What It Takes (145 page)

By that time, they had a schedule of neighborhood picnics, church fairs, block parties ... they’d roll up in Joe’s truck, tank of helium in the back ... every kid got a Gephardt balloon, a leaflet for every voter—bang, bang, bye-bye, back in the truck ... next block.

By that time, too, Gralike had to debate ... and that’s where it showed—before one word was spoken. Gralike was an old-fashioned pol, a dark and serious-looking man ... and there was Dick, across the stage: young, blond, eager ... with his beautiful family in the front row ... well, it did your heart good. You could
see
that young Gephardt was honest, decent, smart ... and he
cared so much
.

But Gralike was not going to roll over, play dead. He’d been lining this up for a long time. He had his union households, and his home neighborhoods were studded with lawn signs. ... God, this guy was the
king
of lawn signs!

That’s what got to Dick, in the summertime ... those signs,
everywhere
: he’d work a sixteen-hour day and then have to drive home in the dark, past
GRALIKE...GRALIKE...GRALIKE...

One night, Dick sagged through the door and dropped himself onto a chair in the kitchen: “I don’t know,” he said to Jane. “I just ... I think we can’t do it. I think we’re gonna lose it.”

Jane said, “Well, we are going to lose it, if you don’t think we can. That’s what you always say. ... But we’re
not going
to lose it. We’ll just have to work harder.”

Dick had his first downtown fund-raiser—hundred dollars a plate! (Night before, he had a ten-dollar beer party, in the district, so people wouldn’t think he’d gone country club.) After that, he cut his first ad.

It was a beautiful shoot, in the backyard of the house on Fairview: Dick, Jane, Matt, and Chrissie ... a picnic table on the lawn in the sunshine. “Hi, I’m Dick Gephardt ...”

Dick ran through the script two or three times—perfectly. Dick could just
do
that sort of thing. But Chrissie was small—just three—she started yammering, and hammering a spoon on the table.

The TV guys (friends of Komorek’s) wanted to get rid of that take, do it again—maybe get rid of her ... but Dick said no, it would be fine that way. Leave it in. ... It was a move of instinctive genius.

After all, it was 1976, when Jimmy Carter was thirty points ahead and
cruising
on the promise, “I’ll never lie to you.” People wanted candidates they could trust ... Christian values ... family values. Imperial, impervious, impersonal government was the
problem
. That was the first thing Dick was
not
... part of the old guard, part of the problem.

No ... much better to be personal. Jimmy Carter was personal. (He’d called Dick’s
home
... Carter
called
, he talked to Jane!) Much better to be genuine. Jimmy Carter was genuine. And Dick Gephardt thought Carter ran a campaign of genuine genius.

So, by the end of July, everybody in the district seemed to know that Gephardt was the fellow with those beautiful young kids. (That little girl! She didn’t like that camera, one bit! ... Well, they knew how that was ...)

Of course, Gralike had ads, too. But he didn’t have those lovely kids—no kids at all, to judge from his ads—or sunshine, or grass ... just men in suits, shaking hands ... and—woe unto Gralike—
photo-gray glasses
... that turned dark in the bright light ... dark glasses in the middle of a dark face ... a union man, hmm?

In the end, it wasn’t even that close: Gephardt beat Gralike fifty-five percent to thirty-seven—by sixteen thousand votes. (The next day, Dick was on the phone to the unions ... to tell them how
glad
he was they were on the same team now. See, he didn’t want them to feel bad—have a hard time coming to him.)

He would have a Republican opponent in November: Joseph L. Badaracco, a well-known man, former president of the Board of Aldermen ... but another old-style pol. Dick made him look like part of the problem.

The race with Badaracco was even more lopsided: Dick won by fifty thousand votes ... and two months later, he was on his way to Washington, where he was invited to the White House, and he found himself (he could hardly be-
lieve
it), shaking the new genius-President’s hand.

W
HEN THEY SET OUT
to run for the White House, Dick and Jane went to see the Carters. Plenty of Democrats made public pilgrimage to Plains, but Gephardt didn’t go for a photo op. He wanted to sit down and talk ... actually, he wanted to listen.

When you got down to it, he meant to run Jimmy Carter’s campaign—twelve years later, different issues, new wrinkles, but still, he meant to hike the trail that Carter blazed. He would come out of nowhere, win Iowa ... get the bump ... and then the hot light would hit. Dick had to be ready. He had to know how to run in the South, how to make his campaign truly national; had to know what the press would do, how to get the money while his name was hot, how to tie down the pols who meant to ride with a winner ... how to build momentum until his nomination, like Carter’s, could not be stopped.

So he sought Carter’s advice, and he followed it. He started early. He made sure his contact with Iowans was not only broad, but deep—and deeply personal. Though his money was tight, he staffed not only Iowa and New Hampshire, but offices in several southern states. He picked his campaign team, and he backed it—even in the worst times, he never second-guessed. He worked small towns, and corn boils, church picnics, county fairs ... he did everything, in short, that Jimmy Carter did ... did it just as hard, and much longer ... and with two months before the Iowa caucus, he could see ... it hadn’t worked worth a damn.

Why wasn’t it working?

Dick had asked himself a million times, answered himself maybe fifty different ways ... and tried to fix every problem he discerned. Meanwhile, things got worse.

After the NBC debate, the
Register
’s December poll showed him fallen ... to six percent.

After five years of effort, after 110 days campaigning across Iowa, after thousands of hours in the air, and tens of thousands of rent-a-car miles, after tens of thousands of staff hours, tens of thousands of phone-bank calls, after more than a million dollars, after personal visits to ninety-four counties, after rallies, meetings, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, picnics, fairs, ice-cream socials, cocktail parties, meet-and-greets, coffee shops, motel meeting rooms, main street strolls, senior citizens’ homes, factory floors, auction barns, grain elevators, farmyard tours, debates, press conferences, interviews, photo ops, satellite stand-ups, speeches, notes, phone calls, visits-at-home, candy-for-the-hostess, and flowers-to-the-hospital ... after thousands of deliberate personal acts of will and wile, by Dick and every Gephardt, all in blandishment of one sparsely peopled midwestern state, he had won and held ... six percent.

It could not be true.

He was better than that!

There must be a mistake!

But if there was not?

And if his hardy six percent read this poll and felt, as he did, the chill of disaster on the back of the neck—how many would stay with him? How many could he count on?

Dick got another piece of advice from Jimmy Carter—a warning, really.

“You will reach a point,” Carter told him, “where you can only be sure of two votes—yours and your wife’s ...

“That’s when you’ve got to still go on.”

Gephardt got a day home after the latest poll hit the streets. It was a good time to be out of Iowa. Matt picked him up at the airport. He had actually cleaned Dick’s Pontiac—took it to the
car wash
. ... That was the first sign.

Dick had promised to help Matt set up the Christmas tree. Jane backed off, to let those two be together. Matt was full of questions—but only certain questions.

“How’re
you
doing, Dad?”

“Where have you been lately?”

“Are you tired?”

“How do you
feel
?”

That’s when it sunk in on Dick: his kids were worried about him. Matt never brought up the polls ... but, of course, Dick knew that Matt read everything.

At dinner, the girls were the same way: never mentioned the polls, but...

“Are you okay, Dad? ... Really okay?”

Was he? What was okay? Yes, he was tired ... after years of pumping up a balloon that always seemed to have a hole in it somewhere. He was worn down ... but he didn’t want to lose. Not like this. In ignominy.

Could he really expect to win?

And if he could not win, then ... what was it for?

Somehow, he had to get back to the why ... and why
now
?

Back in ’81, ’82, when Reagan was new and strong, the President had set the agenda, and swept all opposition before him. The feeling Dick remembered was helplessness ... being shoved to the margins. He would have meetings with his Democratic colleagues, they’d plan, they’d propose, they’d put together packages ... and then Reagan would call those phones in the cloakroom ... and their votes were gone. Their plans were air.

Now Reagan was out of steam, not even treading water. But you still couldn’t get the people together to
do something
. Not with a veto in the White House. Not with the members running scared. Their districts might not like it if they stuck their necks out. They had to take care of this group, or that. ... And there was no one to get them together.

Dick liked the House, he loved those guys (by now, he’d signed on eighty of them to back his campaign) ... but, Jesus, what a mess! Planned chaos! ... Four hundred thirty-five members, running half-crazy with their separate agendas. And
nobody had the power
... to do
anything
.

That’s what shoved Dick out to Iowa. Someone had to supply the will to
do something
. He didn’t have all the answers. But the point was, he’d
do something
. And if that didn’t work, he’d do something else. That was the why—to get something done. And that was what he had to offer, that will.

But this was the awful calculus of the polls:

How could he swallow that will now, that ambition, that drug of denting history? How could he go back to the House now, with his tail between his legs?

Powerless? ... His life had never seen that sort of futility.

He could not do it.

He would not go back!

He would return to Iowa, and make a move ... or it was over. Not just this campaign—all the campaigns. He was not going back to the House.

He told Jane: this was it. They’d fight it out on this line ... win or lose—then it was over. All of it. They’d talked about the money for college (Matt was a junior, applying next year) ... maybe they’d have to sell this house, or the house in St. Louis, maybe both ... well, maybe it was time to make money—Dick could practice law.

He talked about where they’d live, what they could do. He talked about spending time with Matt, and the girls. Time was precious—they wouldn’t be home for long ... God, he’d missed the time! They wouldn’t have to run from this campaign to St. Louis—another campaign to save his House seat. They could take a trip!

Jane didn’t say much. She wasn’t one to count her chickens ... she was just relieved to hear Dick working up all the good things ... so much happier. She’d missed that.

Back in Iowa, they had no idea what had happened to Dick at home. How could they know he’d rolled up his safety net, and was swinging free over the floor? He never said a word.

Ethel Klein was on the phone the next morning, back to Steve Murphy in Des Moines, as Dick came out of his first event. She said into the phone: “Dick just gave me a big thumbs-up. He’s got this huge grin. Is there some really great news? ... Or has he completely flipped?”

The Washington HQ was going to hell ... rumors that everybody was fired. There was bickering among the killers, great struggle and teeth-gnashing over the ads. The campaign was flat out of money. They were going to have to close up the South ... those people would have to make their way to Iowa—limping into the last fort ... with Apaches already at the gates.

But Dick was beautiful: funny, tireless, full of good juice ... he made his speeches, and then at every stop, he did a second event for his people, his captains—pep talks—as he poured his will into them. “What I want to do tonight, is to get
you
to
believe
. I’m looking you in the eye now. ... My mother always said, when you talk to someone, you look them right in the eye. I want your commitment! I want your belief! Because if I can get you to believe ... then we are going to win this thing, and we are going to change this country. ... WE HAVE THE POWER!”

And all of a sudden, he had them standing, yelling:

GEP-HARDT
...

GEP-HARDT
...

GEP-HARDT
...

No one could figure it out. They only knew that for the next month, by force of pure conviction, Dick Gephardt carried that campaign on his back.

B
USH COULDN’T UNDERSTAND—
why wasn’t it working? This was the state where he’d made it happen, where he’d felt Big Mo settle on him like the hand of God. He’d worked his heart out in this state—two
years
, against all odds. And he showed he could win!

That was Iowa, 1980. Not so long ago ... same people with him now ... and he was the same guy, same kind of winner, maybe better. Hell—sure he was better! So why wasn’t it
working
?

He had liked those odds, starting out ... back in ’77, ’78. His name recognition stood at zero-point-three percent. One in 333 voters knew Bush’s name. His three staff kids (Jim Baker hadn’t even come aboard—he was running, unsuccessfully, for Attorney General of Texas) would, in time, call themselves the Asterisk Club: Bush was an asterisk in every poll.

The campaign ... well, they called it “George Bush’s two thousand closest friends.” That was the major asset: Bush had the Christmas card list, his politician friends from the RNC days, his business friends—quite generous with money—and his school friends. That turned into money, too. Bush had been chairman of Campaign for Yale, an ambitious reendowment of Old Blue, which, by degrees, became Campaign for Bush.