regret it more than anything I have ever said to a reporter.

Ironically, by trading his Thomas vote for the weak Republican candidate he thought he would face, Dixon also made it almost impossible for Moseley Braun to lose in the fall—though it quickly became apparent that she was going to give it a try. With her primary victory, Moseley Braun had become an instant national sensation. Yet, as the months wore on, she continued to take victory laps while her Republican opponent, Rich Williamson, a conservative former State Department official, worked for the vote.

She had effectively entrusted the leadership of her team to her future fiancée, a cantankerous South African named Kgosie Matthews. Together they seemed more eager to plunder the campaign than to win the election. By the fall, investigative reporters also had zeroed in on charges that Moseley Braun had conspired with her mother to commit Medicaid fraud, an accusation she heatedly denied. Suddenly, it was a horse race.

Moseley Braun and Matthews had a shrewd and experienced media consultant, Jerry Austin, who had done a good job for her in the primary. Still, they asked if I would help stop the bleeding, and I agreed. For her to lose now would be unthinkable. I hammered out a batch of scripts, some to remind people why they’d liked her in the first place; others to bring Williamson down to earth.

We set up a shoot in the Hyde Park home of my in-laws, just blocks from Carol’s home. It was a Sunday, meaning double time for the crew. Yet this was when her schedule was free, and time was of the essence. We waited for hours, cameras at the ready, but the candidate was a no-show. Finally, an aide called to say she would not be coming. The fire drill cost her campaign twenty thousand dollars and, worse, valuable time.

When Moseley Braun finally deigned, days later, to sit for a shoot, she absolutely lit up the screen. We wanted to give voters a renewed stake in her success by offering her improbable rise as a parable about our country at its best. An ad we ran in the closing week reflected the strategy.

“When I began this race a year ago, I was called a hopeless underdog,” Carol began. “But I was outraged about how they do business in Washington. It turned out a lot of you were outraged, too. And, together, we overcame the odds and sent a message of change and hope. On Tuesday, you can send more than a message. You can send a vote. For guaranteed health care. For policies that will create jobs and opportunity. For an America where we finally put people first . . . and where even an underdog can win.”

Helped by spots like this as well as Bill Clinton’s extra-long coattails and some hard-hitting ads targeting Williamson, we regained control of the race. Sadly, Carol never fully took control of her life. With the emotionally abusive Matthews in her ear, offering colossally bad advice, she would spend much of her short tenure in Washington mired in controversy. The first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate, who would pave the way for another pathbreaking Illinois senator, was defeated after just one term.

Carol was the daughter of an abusive father. It’s hard to know how much that factored into the drive that led her to a political career, or the erratic, self-destructive behavior that claimed it. In my experience, such struggles are not uncommon among men and women who are drawn to the great emotional risks and rewards of the public stage. So many are chasing ghosts—trying to live up to the legacies and demands of a parent, or compensating for one’s absence.

In 1994, I worked for two such candidates, each tragic figures in his own way.

In Rhode Island, Patrick Kennedy, son of Ted, was seeking a seat in Congress. Just twenty-six, Patrick had already served five years in the Rhode Island legislature, helped by his famous name. The sweet, anxiety-ridden young Kennedy, however, had inherited little of the family’s trademark charisma or campaign skills. Patrick, who struggled with addiction as a teenager and would again, so wanted to please his dad, but lived in constant fear of disappointing him.

“We have to win this race,” moaned young Kennedy, who spent much of the campaign figuratively curled up in the fetal position. “In my family, you don’t lose.” It was curious, because his dad had in 1980. Propelled by the family legend, Patrick also was a prisoner of it.

We did win, mostly by annihilating a strong Republican opponent with a devastating negative ad.

Patrick served for sixteen years, a tenure marked by real accomplishment and periodic breakdowns. Yet shortly after his father died, he left Congress and politics, settled down, had a family, and lived a much happier life as an advocate for the mentally ill.

Dan Rostenkowski was a political prince, albeit of a less exalted domain. Elected to Congress at the age of thirty, he had served under nine presidents. As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, he had helped fashion Medicare under LBJ. As its mighty chairman, Rostenkowski worked with President Reagan on landmark tax-reform legislation and with President Clinton on health care reform. He had been the go-to guy in Washington for two Mayor Daleys, and in Chicago, he was the unquestioned boss of the Thirty-Second Ward, where he and his father, Joe, had ruled as Democratic committeemen for half a century.