Caucus de Iowa, 1988: "¡También es tu lucha!"

Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Michael Dukakis, Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, Bruce Babbitt y Paul Simon posan antes de un debate en Iowa en septiembre de 1987. (Foto: LIFE).

Para un candidato semidesconocido o inesperado con un buen argumento, una minúscula victoria en el caucus de Iowa puede ser la catapulta hacia la Casa Blanca (si es un candidato de amplia base y con fondos para competir después en los grandes estados) o la cumbre de una campaña presidencial sin más recorrido. Para Dick Gephardt, congresista de la vecina Missouri, fue lo segundo. En su libro What It Takes: The Way to the White House, sobre las elecciones de 1988, Richard Ben Cramer nos cuenta con mucho humor cómo Gephardt pasó de ser un candidato sin rumbo a encabezar las preferencias de los demócratas iowanos cuando dio con un tema potente: la protección de la producción nacional. La narración de los hechos es muy larga, por lo que, para amenizar su lectura, os dejo cinco hits musicales de los meses previos a la temporada de primarias del 88: Walk Like an Egyptian de The Bangles, Alone de Heart, Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now de Starship, Bad de Michael Jackson, y Here I Go Again de Whitesnake.

OF COURSE HE WANTED to win—wouldn’t have tried if he didn’t think he could. But when he started—when was it? four years ago? almost five!—Dick Gephardt didn’t think he could lose.
 Not that he thought himself inexorable victor—no, the odds were always against him. But if he just did well, if he ran a decent race ... he’d have to end up better. A national figure, a force for the future!
 It was strange, but the road to the White House was the path of least resistance. Dick made the turn in ’83, after Senator Tom Eagleton tipped him off: Eagleton would not run again in ’86. He was going to announce his retirement, and he wanted Dick to jump in the same day—say he meant to be the next Senator from Missouri.
 Well, it was a hell of an invitation. Dick could emerge anointed, with Eagleton’s blessing, Eagleton’s money. (Lou Susman, the Senator’s high-dollar man, was more eager than Tom! ...) But it would have been bloody—a primary, statewide, against Harriett Woods, a go-getter liberal, a hard campaigner ... a woman. It made Dick edgy: he’d have to talk about abortion. Gephardt had always voted with his district—pro-life—to outlaw abortion. But he didn’t want to climb into bed with the antiabortion zealots in Missouri ... they were crazy! Anyway, after that, he’d never be able to get outta bed. He could never run nationally as a pro-life Democrat (unless he meant to do without Democratic women).
 So, Dick didn’t jump. And when he balked at running statewide ... well, the only choice was to go national. Jim Wright was already angling for Speaker (after Tip announced his retirement), and Dick could have made that a fight ... but talk about bloody! He’d end up with enemies aplenty, even if he won. So he contented himself with Chairman of the Caucus—fourth in the leadership. That was his ticket to the top ... and it wouldn’t upset anybody.
 Actually, the job was perfect: he could make of it what he chose—for instance, a straight shot to the evening news. Dick would be invited to speak for the Party, get out front to define the agenda. That would carry him all over the country ... new friends, new connections ... he was already running flat out for ’88. At least, he was out there to offer himself, as he’d offered himself on St. Louis doorsteps. He’d see how it went, how people reacted ... what did he have to lose? The filing deadline for his House seat would fall on March 29, 1988 ... three weeks after Super Tuesday. The worst that could happen: he’d be back in the House—a stronger runner, after a practice lap.
 But five years has a way of changing a man’s mind. So much effort, by so many people ... people counting on him. Other people’s money, promises to keep ... all the problems he’d talked about for years—as if he knew—now, he knew.
 He’d voted, every year, for Meals on Wheels. Nice program: food for old people. Who’s against it? ... Dick was for old people—“senior citizens,” he called them—always scored high on the rankings compiled by their lobbyists. But now, in Iowa—a campaign event, a photo op—he delivered a Meal on Wheels. And this old lady came to the door, on her walker ... she was so happy he was there. She wanted to tell him what it meant ... the food was fine—but what it meant was, a person came by, every day, to ask for her ... a person who cared. She could live in her own house. She didn’t have to sit in some warehouse for old bones. (She didn’t call it a “senior citizens’ home” or a “Title-Eight, Type-Two, Long-Term Health-Care Facility.” It was that brick box across town, where people went in and never came out.)
 He visited the GM plant in Fremont, California. It was shut down in 1982 because of low productivity, high worker-absentee rate, high defect rate ... maybe the worst plant in the company (which was going some, in GM’s case). And then GM switched it over to building the new Chevy Nova—a joint venture with Toyota—and replaced the plant’s top brass. The new manager came from Japan: the son of Mr. Toyota himself. Well, the defect rate went down—among the lowest in the corporation ... lower absentee rate, higher productivity. The high muck-a-mucks were eating with assembly-line workers in the same cafeteria, the workers were meeting in quality councils, showing up before shifts to do calisthenics ... and they felt great about it!
 That’s just what he’d been talking about—attitude! You get people together and find out what they want ... and then do it!. You could turn it around! That’s what the country had to do. That’s what he could do ... what he had to do!
 It’s like a drug, the feeling you could make a difference—a big, thumping, history-denting difference in the lives of all those people, those hundreds of thousands of hoping, hurting individuals who have stared at you in school auditoriums, coffee shops, and living rooms. The twelve hundred men and women from the J.I. Case plant, in Bettendorf, Iowa, whose jobs took off one day and landed in South Korea—he wanted to tell them, things would be better ... he would make them better ... he could do it!
 But he had to win.
 And that was different from not losing.
 And the twist in his belly, that end of September 1987, was he was not winning. He wasn’t even not-losing. When it mattered most, to him ... he was sinking like a stone. But worse than that, he’d stand on a courthouse lawn (his seventy-ninth county!) and he’d wind up his speech ...
 “Give me your will ...
 “Give me your vision ...
 “Give me your commitment ...
 “Give me your belief ...
 “And, together, we can make America great, and strong again.”
 And maybe there’d be forty souls, forty pairs of eyes, maybe thirty seeing him for the first time ... and he could not see in them any faith that he could make the difference. He could not even read belief ... that he wanted to make things better.
 What he saw was suspicion.
 Even before Joe Biden withdrew, everybody knew ... it was Gephardt who did him dirty.
 It started in the sour soup of the pack, of course. Not that it showed up in stories ... but still, everybody knew. Tell the truth, the pack was edgy—this Karacter Kop routine was screwing up their campaign, their own shining shot at History! Candidates toppling like trees in a clear-cut! Where would it stop? People were blaming them! ... So, someone was gonna pay for Biden. That video started the whole sooty snowball—who sent it?
 Gephardt, Gephardt, Gephardt ...
 The wise-guy community echoed back this delicious and well-known poop, the more avidly in Iowa (they might be in Council Bluffs, but hey!—they were in the know). And from that point, it was an epidemiological certainty that the “activist” population would be infected.
 People stood up at events and asked Gephardt: Why’d you do it?
 Gephardt said he didn’t do it. As far as he knew, no one in his campaign did it.
 As far as he knew! ... Wasn’t that wiggle room?
 Even if they believed him—say, half those staring citizens on the courthouse lawn—they didn’t believe for long. Their neighbor heard for sure. ... Anyway, this thing spread like herpes B—no way you’d catch up with one man in a Ford van.
 Dick was supposed to be bringing in the old Biden folks ... forget it! Lowell Junkins, the top of Biden’s Iowa heap, the last Democratic candidate for Governor, was jobbing Gephardt every chance he got. And as he was the one man the big-feet consulted to find out where Biden-folk were likely to land ... his chances were legion.
But the press didn’t need persuading. They’d always had that Gephardt figured: the man would do anything! (He made his mother move to Iowa ... what is she? Ninety?)
 It was like his flip-flop on abortion ... the guy got off the pro-life wagon just before going national—how convenient.
 Then he discovered the trade deficit because he needed the unions.
 Then he signed onto Harkin’s farm bill because he’d need the farmers.
 It all fit, see ... not just David Doak and Bob Shrum plotting to ruin Biden because they hated Pat Caddell. The whole Gephardt operation was a band of desperadoes! The newest was Joe Trippi ... brilliant, yes, but his pockets were filled with grenades—everybody knew that! Trippi was going to do message—God only knew what Gephardt would say now, now that he’d tailored his whole image to Iowa ... that whole Eagle Scout thing ... and Iowa saw through it. (D’you see the poll? Guy’s fallin’ apart!)
 Now there were rumors Gephardt meant to sack his Iowa operation (after Fleming put an army out there for him!). Was he getting rid of the guilty parties?
 Everybody knew something was fishy in that Gephardt office. You never even saw those people out to dinner! ... Teresa Vilmain, head of the Dukakis Iowa campaign, threw a party—it was for the Biden folks, but everybody came ... everybody but the Gephardts. That’s what people talked about, all night—and days thereafter. Not one Gephardt person! Teresa was nobody’s fool—she wouldn’t invite them! The Duke’s people hadda know something ... right?
 Missss-ter Eagle Scout!
 Dick was without tools to combat this disaster, unequipped by experience. His life’s method was built on the certainty, the requirement, that people would look into his eyes and see he was decent, optimistic, patriotic, faithful to the Lord, considerate of his fellow man. ... Seldom had he been mistrusted—never attacked.
 He had no idea what to do.
 His problem could not be solved by denial—they did not believe him. And his constant instinct in times of trouble—to work harder—was useless. He could not prove a negative by visiting three more Iowa counties, not even three a day. The intensity of his effort just made it worse. It made him laughable—the dread and fatal affliction.
 His issues, his program, offered no protection: people did not believe that he believed in his issues ... they were campaign-convenient, too clever by half. Reilly took polls in Iowa on the trade issue. Almost eighty percent of the sample agreed with Gephardt’s position ... but they wouldn’t vote for him.
 That’s what was dawning on Gephardt: it was about him ... the issues, the organization, were only important insofar as they showed him. ... And not in the comfortable, unassuming way that had always worked before: Dick Gephardt, honest broker ... that nice young man who helped the community association with its articles of incorporation ... that knowledgeable young Congressman who cut through red tape at the VA ... that patient legislator who sat through 165 conference committee meetings, just to buff the burrs off that Gramm-Rudman bill.
 No, that was not enough.
 “People in this country look at politicians like doctors—solve the problem ...” That’s the way Dick talked about his discovery. “They don’t really know about the gall bladder ... so they want to know something about the doctor.”
 This wasn’t like his other campaigns. It was not just more doorsteps—this was something else. He would have to be something else. There were millions of people out there, going to pick their President. It didn’t matter how hard Dick worked—he was not going to lock the baby blues on their faces and listen to them all. They weren’t going to get in a room with Dick and figure out what they wanted to do. They wanted one guy, at the front of the room, to tell them what they were going to do—or, at least, what he meant to do.
Dick said, one day, in a plane over Iowa: “You know what’s the amazing thing? The people elect the President ...” He announced this with a grin of wonder—such a radical idea! “That makes all the difference. Isn’t it un-be-liev-able? All those millions of people ...”
 Seeking one guy, of size, to fill the stage.
 Problem was, he did not know how to be that man, or show himself to be that man ... to bestride the stage, to impose his person. He could not impose himself upon his own campaign.
 The most corrosive thing was, he could not know. When they came at him about the Biden mess, he didn’t think his guys had done it. He’d never heard about it ... but ...
 He asked Carrick, who said he was sure they hadn’t done it ... and Dick found himself listening in Bill’s murmur for the thump of conviction.
 So began the Great Chain of Doubt.
 Because there was no conviction in Carrick’s voice. He didn’t know ... surely, he ought to know ... but Doak and Shrum did hate Caddell ...
 And Doak knew he hadn’t done it ... but Carrick ... or Shrum! Shrum thought Biden was wifty anyway, and he would’ve known those Kennedy quotes cold ... but Shrum was in Italy when those quotes came out, and ... no, probably wasn’t Shrum.
 Of course, Shrum knew he hadn’t ... but Trippi—would he do it without telling? Could Joe do anything without talking about it?
 Hell, Carrick could! Or that kid he hired for Deputy Press, that little killer, Mark Johnson: ambition on his face permanently, like a birthmark! That kid could have done it ...
 Carrick could have told him to ...
 Dick could’ve told Carrick! ...
 “Mrs. Gephardt, did your husband put out the attack video?”
 Jane got the question from a reporter in Idaho. She had to ask what he was talking about. She always liked Joe Biden—such a charmer! What was going on? She called the campaign, and Don Foley told her Dick was saying he had nothing to do with it. The line of the day: “We don’t run that kind of campaign.”
 Well, that’s exactly what Jane had said. Dick had never run that kind of campaign ... but this was a new kind of campaign.
 “Have Dick call me as soon as he can.”
 That night, Dick told her not to worry—they hadn’t done it.
 “Are you sure? ...” Jane knew they were all “professionals,” all the new people. Maybe this was part of the deal. “How do you know they didn’t?”
 Dick said he’d asked Carrick—and he had to back his guy! That was the deal with Carrick.
 Jane said quietly: “You don’t know anymore.”
 He’d make his move in Iowa: get rid of Fleming, bring back Steve Murphy, the almost-Campaign-Manager whom he’d dumped for Carrick. Murphy had licked his wounds and was looking for a role. And he was, in Dick’s felicitous phrase, “a real ass-kicker.” Murphy would take names.
 It wouldn’t look good—bound to get bad press: GEPHARDT CAMPAIGN IN DISARRAY. ... And Dick never liked bearing bad news. But he had to! All his effort, money, hope ... he sure as hell had to know what was going on! Dick had decided to make this campaign his campaign.
 But it was like watching a kid learn to walk—one or two bold steps, then he’d fall over again.
 He’d fly out that weekend—had a debate there, anyway—and he’d tell Fleming. (Well, actually, Carrick would tell Fleming—but Dick agreed!)
 Murphy couldn’t move to Des Moines for a week or so, but Dick was already talking to him, telling him the problems:
 The schedule was stupid—they were plowing the same ground, over and over.
The field work was sloppy—people told Dick they’d tried to volunteer, no one ever called them back.
 The speeches were always late—Dick didn’t see them till the day he had to deliver the words.
 “Well, all you gotta do is call ’em up and tell them,” Murphy said. “Tell ’em what you want—demand it! You know? ... Get mad!”
 Dick said: “Okay, good ... we’ll do it.” But he never called.
 Meanwhile, till Murphy came, Trippi had to hold the fort—which was still besieged by suspicion. ... The latest from HQ was, that Deputy Press kid, Mark Johnson, had been handing out clips on Biden’s troubles—right in the middle of the feeding frenzy. Chrissake! The kid was Carrick’s hire ... but he had to be stopped.
 So Trippi pulled an Al Haig (“As of now, I am in control here”) and put out a memo—to everyone—forbidding any talk to the press without his explicit permission. In fact, he forbade talking to the candidate without his permission.
 Then Don Foley went nuclear. He’d been Dick’s Press Secretary for ten years ... been working with Gephardt since 1970, since Don was a senior at St. Louis U and an eager lawyer-pol named Dick Gephardt had come by to organize Students for Symington. Foley was the one guy who knew Gephardt from back when. Foley was the one who told Gephardt from the start: this was his campaign ... his values, his method ... his person. (And Foley knew: that’s why Carrick had to coup him. That’s why Carrick “helped him out” with an assistant, Mark Johnson, the Pit Bull—the kid actually liked the nickname!—and why Carrick gave Johnson the word: Hey, if something should, you know, happen to Foley, well, the job is yours.)
 So Foley went straight to Dick: This has got to stop! How could Foley do his job, help Dick ... when Carrick and his killers were trying to cut off Don’s nuts? This memo ... after eighteen years, Don had to ask permission to talk to Dick Gephardt? It was ridiculous!
 Dick agreed.
 Don said: “Dick ... it’s got to the point, I’m thinking of leaving.”
 Dick said he’d hate to see that.
 Well, then, now was the time, Don said, for Dick to put his foot down. Tell them what you want: Don Foley will be the spokesman, handle the press, travel with the candidate ...
 Dick said he really couldn’t interfere.
 So Foley was history ... and just as the Kops were rooting up the forest floor, like hogs after a truffle, snouting out Dick’s Karacter ... there was no Foley to explain, to tell the old stories. ... No, the campaign ended up with Mark Johnson prowling the press pens.
 And he had been peddling hot clips on Biden ... to CBS ... where they fell into the hands of Lesley Stahl ... who found out they’d come from ... the GEPHARDT CAMPAIGN!
 So she promptly went on the air with the first public confirmation that, indeed, the Gephardts were promoting dirt on Biden.
 Dick was so wounded. And mystified: How could this happen? They were making him look like a schemer, a liar! ... He went so far as to call Lesley Stahl, to protest: This is really unfair!
 Mark Johnson went further (this could affect his future!) ... he called Dan Rather. Of course, Johnson didn’t get through. But he gave Dan’s assistant an earful. He wanted a retraction!
 Well, word must have got through ... because Rather went on the air, the next night, and stuck it to Gephardt again.
 So Carrick had to swing into action.
 He gave the candidate a stern talking-to: “Dick! Y’don’t pick a fight w’the goddam networks ...”
 And he called a meeting, a manage-the-damage. Dick had to come in for that.
 They went round the table—who did what?—because they had to know where they stood. They ran through the answers to every charge—explanations for everything. Dick sat quietly through all that.
But when they got to the Lesley Stahl story, he picked up his briefing book ...
 “This just shows ...” he said.
 He was standing now, in front of his chair.
 “... you can do nothin’ wrong ... and they’ll STILL ...”
 Gephardt slammed down his briefing book.
 “... FUCK ... YOU ... TO DEATH!”
 They were aghast. No one said a word. They’d never heard him talk like that. They looked at each other, then up at Dick.
 He was smiling. He’d never heard himself talk that way, either.
 He liked that. He’d got mad.
(...) DICK WAS IN IOWA, the following weekend, when he got his reprieve. Michael Duffy, from Time magazine, told him: Time had the story—it would come out Monday—it was the Dukakis campaign that put the hit on Biden.
 Thank you, Jesus!
 Gephardt had a brutal schedule, crisscrossing the state—west to east, corner to corner ... followed by a few hours’ sleep at his mother’s apartment. Loreen had decided to stay in Des Moines—the Lord had work for her. (It occurred to her that the birthday of Lou, her late husband, was ... February Eighth—the night of the Iowa caucus! ... “And did I tell you? The last four numbers of my Social Security card? ... 1988!”) And Dick had decided—one look at his budget had decided him—there was no use spending money on a hotel when Loreen had a perfectly good foldout couch.
 Sixteen hours of work, six towns, five hundred miles ... to a foldout couch?
 “No, it’s greeeaat!”
 See, it didn’t matter what he had to do. Didn’t matter that his message cops came to poke him after every speech. (“Dick, your first piece, up front, is that you’re gonna win ... so your close has got to be, ‘I want you on board, NOW!’ ... see? And it’s, ‘When ... WHEN I’m elected, I will not forget ...’ ”)
 Didn’t matter that the Japanese Trade Ministry had an operative dogging Gephardt’s steps. For God’s sake, they got her on his plane! ... She was an American, small and serious, who kept asking Dick to explain what was unfair about Japan. (“Congressman, could we go into the beef situation?”)
 Didn’t matter that the quarter was ending, and Gephardt had a hundred money calls to make. He had to pump up the total so the press wouldn’t label him a pauper. (“Is Mr. Mitchelson there? This is Congressman Dick Gep-huh—? ... He just hung up! He came right on, then he hung up! Hackhackhackheeheehee ...”)
 Dick was like a kid out of school for the summer. His whole body changed. He’d strip off his suit coat and toss himself into his airplane seat as if he’d lost twenty pounds overnight. Tail winds blew him into Muscatine forty-five minutes ahead of schedule. (“Early! Can you be-lieve it?”)
 They gave him a room at the tiny airport, and he meant to work the phones. Brad hauled out the laptop computer and scrolled the lists. But there was a TV, and Dick flicked it on—C-Span, of course. He stared with his head cocked. The show was Road to the White House, and this edition had a tape of Dukakis working an event. It was unedited—the tape just rolled on, unblinking ... a steady view of the Duke’s shoulder and cheek as he handshook (“Hi, Mike Dukakis ...”) his way through a crowd. It was banal—and revealing. You could hear every lame mumbled pleasantry ... every grunt.
 “This is what killed Joe Biden,” Dick said. “Video regurgitation. I mean, is this TV? Should this be on?”
 He started laughing at Michael’s halogen-lit mumbles.
 “Would this be on ... in any other country?”
 Brad held the phone, uncradled.
 Dick suggested: “South Carolina?”
 “Uh ...” Brad said, scrolling, “I got Minnesota.”
 Brad dialed. Dick made a few stabs, but people weren’t in—6:00 P.M., not the best time. So Brad brought in a TV crew from St. Louis—they wanted an update on their hometown boy.
 Had he changed?
 “Nope,” Dick said with a grin. “Not at all.”
What surprised him?
 “It’s like being in prison ... you never get to go where you want. You lose control. I expected us to have a plan, and we’d just go out and do our thing. But you’re just out there ... you lose control. You’ve got a plan—you plan for three years—doesn’t mean a thing.”
 The TV woman from St. Louis asked if that made him unhappy.
 Dick blinked once, slowly, and said to the lens:
 “No ... happy to be in this. Happy to be here. Happy to walk away. Happy to be alive.”
 Brad got the crew out. He was packing. They had a Democratic dinner in Muscatine ... no use falling behind now.
 But Dick got the phone.
 He held up a hand ... he’d dial.
 “Hey, Bugs!” he said. “What’s goin’ on? ...”
(...) THING ABOUT IOWA—no one could call it. The old rules seemed not to apply. The Gephardt campaign poured everything it had into the J-J, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. For Democrats, that was always the focus of the fall. Jimmy Carter won the straw poll at the J-J in ’75, and that put him on the map: he showed he could organize the state, he had the troops—after that, there was no stopping the man.
 And after that, of course, no Democrat would ever again ignore the J-J. Mid-November, every fourth year, they’d pack the hall, they’d hire on buses, they’d scheme and bribe for extra tickets, they’d dress their people like Let’s Make a Deal—whatever it took to “win” the J-J. ... And that year, the Gephardts went berserk. This was gonna show, the new team in Iowa could kick ass! This was gonna put the lie to their declining polls. This was gonna get them back in the network roundups, make the big-feet take notice.
 They were running out of dollars all over the country, and they poured thousands into extra tickets—they bought the floor. Joyce Aboussie rounded up a herd of St. Louisans and flew with them to Des Moines aboard a chartered jet. (That was the mildest of Joyce’s endeavors—what she wanted was a team of Budweiser Clydesdales to circle the hall, parading Dick’s name.) Carrick brought back Barry Wyatt, the Advance whiz who’d yanked Dick’s announcement into line, to move Dick in and out of the hall and whip the floor demonstration to a proper frenzy. There was a SWAT team of kids to decorate—they sprinted into the hall when the doors opened, climbed into the rafters, stood on each other’s backs to get their signs well up on the walls. (Dick would note no dearth of signs here—there were Gephardt stickers in the bathrooms!) Of course, they had Shrummy on the speech—first team—and Doak actually came! That’s how big it was. Doak was strolling the floor, next to Carrick ... walking together, talking and laughing—proud owners at Grand Opening—smoking big cigars.
 But by that time, alas, the cream was off the milk—skimmed by cruel circumstance, and a bit of heads-up politics.
 The circumstance: Judge Ginsburg, Reagan’s post-Bork nominee for the Supreme Court, was discovered to have smoked a bit of dope while at Harvard. By the time Gephardt got to the hall, all the Kops wanted to know was: Had he ever smoked marijuana? (Gephardt answered as he always answered character-queries: he looked them in the eye, and said, “No.” At which point, someone yelled the best—unanswered—question of the night: “Well ... why not?”)
 The politics: the Simon campaign convinced the state Party to cancel the straw poll ... there would be no vote, no clear winner in the papers the next day. So when the Gephardt faithful leapt up at their man’s introduction, when they made the whole place ache with noise, when they conga-danced in the aisles and poked their pole signs heavenward, when they stood on their chairs and bayed their man’s name at the roof, when they stomped on the floor till it seemed the balcony must come down, when they exceeded their time limit for “crowd response” by a factor of three, when, in short, they took over the goddam J-J ... well, there was no one to notice.
 Anyway, no one who could be trusted to notice. E.J. Dionne, in the next day’s Times, made no mention of Dick’s demonstration ... though Dick did get his own subhead in the story:

 HIT A BRICK WALL
Mr. Gephardt, who has spent more time here than any other Democrat, and has built a substantial following, was seeking to reverse the perception that his campaign, as one prominent Iowa Democrat put it, “has hit a brick wall.”

 And E.J. noted, higher in the story:

One candidate who likes the way things are going just fine is Mr. Simon, of Illinois. ... Mr. Simon seems especially strong among precisely the sorts of Democratic activists who attend the caucus.

 Simon! ... Gephardt couldn’t understand it. Paul Simon was a nice man—a friend of Dick’s, matter of fact: they had served together in the House, sometimes took the same plane home to their districts (Simon’s home was southern Illinois, closer to St. Louis than Chicago).
 Back in ’80, Dick even put Paul’s name up for Chairman of the House Budget Committee ... of course, Simon got slaughtered. Dick could have told him. But Paul said he had it. Jesus—just ’cause people told him they were for him! At least Dick could count votes! Paul might have a good idea, a lot of good ideas ... and was sincere, sure, good-hearted, independent ... but that was different from getting things done. Paul was off in left field (playing deep!) ... you’d see a vote: 364 to one ... that one was Simon.
 President Simon?
 But sure enough, after Dick had shrugged off all the bad press and installed his new kick-ass Iowa squad ... after he’d finally got the Biden monkey off his back ... and schemed and spent to take over the J-J ... after he was ready to make those polls jump up and say Hi! ... Who got the bump? Whose numbers shot up?
 Paul Simon.
 There he was—a Senator now, but same guy, exactly—saying the same airy nonsense, in the same honey-graham baritone: “Weee wanta guvvverment that caaares!” ... In fact, that’s what he wanted you to see: that he hadn’t changed a lick. He had the same pendulous ears, same folds in his face, same glasses, same stentorian Our-Friend-the-Government promises he had in 1956! ... And the same bow ties.
 That was his trademark, see ... and it was beautiful, Dick had to admit: all his supporters with lapel pins in the shape of bow ties ... instant identification, like the pictures of cows and chickens they use for the different parties in India. In other words, you didn’t have to know nothin’ ... that’s why Dick admired it so.
 “It’s a visual, see ...” That’s how Dick explained it, because that’s how his killers explained it to him. He’d ask:
 Why is Simon going up?
 Why is Dukakis going up?
 (While Gephardt’s falling below ten percent—the second tier!)
 Carrick and his button men would tell him those other guys were on TV with ads. It gave people a visual to hold on to ... and Dick’s ads were still a month away.
 So Dick was trying to think visually—think ahead to his ads. (It’s always the next hope in campaigns—the next thing, surely, will fix all the ills.) He had a legal pad on his knee while his small plane bounced over Iowa. He was sitting between the new members of his road crew: Debra Johns, who did press on the plane, and Ethel Klein, who did ... well, no one knew what Ethel did, but she was smart and she talked to Dick.
 Dick drew a box on his pad—big and neat, like Dick always drew—and on the left, he wrote “RAG” ... him. In the middle, he wrote “Duke,” and on the right, “Simon.” Then he wrote words for each. Under “RAG,” he wrote: “Midwestern, Honest, Young, Cleancut ...” Under “Duke”: “Leader, Massachusetts Miracle, Eyebrows ...” And under “Simon”: “Honesty, Caring, Bow Tie, Glasses ...” Then he sat and stared at the page, till he said:
 “See, after what happened to Hart, and Biden, and now Dukakis, people are fed up. Simon’s the symbol, antipolitics—the bow tie, the glasses, you add that voice: ‘I-I-I-I ... C-A-A-A-R-E.’ ... It doesn’t matter what Paul Simon says—everywhere he goes, he carries that visual in front of him.
“See, people look at Dick Gephardt, they don’t have a connection. ... ‘Young,’ okay, ‘Honest’ ... but then, they think, ‘Protectionist.’ They’re confused. They don’t know. See, what the image has to be is Energetic, Leadership, Doer, Fighter—that’s the visual we need.”
 Ethel finally broke in: “Yeah, but that visual is not passive, like the bow tie, or the eyebrows. If you want that image, you’ve got to be energetic, fighting all the time. You can do it—I’ve seen you enough to know you can do it—but you’ve got to BE it.”
 (That’s why Ethel was on the plane. As Brad Harris, the body man, catered to Dick’s body, so Ms. Klein ministered to the head.)
 Dick said: “Right. I understand ... be it.”
 But he was still trying to think of something like a bow tie. Had to have it! ... That, and he had to hit Simon—hard—at the next debate, the big one December 1, a network show, prime time, NBC! Brokaw! ... Democrats and Republicans. Everybody would watch. Dick had to go in and kill. ... That’s the other thing Carrick and the fellas had told him.
 Here is the official button-man analysis, from Joe Trippi (ex-Mondale, ex-Hart), Gephardt’s message-doctor, heading into the NBC debate:
 “It’s simple. ... Dick would never hit Simon. Why go after Paul? Paul is just out there, caring. You hit Paul, you look like a monster. Paul is Bambi, skipping through the woods, eating leaves. No one wants to kill Bambi.
 “But then we get out from under the Biden tape—it’s Duke, after all, and he looks like shit ... so Dick figures: ‘Jeez, all right! Finally, we’re gonna do something!’
 “And next time he turns around, here’s Bambi, running by in the woods, eating leaves, and Bambi is getting big!
 “Still, you don’t kill Bambi, right? Dick says to Carrick: ‘That’s not gonna last, is it?’
 “And Carrick says, ‘No. Can’t last. Don’t worry.’
 “And there goes Bambi, munching leaves.
 “So we’re into November, and Dick is slipping. The Biden thing left a sour taste. People in Iowa are looking for someone, anyone, without the smell of blood:
 “Gephardt, somehow, he was involved, right?
 “Duke, he had to fire his guys.
 “Jackson, he’s black—can’t win.
 “Babbitt is a wonk.
 “Gore won’t even come to the state.
 “Who’s left?
 “Ah, Bambi!
 “Bambi is getting bigger. Dick says: ‘When’s this gonna stop?’
 “Carrick tells him: It’s gotta stop. Don’t worry.’
 “Dick says: ‘The guy’s got thirty percent! I got ten, going south.’
 “Now, everybody admits: Simon is rolling. He’s gonna win Iowa big.
 “So who’s gonna kill him?
 “Babbitt? He’s the Son of Bambi. Babbitt is gonna kill no one.
 “Jackson is all peace and love. Gotta be. He’s a scary black man.
 “Duke doesn’t wanna kill Bambi. Duke thinks: ‘If Bambi wins Iowa and I win New Hampshire, then it’s just me and Bambi. ... I’m it!’
 “Gore? He’s not gonna touch him. If Bambi wins Iowa, Duke wins New Hampshire, then these two martians have to come south, to Gore. One talks about making better ‘cahs,’ and the other one says: ‘I want to spend a lot of money on poor people.’ Let ’em come!
 “Meanwhile, Gephardt, the one guy who might get to white, middle-class people in the South, will be dead meat.
 “So, in the NBC debate, Gephardt takes out a .357 Magnum, and blows Bambi’s head off.”
That simple. That’s why the killers were leaning on Dick so hard to go in and kill. ... They were sinking so fast, they were panicky. There must have been twenty debates that year, but they were nothing compared to this NBC thing ... that’s what they wanted Dick to know. This was it!
 That’s why they tried so many lines, wrote them on cards for him to memorize:
 “You know, Paul, I’ve heard you promise more aid to education, more grants for higher ed, a guaranteed jobs program, long-term health care for seniors ... so, there’s plenty of beef. What I want to know is—where’s the dough?”
 (That’s how they were going to hit Simon, see: Paul had no idea how to pay for Our-Friend-the-Government.)
 Then, the staff speechwriter, Paul Begala, wrote out on a briefing sheet: “Simonomics is just the flip side of Reaganomics.”
 Then, in a mock debate, Trippi blurted out: “Reaganomics with a bow tie!” ... They all had a giggle about that.
 But they should have known: you couldn’t toss four different lines at Gephardt—he was listening. The Washington staff used to call him Memorex. (Lately, it was RoboCandidate.)
 This time, the practice was harder, because Carrick and the boys brought in hotshot lawyers to play the other candidates. Their instructions: beat the shit out of Dick—make him hit back, make him kill. ... Of course, that, too, sent the message to Dick that this was the big one: suddenly, he was looking at $2,000-an-hour worth of Washington smart guys.
 But the thing was, he knew this was it. For God’s sake, it was December ... the caucus was nine weeks away ... it was network! All those millions of people! And he wanted to do something ... so badly—he was pushing himself harder than they were!
 So they were running mock debates, beating up Dick, and their smart-guy-Gore said something about Dick’s vote for Reagan’s tax cut. Dick just wheeled on the guy, started yelling:
 “Where were you? I led the FIGHT for the Democratic alternative! Where were YOU, Al? You were on the BACK BENCHES!”
 The button men were silent, staring. Dick had hit back! But it sounded screechy—like the interviews with pro wrestlers. It wasn’t ... Presidential.
 So Shrum broke in again. Now he was trying to back Dick off: “Uh, Congressman? I hate to say this, ’cause, you know, I always ... but that seemed, uh, a little harsh. Maybe we could try something like Dukakis does, where you say, ‘You don’t understand ...’or ‘Those are not the facts ...’ ”
 Dick cocked his head, said he understood ... but behind his eyes, that just turned the screws tighter. Why were they now telling him not to kill? They didn’t think he could do it? They were giving up on him! ... Or they were wrong? They changed their minds? ... They didn’t know!
 And from that point, Gephardt knew, he was alone. He’d always wanted their help. He’d always been good at asking for help. But this was the big one—and he was out there ... naked. They wanted him to kill, but be himself, but show some balls, but Presidential ... and there were no answers. He was going to have to get it from himself, and he didn’t know anymore where it was ... with all of them working on him, to rev him up, back him down—calm, it had to be calm, they said ... but as he left the room, there was Carrick, pounding his fist into his palm.
 Ethel Klein, who always talked like a shrink, called it a “generalized web of anxiety.” And it only tightened on the big night. First, there was Ethel, driving him through D.C. to the Kennedy Center. God knows why they wanted her to bring him. Maybe they thought she’d calm him down. But how could she? She didn’t even know how to get to the place! She was a New Yorker ... she wasn’t the body man, couldn’t answer his questions: Where do we go when we come in? Where do we sit while the Republicans are on? ... She knew what he wanted: some piece of certainty—just logistics!—but she was helpless, her hands white on the wheel.
Then they got to the holding room, and there were Doak and Shrum. That was another signal. Shrum hated debates, never came. He was like a playwright who can’t stand opening night—his beautiful lines get all screwed up, and people hate it ... but Carrick insisted. Shrum was trying to make jokes—that’s what Carrick told him: Lighten it up! But Shrum was a mess, and nobody laughed ... so pretty soon Shrummy didn’t have any jokes. He paced the room, chafing his neck with his Italian scarf, fiddling with the fringe on the end, like a hungry Jew waiting for Yom Kippur to end. “Dick,” he said, “you’re just gonna have to get me through this.”
 Doak was calmer—outwardly. He slipped into country-lawyer mode, like he used to when he had a big murder case, as a Public Defender in rural Missouri. Doak always tried to keep it simple—one truth for the jury to hang on to. Tonight, his one message for Dick was: Don’t ask a question if you don’t know the answer. And just to drive that home, fill the air, he told a story—one of his old murder trials. Doak had his client off, the case was going great, but the cop was on the stand ... and Doak asked a question when he didn’t know the answer: How did the cop know what happened in the house? So the cop went into forensics, how he pieced it together ... how this elderly lady, in her own home, was hit in the head, but then she ran through the house, and the guy hit her again, and she fought, and he hit her again where there was blood on the wall, and again, he bludgeoned her, where they found part of her scalp, and again, and he hit her, and hit her, until ... heh heh ... the jury saw that old lady’s brains and blood all over the walls ... heh heh—that case went down the drain.
 Dick was staring at Doak, like this was a bad dream: her brains on the wall? ... It was time to go. All the candidates had to meet backstage for their pictures, smile for the cameras. ... Jesse Jackson took the occasion to rally the Democrats. He wanted them to remember: Party unity. They didn’t want to give the Republicans ammunition. ... Of course, Jesse couldn’t know, but he was only turning the screws on Gephardt—like Bonnie Campbell, before the Duke-Dick debate! ... Well, Gephardt wouldn’t pussy out this time.
 So they got on stage, and it happened: Gephardt looked edgy, white under his makeup, bloodless, angry, wooden. He screwed up his first answer (though it was one they’d rehearsed forty times). In the audience, Shrum was looking through his fingers, like you do at a horror movie when you can’t bear to watch ... as Simon said something ... and Dick turned slowly ... and he hit him:
 “Paul, you’re not a pay-as-you-go-Democrat ... you’re a promise-as-you-go Democrat.”
 There was a moment’s hush in the hall—the attack had come out of nowhere ... and Simon, with his lips parted, just stared at Dick in quizzical paralysis—he looked stunned, almost sad ... oh, God! ... Bambi caught in the headlights.
 But Dick couldn’t stop: he hit him again—Simonomics is the flip side ... Reaganomics with a bow tie ...
 And no one knew how to stop the thing—least of all, Simon ... or Dick.
 So he hit Paul again: “Where’s the dough? ...”
 It was just like Doak’s hoary ax-murder, where the killer couldn’t stop. And even the knowing Washington crowd was sending up a low, rustling murmur of incredulous revulsion ...
 Until, mercifully, Gephardt was out of lines.
 In the holding room, while the Republicans were on stage, no one had the guts to bring it up with Dick. They talked about Gore (Dick had called him a back-bencher).
 “Well, he deserved it,” the killers said. They were trying to sound hearty. Dick was staring ahead, looking at no one.
 He had to bring up Simon himself:
 “I hated that,” he said.
 The killers had nothing to say. Ethel tried, but she was so panicky, she was squeaking. She wanted Dick to explain to her why it was all right: “I don’t know, I really felt, I mean, God, you know, you have to give people some access, some way to like you, and ...”
Dick turned on her—screaming at her face:
 “SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT! ... HE HAD TO TAKE THE HIT, AND SOMEBODY ... HAD TO DO IT.”
 That night the killers sent Dick home, went out and got drunk. What else could they do? It was over.
 Some unemployed pollsters had a people-meter operation rigged up in Iowa during the debate. The Iowans had dials with which to register their likes and dislikes. When Dick blew Bambi’s head off, the Iowans were so unhappy they dialed Gephardt’s graph off the bottom of the charts. When they walked out, Dick was at zero—not one person said they’d vote for him.
 Shrummy took to his bed, convinced he’d ruined the campaign—too many lines. The gloom filtered down through the Washington office. RoboCandidate had gone haywire—green slime was oozing out.
 And that was just Washington. The road show went to Iowa, 6:00 A.M. the following day. Dick looked terrible. The rest looked worse. They landed in Des Moines, and there was ... Ken Bode, NBC, full crew. Bode was full of beans and news of the people-meter disaster: Well, how does it feel to be the most hated man in Iowa?
 That’s all Dick got, all day, as he slogged east across the state:
 How do you explain your campaign falling apart?
 Looking back, how did you lose your lead?
 Would you say attacking Paul Simon was your last chance?
 No, he would not say ... but what could he say? He got to his last event, late ... and it was Waterloo.
 Waterloo, Iowa, was supposed to be his stronghold, a blue-collar town that had lost its jobs, UAW country. Gephardt had a big rally scheduled. Dick got to a holding room in the basement of a church: he had ten or fifteen calls, people to sign on. The local field man dialed, and Dick came on: “We need your help. ... You’re the kind of people who make things happen here ...”
 Not one signed on—he lost them all.
 He walked down the hall to his rally, and there was no one—well, twenty or thirty old folks, just the faithful. The UAW was supposed to bring in busloads ... no bus. No show. He started his speech, the stump speech, same speech ... but it was not the same.
 He started telling stories in the middle, talking about the people he’d met. And they weren’t polished stories, for effect. He was just talking. Like he meant to tell them what it meant to him, all those months—now that he’d got to the bottom. “You know, I took a meal to this lady—she was ninety-four years old, she came to the door on her walker ...”
 In the back of the room, the regional field man, Don Miller, whispered to the road show crew: “We’re in trouble ...”
 “Did you tell Dick?”
 Miller shook his head. It was the moment when the guys in suits stop telling the candidate the truth.
 Ethel Klein told Miller: “You have to do something. You have to make him feel good, tonight. You get somebody to call this guy!” Then she went to a phone and tracked down Carrick. Half a dozen calls. “You’ve got to call him,” Ethel said. “You have got to call this guy, tonight.”
 Dick was still telling stories:
 “This man said, ‘How’m I gonna send my daughter to college?’ And I saw the daughter ...” Dick stopped, looked away, like he could see the girl, still ...
 It was late. They needed sleep. But Dick needed this more. He had to draw these people to him—not to his candidacy, to him.
At the end, he did his pitch for precinct captains ... but he did not leave. He thanked every one of them for coming ... went around the room, shook hands with everyone. Still, he stayed.
 Then a farmer, Carroll Hayes, a thick guy with sideburns, in a jacket and cap, said to Dick, to everyone: “You don’t just need precinct captains. I’m a captain. Been with you a long time. You need money, too.” He put his ankle up on his knee, took out a checkbook, and wrote Dick a hundred dollars, right there.
 Dick said quietly, he’d never forget that.
 Then Hal Lennox walked up with a check. He was an IBEW man, and there were only a couple of dozen IBEW men with jobs in Waterloo. Hal wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t worked for a while. But he handed Dick a check for twenty dollars.
 It was almost midnight when they finally left—night-silence in Waterloo, and a sudden, soft snow. Ethel said to Dick at the car: “That was wonderful ...” She got his eyes, like Loreen used to do, and she told him: “You were so ... great.”
 In the hotel that night, Carrick called. He talked about the ads. This month, they’d be on. The ads were gonna be killers.
 Then the Iowa Field Director, Jim Cunningham, called: “Dick, there ain’t no quit in any of us. Only thing means a damn here is my Number Ones, and we’re up this month, thirteen hundred ...”
 Dick was played out. His voice was small. But he took the calls. ... At last, he called Jane. He always finished with a call to Jane.
 She could hear it in an instant. She always knew. The words were the same, but there was no air in him.
 “Bug-man, you’re the best,” she told him.
 Over and over: “You’re the best ... you’ll make it. You just have to believe you can do it. That’s what I learned from you, Bug-man. You can’t go by the polls. Believe in you! You’re the best ....”
(...) WHEN 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.
IT DIDN’T MATTER TO Gephardt who was in the lead. He wasn’t. A month and a half to the caucus, and the message wasn’t getting through. Six percent! He was better—he knew. He could feel it in the room, or the barn (he was doing farm rallies—he loved them) ... but it was too late to work forty folks at a time.
 Somehow, he had to make people listen anew—a lot of people, in a hurry. But with everybody chasing Gary Hart, Dick couldn’t get on the network news to save his life. And the papers—well, he only wished they’d ignore him. They were vicious!
 “Could we—just once!—get one decent story from the Post-Dispatch ... so we could raise a little money?” Dick would fume at the tearsheets from St. Louis: “They don’t understand! They’re killing the campaign!”
 And the Post-Dispatch was benign compared to the Register. Iowa’s biggest paper had a bad jones for Gephardt. It wasn’t the poll, though that was a monthly knife in his heart. The editorial page slammed him regularly. (Hey, they might be in Iowa, but they were just as tough as The New York Times!) And the paper’s political big-foot, David Yepsen, was the man who had let Dick twist in the wind ... for weeks ... when he knew, of course, it wasn’t the Gephardts who had handed him the Biden tape. In fact, the Register had written Gephardt off. In that newsroom, everybody knew ... Iowans had heard his message—plenty of it—and rejected it.
 Of course, Dick couldn’t accept that. People didn’t know him! He hadn’t yet got to them. Somehow, he had to get it across that he was for them ... the ads! It would have to be the ads.
 There would be four ads. They were going to be great. (Dick believed in Shrum—Bob was a genius!) One would be a bio, introducing Dick. Then, one for farmers, one about seniors, and one about trade. Some of Dick’s fellow Reps were urging him off that trade horse—people were tired of that—and the newspapers were hammering Dick for being “protectionist ... against free trade.” But Dick was not getting off any horse. Not any more. ... There were friends in Iowa who told him he could forget about seniors. Simon had the seniors all wrapped up. But Dick had Claude Pepper, the eighty-eight-year-old Representative from Florida—he was going to be in the ads. Pepper was Chairman of the Committee on the Aging, a hero to seniors and their organizations. In fact, Pepper was even in the bio ad, talking about Dick’s concern for health, which he developed, Pepper said, “in his young son’s struggle with cansuh ...” Jane didn’t like that reference at all. Loreen would go nuts. They’d always kept Matt’s health private. What would Matt think? Jane couldn’t even bring herself to tell him. She argued with Dick ... but the line about Matt stayed in. The ads were the next hope. Everything had to go into those ads.
 But the ads got held up—the killers were split. Now that they had to boil down the message, dream up a slogan to tie the ads together, no one could agree on a verb. Murphy, Klein, Trippi—who were trying to get Iowans to like Dick Gephardt—said they had to hammer the word “change.” People wanted a change. Carrick, and the killers back in D.C., said it had to be “fight.” That’s what this came down to—were they gonna fight? ... Murphy said “fight” wasn’t Gephardt: Dick would always split the difference. ... Someone from the staff tossed in “stand.” Maybe they could all agree: “Stand up for Gephardt ...” But that wasn’t really it (and Babbitt was already “standing up”) ... no. Carrick, Doak, and Shrum insisted it had to be “fight” ... but “Fight for Gephardt”? Iowans didn’t like to fight.
 So Dick had his yellow pad on his knee again, this time in the middle of sweating passengers and squalling babies at an O’Hare Airport gate, waiting for a flight to Des Moines. He was flying commercial—coach, at that. He’d left the road crew in Iowa: money was tight.
“I gotta get it down to five words,” Dick explained. “That’s what it’s gotta ...” He was drawing a neat square on his legal pad, as if he somehow had to fit the words into that box. “Something people can hold on to ... five words.”
 They had to be about him, but couldn’t be exactly him ... or not just him. That was the strangest part. Dick said he knew now: voters wanted someone larger than life ... Olympian. So it couldn’t be that red-haired lawyer from St. Louis who got home from work and fell asleep on the floor of his family room with his mouth open in front of the TV. ... No, they told you to be yourself, but they didn’t want you to be like yourself. They wanted you to be like a President! They wanted you to be something huge for them.
 “I’ll tell you the weird part—is when you stop. ... I was in Louisiana. Little town ...” He named the town. “I don’t think they’d had a Presidential candidate since, uh ... Millard Fillmore.
 “So, I get there, and there’s cops and motorcycles, and a limousine the size of Ohio. There’s the Mayor, and marching bands ... and they treat me like the King of Spain.
 “I do my speech, I get back in the limo, get to the airport ... and two hours later, I’m back in O’Hare ... hauling my suitcase off the plane ... carry it half a mile ... I gotta wait in line for a lousy hot dog ...
 “All of a sudden, I’m back, I’m a ... a, uh ...” He was hunting a word. “I’m a, uh ... a shit-bum!”
 But he wasn’t going to finish as a bum. No ... he stared down at his pad, as if it must hold the answer. But there were no words in the box.
 “It’s Your Fight, Too!” came from David Doak—and Gephardt loved it. Didn’t that just say it all? You know, not only was he out there for them ... but now, they had to stand up for him ... and for themselves! ... Beautiful!
 Murphy still tried to fight against “fight,” but it was time to shoot the ads, and no other word worked. (“What do you want?” Shrum protested. “ ‘It’s your tussle, too’?”)
 Anyway, the strangest thing happened. As soon as they started hammering down the ads—refining the scripts, sending drafts back and forth—Gephardt started using the lines. ... “They work hard all day to make a good product. ... If we don’t stand up for our workers, then who are we? ... It’s your fight, too!”
 And right away, he could see it in the crowds, the way they locked on ... finally, he was talking their language! And his speeches, his rallies, started giving off heat. Voices called to him, from the crowds:
 “Give ’em hell, Dick!”
 Dick would stop in his speech and call back: “I’m like ol’ Harry Truman—I just tell ’em the truth ... and they think it’s hell.”
 His van crunched to a halt in the snow on a farm lane, and he hopped up on a wagon in the barn—mid-December, cold like a meat car on a coast-to-coast train ... cold air through the walls, cold floor, cold gray light filtering in through forty feet of loft above ... great dull cold-steel mantis-machines, stored for the winter, looming over Gephardt like monster sculptural tribute to debt and difficulty, futile fertility—thousands of tons of Iowa corn that no one could sell.
 Dick was dressed in a ballcap and a bulky (borrowed) blue jacket that advertised a seed company. He shouted through the steam of his breath:
 “Costs about two dollars eighty cents to make a-bushel-a corn!” (Dick was talking full St. Louis now. ... He pronounced it “cahrn.”) You get about a dollar and a half for it ... that’s the program now! A few months back, it was a dollar!”
 “That’s right ... tell ’em, Dick!”
 “Why shouldn’t farmers vote on the program? ... Let’s pass Harkin-Gephardt and let the farmers VOTE on what the program is! ... You want a fair PRICE for your cahrn! ...”
 “Yeaahhhh!”
 “Give ’em hell, Dick!”
They were slapping their big gloves together, stomping their feet.
 At the back of the barn, Ethel Klein was clapping, too, squealing to be heard over the cheers: “He’s never done this before! It’s all him! It’s all him!”
 And Gephardt was so pumped up, he was screaming:
 “Lemme tell you something! I’m a Democrat that cares about the American worker and the American farmer ... AND I’M NOT GONNA LEAVE ’EM BEHIND! ...”
 Fight was the word—he’d show them a fight!
 They loaded him in the van, and Ethel got his eyes: “I am so proud of you ...”
 But Dick didn’t need that. His voice raspy from strain, he demanded of Brad: “What’s next?” He could hardly sit still.
 Problem was, there was Brad, and Ethel, Debra Johns, sometimes Trippi, or Murphy—Dick, and a driver, of course—and they still only needed one van. There wasn’t enough press for two. The big-feet weren’t going to screw around with a candidate at six percent. ... So there wasn’t any way to tell the world: Gephardt was fighting back.
 Every morning, at Loreen’s apartment, or a motel in some corner of the state, Dick would rip through the Register ... in vain. They just wouldn’t get it! At a press conference that December, David Yepsen asked Gephardt (rather, told him): “You sound horrible. You look tired. Do you really think you’re getting any votes here?”
 Then came Chickengate. It wasn’t much of a story. God knows who fed it to the Register. It was about some vote in Congress—a procedural vote on a poultry bill—and Dick had voted no (couldn’t even remember what the vote was; it was chickenshit). But the Register was going to prove with this vote that Gephardt was really against the farmers.
 Well, the story never caught on ... no one could understand it. But it did wonders for Dick. Because, finally, he realized: they didn’t like him. He wasn’t going to make a friend of Yepsen. He wasn’t going to get a good story from the Register. It wasn’t that he hadn’t got to them yet, hadn’t worked hard enough to get to know them. They didn’t want to be got to—didn’t want to know him.
 Can you beat that!
 It occurred to Gephardt that the message wasn’t getting through because they didn’t want it to get through! ... It made him angry.
 And that anger fed back into the ads, into the final scripts, and the shoot. They filmed about ten days before Christmas, and Dick poured his outrage and resolve into those ads. It wasn’t just the words, it was him and the camera—he could just do that: show that camera exactly what he meant. And what he meant to show was a steely indignation ... at the unfairness.
 Of course, the words were about unfairness to the workers, the farmers, the seniors ... to voters.
 But the anger was his.
 “You got any Contac or anything?” he croaked in the dark, aboard his puddle-jumper, heading east—his last stop in Iowa before Christmas. “I think I’m gettin’ a cold. ... At least it’s the end. Be home tomorrow night.”
 They had him scheduled the next day in New Hampshire—one last effort before decency required that he look like he was relaxing. One of the Iowa crew asked what he was going to do in New Hampshire. Gephardt shrugged.
 “I don’t know ... walk around.”
 He shook his head. Now that he was saying what he meant to say, it just didn’t make any sense to be doing ... well, half of what they asked him to do.
 Brad said: “Did you talk to Jane yet about that USA Today?”
 Gephardt slumped five degrees in his seat. “Not yet.”
USA Today wanted to shoot a family picture at his home—the day after Christmas. Dick hadn’t had the guts to tell Jane.
 Brad said: “So you’ll talk to her?”
 “Yeah ...”
 Brad started laughing. “When?”
 “Okay, I will ...”
 “Yeah, and, uh, we want a media hit in New Hampshire tomorrow ... so they want you to shop.”
 The look on Gephardt’s face was as close to disgust as he could manage. “What am I gonna shop for?” he said. “A seed hat?”
 “I think they want you to shop, uh, for Jane ...”
 Gephardt wasn’t paying attention. He liked that seed-company jacket—first time he’d been warm in a week. “It was lined, inside, like a sweatshirt. I wanna wear it ... I got to get out of this monkey suit. You know, when I go home tomorrow, I’m not gonna wear a suit. Blue jeans ... I HATE suits. When I was in Congress, I never wore my jacket. Got into a meeting, and right away, just threw it in a corner.”
 Gephardt was talking about Congress in past tense.
 “You know, I saw it on TV, the other night. Got in late, and I turned on the TV, and they had the House ... I saw it, like a citizen. The budget resolution. I mean, for hours ...” (He started waving his arms in a parody of an earnest solon.) “Mister SPEAKER! ... Heh heh hackhackhack.”
 The new Gephardt was molting before their eyes. And the road crew didn’t know what to make of it. He was good, loose, but ... maybe the guy was getting sick.
 “So, uh, Dick ...”
 Gephardt announced he was giving up ties!
 “I HATE ties. Always worried to death I’m gonna get something on it.”
 Brad pointed out it was his tie, not Dick’s.
 “Well, I’m giving it back.”
 “It’s up to you, boss,” Brad said. He looked worried, prim, in his own gray suit.
 “That’s what I’ll do,” Gephardt said. “I’ll shop for a tie for you. You’re the suit. Brad is the suit! Hackhackhack ...”
 Brad said: “I always feel I have to be dressed ... to meet the President.”
 There were three beats of silence in the plane. Brad was serious.
 President Dick said: “Yeah, but the President’s wearin’ a seed jacket hackhackhackheeheee ... I’m gonna, too. I’m gonna do it. This is it ...”
 Brad said: “Uh, so you’ll shop?”
 “Yeah, okay ... I’ll shop.”
 Which he did, the next day, at the Mall of New Hampshire. He did exactly what they told him: walked into a store, straight to the sweater (the Advance man had it all picked out), held it up while he smiled for the camera, took it to the register, and bought it for Jane.
 Which was great, except the Advance man forgot to check—the sweater was made in China ... which didn’t really bother Dick ... but it made for a snide little wire story (Mr. America First!) ... which The Des Moines Register ran the next day
(...) DICK GEPHARDT FLEW TO Iowa the day after New Year’s—five weeks to give it one more hard shot. His ads were on the air—they started the day after Christmas, and reaction was good. He didn’t know how good. (His vacation was four days’ skiing with the family, and Jane had docked his phone privileges—he only managed a few stealthy calls from the phone at the top of the chair lift.)
 But as soon as he was back in the state, he could feel the ads. The trade ad hit the hardest. Voters came up to Gephardt and quoted the ad back to him—as if, maybe, he didn’t know and they had to tell him about this ad ... unbelievable! It said just what he’d been talking about!
 So Gephardt started using the ad, almost word for word, in his speech:
 “We make a car here called the Chrysler K-car ... costs about ten thousand dollars in the United States. Competes against the Hyundai. That costs about seven thousand dollars. So that’s the competition, and I accept that. ... But if we took a Chrysler K-car and tried to sell it in Korea, they put on nine different taxes and tariffs ... and when they’re done, that K-car that cost ten thousand dollars here would cost forty-eight thousand in South Korea. ...
 “So, when I’m President I want to have a meeting with the South Koreans ... and I’ll say two things: first, we’ll keep our military commitments, because that’s the kind of people we are. We give our word, we keep it. But, second, I’m gonna ask them to take off the taxes and tariffs that we don’t have on their products. And if they don’t, they’re gonna leave that table wondering ... how many Hyundais are they gonna sell here, for forty-eight thousand dollars a copy!
 “They can bring the Mitsubishis, and the Toyotas, and the Mercedes-Benzes, and the Volvos, and the record players, and computers—all of it—I don’t mind it. But, by golly ... if they can bring their products here and sell them with ease, I want us to be able to take our products there—and sell them with EQUAL EEEASE! ...”
 That’s what Dick was talking—equalese! ... And now, every time he gave them equalese, the crowd would halt him with cheers.
 In a state hit hard by a slump in exports, where so many workers had lost their paychecks, lost their plants, as manufacturing moved overseas, the issue was a good one ... but, God knows, he’d been drumming Iowa with the Gephardt Amendment for years, and it got him ... six percent.
 True, these words were better, as he wasn’t talking about his arcane bill, or the unfathomable billions in the national balance of trade. He was talking about two cars (that they knew) and one (unknown) set of menacing Asians ... and that lent focus, a target for ire. ... But why would this new example turn the tide when, for years, they’d watched their own factories shut down and their neighbors or kin put out of work? Were they confused before about what Gephardt meant?
 No, but now he’d become something palpable in their lives. He was on that screen, whence the great world came to them ... not once, but several times a night: he was a presence, a force, of size, he was ... bigger than Geraldo!
 And just as angry.
 And more serious, more important ... almost (dare one say?) noble ... because, in the end, he was not on TV for money, or ratings, syndication, selling soap, no ...
 It’s Your Fight, Too!
 He was ... for them.
 And as TV validated Gephardt—made him larger than life, the size of celebrity (which is like in degree unto personage, or President)—so, then, his appearance in their town, their school, their neighbor’s home, or their own freezing barn, validated that enormous presence on TV. It was not just slick hoopla cooked up in Hollywood—or Washington. He was there ... and he said the same thing ... and they heard him, and cheered him, and they were, thereafter, linked to that huge figure on TV.
 And the last shining strand of this gossamer pulled straight back through the heart of the web ... because their cheers (so loud, so many new people!) validated Gephardt in his instinct, his effort, to be that man on TV.
 And when that happened (it was only a matter of days—Gephardt could just do that kind of thing) ... he was huge. He was coming like a freight train.
 And he knew it. He called his killers in Washington and told them: “This thing is gonna happen. We can win.”
 That’s when Shrum came out to listen to the new stump speech. If something was happening out there, he had to know. The next speech, the next ad, had to build from these new facts on the ground.
 So they drove Shrummy out to a one-street town—just a car dealership and a Catholic church, way up north, by the Minnesota line, where the windchill could crack the skin on your face. It was Sunday, they had to wait for people to come from church. And the farmers stood in Sunday-best, in a shed with a concrete floor, while Dick climbed onto a wagon in front, with his own new shiny green seed jacket on, a tractor behind him ... and he was belting it out:
 “Why shouldn’t farmers VOTE on the program? ...
 “Why should BIG GRAIN COMPANIES TELL YOU THE PROGRAM?”
 Shrummy tried to listen, but he had nothing on except a nice little corduroy jacket and a fine, white Italian scarf, and he was gingerly dancing on the concrete, where the cold ate through the soles of his Italian shoes, and ... well, he just couldn’t concentrate, with his feet, you know ... while he hugged himself for warmth and hopped on the cement, and he said: “No wonder these people are unhappy. S’not economic problems! It’s fucking cold here ... there’s not one decent piece of architecture, and no decent restaurants!”
 That was about the time the pack decided it was Shrum who’d created this monster new Gephardt—laid him down on a marble slab and poured in that angry populist juice. ... Everybody knew Shrummy was a genius.
 Had to be someone, see ... because the pack had written Gephardt off—the guy was a stiff! (Of course, they hadn’t watched him lately—who’s gonna watch a guy at six percent?) Then they’d gone home for Christmas, his ads went up ... and the first poll they saw when they drag-assed back to freezing Des Moines—the guy was even with Dukakis! (Their darling!)
 It was a trick—had to be ... a stratagem ... which they’d have to ferret out.
 Must be the ads—who did the ads?—Doak and Shrum! Those two sly desperadoes must have body-snatched ol’ Eagle-Scout-conference-committee-split-the-difference Dick ... and trotted him out for ’88 as a fire-breathing class warrior!
 So the big-feet went straight to the source—Doak and Shrum—and what could the boys say? ... That the Hyundai ad was Trippi’s idea? That Gephardt had been saying this same stuff for two years? That, so far, they’d gurued the man to the point where his kids thought he was going to lose, he had promised his wife he’d hang up his spikes, he was facing total political extinction ... he was fighting like a cornered marmot?
 No. Their man was on the move! This was their own shining shot—they’d be in all the books. Not to mention, this was their livelihood. (They’d grown to love those year-end ceremonies where they wrote each other million-dollar checks.)
 So they talked about the ads—modestly, becomingly—and they made sure to mention, Dick had input.
 And some of the press followed up on that tip, and rode along with Gephardt (he was so happy his herd was growing) ... and asked:
Who told him to talk so tough?
 What happened to Gephardt, the consummate insider?
 Wasn’t this kind of a transparent ploy? ...
 But Gephardt was no fun. He’d look them in the eye, and say, “No.”
 He had the gall to insist: he meant what he said!
 Of course, they didn’t believe that crap for one minute.
 He went to dinner with the editors of the Register. The maximum boss, Jim Gannon, was host at his house, and he had his editorial chief, Jim Flansberg, and the publisher, a fellow named Charles C. Edwards ... and their wives all came ... Gephardt brought Murphy. Gannon had the thing catered—drinks and dessert in the living room.
 It was a wonderful talk, a wonderful night. They liked him! Gephardt was sure. He’d been in politics twenty years. Surely, he could tell who liked him. Afterward, Dick called Carrick: “I think we really got to them. They caught on ... even the editors, I think ... they really listened!”
 Yes, they did. The next editorial in the Register was entitled: HITTING THE WRONG NOTE.
 “Actually, if you listen closely, Gephardt is not as protectionist as his stump rhetoric would indicate, but that’s not reassuring. It smacks of demagoguery, which may be his real problem.”
 That was the same day Gephardt picked up The Wall Street Journal, and read: “The farm crisis is over.”
 Gephardt leapt out of his airplane seat, waving the paper. “Look at this! This is the problem! Where do they get this stuff?” (Well, the Journal had an expert to quote: one James P. Gannon, editor of the Register.)
 The next day, Gephardt gave a blistering speech—a new phase of the campaign, he called it. He said he meant to refocus the issues: American jobs, the family farm, our children’s educations, Social Security, Medicare—they were all in jeopardy ... and why?
 Because the multinational corporations, the grain companies, the oil companies, the bankers, the Wall Street traders ... all of Reagan’s favored friends, were making money hand over fist by selling off America’s economic base! And what’s worse, the gray-suited savants of the boardrooms—and editorial boardrooms—insisted that American workers, farmers, old people, poor people ... must cut back their standard of living ... to compete!
 Dick called this cabal “the Establishment.” (That was Shrummy’s word.) ... Of course, the forty-year-old big-feet-in-bud went nuts; they hadn’t heard that stupid word since they’d failed to drive ROTC off campus!
 Who’d this guy think he was?
 Where was he in the sixties?
 At that point, the well-known poop on Gephardt leaked off the editorial page and onto the front page:
 GEPHARDT’S NEW TACTIC—ANGER
 It was so obvious! ... Gephardt’s rage was just a creation of Doak, Shrum, Carrick, et al. ... Just as the Eagle Scout, door-to-door Dick was their creation before. ... In fact—everybody knew—Gephardt had been their creation since the start of the campaign!
 That was the problem: the knowledge of this knowing claque reached back all the way ... to last February! ... Shrummy was try’na make this guy sound like Ted Kennedy!
 How could they know ... what “Establishment” actually meant to Dick was “big shots.”
 The way the big shots have it rigged, the little guy doesn’t have a chance!
 Dick didn’t sound like a Kennedy.
 He sounded like Lou Gephardt.
(...) ALL OF GEPHARDT’S KILLERS flew out to Des Moines before the big Register debate, January 15. They were primed and ready for a good twitchy wrangle on the message, the strategy, the electoral imperatives in the last Democratic face-off before the caucus.
 Of course, Dick had been through thirty debates ... but this was the big one for Iowa—three weeks before the vote. This could be the ball game. Not to mention, it was national TV, and the country would be watching for its first look at Hart-risen. ... How should they handle Hart? What if Hart came at Dick?
 They gathered in the party room at Loreen’s apartment building. They had most of two days blocked out on Dick’s schedule. They wanted to mount a mock debate; they’d videotape, critique the tapes. They wanted to rehearse his answers. The other candidates knew Gephardt was surging: there were bound to be attacks on his trade bill, his farm bill ... his campaign, his character! ... They had to have a game plan!
 But Dick already had a game plan. They might have been thinking about the message, but Gephardt had been doing it—eight times a day. He was on that weird white tractor beam that brushed away everything in his path. He was saying what he meant to say, more clearly than he ever had. What did he need them for?
 “Okay, what about the deficit figure?” Doak began. (The trade deficit had diminished—bad news for Gephardt’s campaign.) “What’re we gonna say?”
 But before Shrummy or another maestro could start, Dick said: “Look, it’s not numbers. It’s people. It’s American jobs. It’s American workers and their families ... that’s all I haveta say.”
 “Uh, okay ... well, what’re we gonna say if Duke says your agriculture bill will raise food prices?”
 Dick said, calmly: “Mike ... you know how much you pay for a boxa Wheaties? Buck and a half? Two bucks? ... You know how much goes to the farmer for that wheat? A penny and a half? Two cents? Four cents? ... If that price goes up two cents, you think that’s gonna hurt the American public? But that two cents makes all the difference to the family farmers of America. Why shouldn’t their labor earn them a living?”
 They ran through three or four more questions—just the toughest, the ones they’d been stewing over in Washington. And every time, Dick would answer—boom—it was over. After twenty minutes, Shrum said: “I move that we end debate-prep ... unless Dick’s got any questions ...”
 They looked to Gephardt.
 “Yeah,” he said, and his eyes fell upon Trippi. “Joe—find out: How much is the wheat in a boxa Wheaties?”
 Trippi was exultant. “Tonight,” he announced, before the debate, “you’re going to see a President of the United States.”
 President Dick!
 “He’s unbelievable. We didn’t even prep. He’s absolutely calm, absolutely certain. It’s scary ... he’s Mr. President!”
 Trippi had a highly developed theory on what a President was—though, alas, he’d never been able to make one. He started working Iowa for Kennedy in ’80 ... but Kennedy couldn’t knock off Jimmy Carter. In ’84, Trippi was in Iowa as the deputy maestro for Walter Mondale, who swept the state ... though, again, Mondale fell short in the end.
 That’s why Gephardt had his eye on Joe—Trippi knew Iowa ... Gephardt had to have Iowa. He started calling Trippi back in ’86—August ’86, the day Joe’s daughter was born. Trippi was a half-hour out of the delivery room when the phone rang:
“Joe? This is Dick Gephardt ... I just heard about the blessed event, and, uh, I just want you to know, I think it’s great!”
 Christmas that year, Gephardt tracked down Trippi at his in-laws. Dick was trying to decide whether to dump Murphy in favor of Carrick. Trippi told him: “Dick, you may have a problem ... I just want you to know, Murphy has told twenty people that he has your personal assurance ...”
 Within days, Gephardt had dumped Murphy. That’s when Trippi thought Dick might be a President.
 “See,” Trippi said, “he might have had to make that decision. That’s what I mean, being ready to be President ... it’s too important for personal loyalties.
 “That kind of decision—like cutting off a Pat Caddell ... Joe Biden will not have a problem making that kind of decision anymore.
 “That’s what we demand in a President.”
 But Trippi did not go to work for Gephardt—not right away. He went to Denver, to work for Gary Hart.
 “That was a man,” Trippi said, “who was ready to be President. He showed straight determination ... even after the bomb hit. That day when he had the press conference in New Hampshire—a hundred fifty banshees in that room, just trying ... to take ... him ... down.
 “It wasn’t once he was asked about adultery. They must’ve asked eight different ways. Joe Biden would’ve fallen apart. Anybody would have. But Hart stood there like a rock. He would not leave until there wasn’t anything left to ask. He took every bit of shit they could throw, and he handled it. He did ... whatever it took.
 “That’s a President.”
 So why wasn’t Trippi busy prepping Hart for the big Register debate?
 “No, that’s what I mean,” Trippi said. “There’s this horrible logic to the process. The next day, when Hart decided to go home, when he decided he couldn’t put his family through it, or the women who were gonna be named, or whoever ... when he put anything else before this ... then he wasn’t ready to be President.”
(...)  IN THE LAST WEEK, the Democrats were neck and neck ... and neck, like thoroughbreds pounding for the finish. The latest Iowa poll had it:
 Gephardt: 19
 Dukakis: 18
 Simon: 17
 That’s when Simon went after Gephardt—radio ads, accusing Dick of flip-flops. “Some candidates now profess to be friends of the working men and women, when their votes helped create the problems we face.”
 In the bar of the Savery Hotel, Simon’s wise guys were whining because their man wouldn’t go nuclear—put the ads on TV. But radio did the job: Gephardt got a steady drizzle of questions on his votes.
 The ’81 tax-cut vote was the favorite. Why did Gephardt vote for Reaganomics?
 Well, the short answer was, Dick voted with his district—to be precise, his district-to-be. Redistricting, after the 1980 census, was going to pack a new swatch of Jefferson County suburb into his district—he was nervous, he did the popular thing. Sure, he could kick himself now. He should have known, he should have seen what it would mean if he went national. (When he went national was more like it ... that’s what was frustrating—he should have known himself.)
 But that was a long time ago ... anyway, not the kind of answer he could give. So he had this patter worked out—we were headed for recession, we needed a tax cut, he led the fight for the Democratic tax cut ... but the votes weren’t there, so he voted for Reagan’s cut, which was better than none. ... And then, for the next five years, he pushed for tax reform, which closed up a lot of those tax breaks Reagan engineered for the rich.
 It was all true, in its way ... but it took about two solid minutes to say, even with no wasted words—and was difficult for a voter to get as he passed by the tube on the way to the fridge. So Dick didn’t like to have to say it ... but he said it.
 Some guy in the crowd would stand up, after Dick’s speech, and ask: he heard on the radio ...
 Dick would do the patter.
 Then he’d start back to the car and some visiting reporter from Chicago would stick a tape in his face, and ask:
 Now, what about the ’81 tax vote?
 What the hell did she want him to say? He saw her, at the event, hunched over her tape in the back of the room, transcribing his answer the first time. Did she think he’d change his answer for her?
 No, he’d blink, once, slowly, and start:
 “I led the fight for the Democratic alternative ...”
 “Yes, yes,” she said, after the patter. “But the deeper question, the deep issue, is that you’re being expedient ...” She tried to make her voice rise at the end, so it sounded like a question.
 But Gephardt knew it wasn’t a question. The net result was, he spent less time with the press. He had two vans-full trailing him now, and rent-a-car paratroops dropping in for an hour or two. He was the front-runner: they all wanted a chat.
 Well, let them get in line.
 He had to husband himself as a campaign resource. Eight events a day were draining enough. At every stop, he had to bring up that hot resolve they expected from the TV. Dick would ask, as the Advance man’s hand reached for the door of his van: “Where’s my Wall Street Journal?” Someone would hand him a fresh copy of the Journal editorial, the one that claimed the trade deficit was “just a fact of life.” And Dick, in his shiny-green parka, would take that clip on stage—and wave it.
 “I wish the people who wrote the editorials would come with me out of their office, out of New York, and sit with the workers at the J.I. Case plant in Bettendorf, Iowa. Twelve hundred jobs in that plant six months ago—today none.
 “Talk to people thirty and forty and fifty years old, who lost their life insurance, lost their health insurance, lost their pension. Have no idea how they’re gonna support their families ... standing in welfare lines and unemployment lines ... tell them it’s JUST A FACT OF LIFE that their jobs left Bettendorf, and they’re now in South Korea. Or go to the Farm-All plant in the same town. Three thousand jobs. And tell those people the same thing. People making twelve and thirteen dollars an hour. Or go to the Caterpillar plant, which is half closed down—in six months WILL be closed down—two THOUsand more jobs in the same town. SIX to seven THOUsand jobs in one town ... HERE in Iowa. And the jobs are GONE, in the last six months ... tell THEM it’s just a FACT OF LIFE ...
 “Well I don’t LIKE their facts of life. I wanta CHANGE the facts of life. And if you’ll stand with me on February 8th, we’ll confound the critics, we’ll surprise the Establishment, and we will turn this country in a new direction. IT’S YOUR FIGHT, TOO!”
 They’d be screaming and stomping when he finished, men pumping his hand, hammering his shoulders, women in union jackets busting through to kiss him, and tell him he’s going to win.
 The crowds were bigger now, and hotter, pumped for his arrival by Bruce Springsteen (“Born in the U.S.A.”) thudding and wailing though the P.A. Barry Wyatt, the Guru of Advance, had moved into Iowa for the final push, and he was training a feral pack of twenty-year-old triggermen. (“Goddammit, is that the best goddam sound system you could find? ... You call that a fuckin’ backdrop?”) Those kids would fan out through the state, living off the countryside, begging or stealing what they needed, leaving a trail of abandoned rent-a-cars and shell-shocked locals—but Dick’s events were beautiful TV. ... Then they’d come back to Des Moines, through the big new office, with their premature suits and premature swaggers, boasting of their all-night ride on this corn combine, or the way they talked that car dealer out of his thirty-foot flag, (“put it up behind the stage—Dick looked like fuckin’ Patton!”)
 And it wasn’t just the new Advance pack that swelled the office—the staff had tripled in a month, as everyone from the southern offices and most of the people from D.C. sped to Iowa, where the action was. In the new downtown storefront, they’d scream to one another over the tacky walls of their carrels. (“JIM! This six-eighteen from Burlington First, is that today or last week? IS THAT LAST WEEK? NO ... SIX-EIGHTEEN!”) There were scores of women on scores of phones—updating hard counts every day and every night. Joyce Aboussie had moved in from St. Louis and was whooping and whipping a cadre of Missourians into making noise everywhere Dick went. Murphy had a closed office in the back, from which he’d emerge, screaming imprecations, at irregular intervals. There were press and camera crews, come to talk to Murphy or record this frenetic scene, and they moved more or less at will through the chaos.
 And the net result was, Dick didn’t come to the office. He couldn’t wander in, to ask how it was going, or talk to Murphy, or do an interview. It was a public event when he appeared. He’d have to make remarks. He’d have to show some fire to match the heat in that storefront.
 No, if someone had to talk to Dick—members of the House, money men, Washington smart guys—the Schedulers would tuck them in, in Waterloo, or Iowa City ... they could join up there, maybe have ten or fifteen minutes with Dick on the trip to Quad Cities. ... Most of these VIPs felt constrained to bring Dick some warning or complaint. Sandy Levin, a House member from Michigan, set up a constant mewling whine about Dick’s us-versus-them rhetoric. Levin assured his fellow mewlers in Washington: this was not Dick Gephardt ... he knew Dick ... he’d talk to Dick ... to let him know, he could, uh, make enemies. ... Jack Guthman, Dick’s old pal from Northwestern, now a hot-shot zoning lawyer in Chicago, was trying to position Dick in Illinois—and he had to warn him, his business friends didn’t like what they were hearing. Jack was afraid Dick was losing perspective, pouring everything into Iowa, losing track of the rest of the country.
 Dick, of course, would cock his head and keep the baby blues on their faces, and say at the end, they were right, he understood. But the fact was, he was pouring everything into Iowa ... and he didn’t mean to stop. The fact was, he wasn’t worried about enemies, back in Congress. He wasn’t going back.
 But he wouldn’t say that. So, the net result was ... he didn’t talk much to his old pals. What was the point? ... Loreen was upset about the ads, the way they brought up Matt’s illness, the way they repeated that falsehood about Lou Gephardt losing his farm, but Dick didn’t talk to her about that. What was the point? ... Even Jane was cut off from his new world, off in a smaller, grimmer bubble of her own, as she plied ladies’ luncheons and coffee-shop patrons in other parts of the state. Jane didn’t understand—what was the point of running her around, her and Nancy, or her and Liz Kincaid, driving hundreds of miles through the snow to another cheap motel with its clattering heater and nubby polyester bedspread? She and Dick would talk at night from their two motel rooms, but all he could say was, they’d do the best they could. The Schedulers had to know what they were doing—or he had to assume they did.
 Only the road crew and the killers knew what was happening in Dick’s narrowed world. They were the only ones he really heard.
 “I gotta hand it to the guy,” Reilly said at lunch one day, with Ethel Klein. “He’s really stickin’ with us. You know, all these people are coming at him, complaining, but he’s just not paying attention. I gotta say, the guy is backin’ us—the guy is amazing! Those are his old friends!”
 “Yeah,” Ethel said, quietly. “But pretty soon, we’ll be his old friends.”
 Finally, the Secret Service arrived to seal off Dick’s world from everyone who did not have a badge. And then it was easier. The motorcade was longer, but the cars ran better. There was less for the boys in the bubble to think about ... rides, planes, motels—all arranged. There was less dissonance in Dick’s ear ... less information altogether. He had to call meetings to ask his crew—what was happening out there? ... Were they doing okay? ... Were they winning?
 He thought they were winning. He could feel that much, at events.
 But he couldn’t know.
 In the last week, the Register endorsed Paul Simon. That had to stop Simon’s slide. Dick thought Simon’s support was holding—he could see Simon people at his own events.
 What about the Duke?
 Dick was worried ... he wanted Dukakis to run second. If it ended Gephardt, Dukakis—first, second ... that would kill off Simon. Dick could go to New Hampshire as the clear alternative—he could be not Dukakis. But he couldn’t see Duke’s people on the ground ... where were they?
 He kept asking Reilly, Ethel, Trippi, Murphy: “What’s he doing? Where’s the Duke?”
(...) THE NETWORKS WERE WIRED into Des Moines with millions in equipment, hundreds of people from each ... Dan Rather prowled the Savery with his new CBS consultant, Tom Donilon ... cables as thick as anchor chain snaked up the fire stairs in all the big hotels ... but no network wanted to bore the nation with a nightful of the Iowa caucus, so the killers kept an eye on Happy Days, waiting for a trail of numbers across the bottom of the screen.
 It was maddeningly slow.
 In the Gephardt family suite, Reilly couldn’t wait—he was on the phone with friends from the networks. Trippi had a cigar, unlit. His wife, Katie, watched their tiny daughter, who was toddling on the tan shag carpet. There were two bedrooms and a center parlor in the suite at the beautiful Best Western. In the center room, there was a bar with trays of food, untouched. A long couch (nubby polyester to match the shag) faced three TVs—one for each network—and that’s where the killers gathered. Doak and Shrum were in and out (poor Shrummy was a ball of nerves), Murphy was fretting and pacing, Paul Begala, the speechwriter, watched the TVs.
 “Here it is—HERE!” They’d call out when the numbers rolled—twenty percent of precincts, then thirty-three ... Dole was way ahead in the GOP (and, God! Robertson second—Bush wiped out!) ... but the Democrats were not clear-cut. Dick was holding over thirty percent, a wavering three- or four-point lead over Simon; Dukakis was third with twenty-two percent. On the walkie-talkie, a staffer at Democratic Central said hard numbers put Gephardt at thirty-three percent ... but still, no call from the network gods of election.
 Just before eight, CBS came out—called it for Gephardt. There were whoops ... but the other networks held off. Did they know something? ... Trippi’s cigar remained unlit. Murphy was frozen: if they declared victory and then, somehow, lost their lead, they could turn a near tie into disaster. Reilly dove for a bedroom, punched at the phone—“When’re you guys gonna call it? Come on! ...”
 The family filtered in. Not Dick, of course, he was doing TV ... but Jane and the girls went into one bedroom, and Matt took the other, watched TV in the dark. Nancy Gephardt and her son, Frank, stayed in the center room, with Loreen, her friends the Halls from Third Baptist Church, and her brother, Dick’s Uncle Bob, and his wife, Kay. They hung back at the bar, tried to see the TVs ... but without Dick, this wasn’t their room, and the TVs somehow belonged to the killers, who turned their backs, and traded rat-a-tat spin.
 “Okay, spin doctors,” Trippi was saying, “I think we oughta say this makes it a three-man top tier ... kill Gore in the South—it’ll be too late for him.”
 “We gotta say this weakens the Duke ...”
 “Wait ...”
 There was silence. ABC had called it for Dick ... and there he was, on the screen, with Peter Jennings asking if he could pull it off in other states ... “the politics of grievance—what makes you think it will work, anywhere else?”
 “Well, Peter ...”
 Loreen Gephardt meant to see her boy, and even his face on the screen emboldened her to take the couch, so she settled in with Mrs. Hall, and the killers had to part, so she could see.
 Jennings was boring in on the flip-flops.
 “Well, Peter ... I’ve been in public life fifteen years now, and I’d rather change and be right, than be rigid and wrong ...”
 Loreen was in pink fuzzy cashmere, and she snuggled against Mrs. Hall. Her hand absently reached for Mrs. Hall’s jacket and she fingered the wool, as if she had to touch something, to know ... it was real, all her hopes, all the effort—God did have a plan. Loreen tugged gently on Mrs. Hall’s jacket. She turned her shoulders so she could look straight into her friend’s eyes, as she whispered: “He looks like a President.”
 Uncle Bob Cassell had a bag he was fingering, and now he pulled out his portrait of Dick, just like the ones he used to paint when Dick was twelve years old ... but now Dick had the Capitol dome and an American flag floating behind him, against an azure sky.
 “Oh, Bob, it’s a wonderful picture,” Loreen said.
 “Gee, that’s great!” said Jane. She was distracted, trying to be nice. “I’ve gotta find a place to put it ... in the White House!” It sounded strange. She’d never thought of living in the White House.
 There was a Newsweek reporter in the suite, who had to come over now to get the poop on the picture. Loreen introduced her brother: “You know, people always said Dick looks a lot like Bob.” And Bob drew himself up, beaming, to look like a President, too.
 Debra Johns kept other reporters at bay, in the hall: “Debra! Where’d he eat dinner? ... Debra! What’d he have for dinner?”
 And now, Dick’s voice was in the hallway, too. He was taping out there—Good Morning America. A few friends from the suite went out to watch. But Loreen stayed behind—she had the Lord’s work to do.
 “Bob, it’s such a lovely picture, I think you should present it to him on stage.”
 Bob was diffident. The picture wasn’t quite finished. “I really can’t make it a big deal ... I’ll just give it to him upstairs, in the room.”
 No, Loreen insisted, and she bent to pull the bag back over the portrait.
 “Well...” Bob was accustomed to his sister’s will. “I’m just going to sort of present it, then. That’s all.”
 And, finally, their Dick was in the room, and he was pumped up, he was huge ... and pink under his makeup. But he had the victory speech to do—an important speech, the same one he would give in New Hampshire the following day—and he had to freshen up. He brushed by into the bedroom—not even a hug for Jane. She and the kids were milling at a mirror, last-minute makeup and hair. No time for talk. Nancy was firing stage directions at Frank and Loreen and the Halls. Brad, the body man, was standing at the door of the bedroom, yelling, “Now, let’s talk about what we’re gonna do here! ...”
 There was no time to be a family. They had to learn how to look like a family.
 Downstairs in the beautiful Starlite Ballroom, the crowd was whoop-it-up happy, and a bar band lashed the air with electric guitars. It was a long, low room—and packed. The Des Moines staff couldn’t recognize half the country folk who’d poured in. They must have driven for hours. In the end, it was the farmers who put Dick over the top—he won sixty of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties.
 Against the long back wall, there were platforms studded with tripods, cameras trained on the podium like a firing squad, and mounds of gear in heaps at the feet of surly crews. It was hot, it was late. They were supposed to go live in Kansas City ... and Cincinnati ... Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Boston ... and St. Louis! Every two-bit station with a satellite truck had its anchor-wanker there, and a big chunk of the budget tied up in (ta dummm) ... Decision ’88! But they weren’t asking these Iowans about their decision. They weren’t going to get on the air with some stupid voter ... no. They needed juice.
 And, at last, here it came, in the person of Dick Gephardt, and his wife, and children, his mother, her friends and family ... who busted into the hall along a little cattle run that Advance roped off, and straight onto stage, in front of twenty-two American flags ... and the halogens snapped on, and the crowd sent up a fevered yowl that drowned the bar band’s “Theme from Rocky.”
 Jane hit her mark on stage—behind Dick, and to his right. The kids were on the other side, in a rising diagonal row—Katie, Chrissie, and tall Matt closest to the crowd. Loreen stood directly behind Dick, with a view of his pink Presidential neck, and the rest of the family off on the flanks, with Congressman Tony Coelho (always a nose for a winner, Tony had). And it was quiet—Dick was talking.
 “... We will fight the Establishment! ... We will pry open foreign markets! ... It’s time to tell the forces of greed: ENOUGH is ENOUGH! ...
 “In our America, land is a place to raise cahrn and soybeans, wheat, and most importantly, a place to raise our kids AGAIN ... we will save the family farm in America, because ...”
 The crowd was onto this song now, and they joined in as chorus:
 “NUFF is ENUFF!”
 Loreen was jolted back to the here and now by the noise of the crowd, and she woke with a pleasant shiver of joy from a reverie on her boy’s neck, and she looked over the crowd, into the lights, with a smile of blessing and vindication, at the faces in front, staring up at her boy, who was pink as her fuzzy cashmere, and wailing:
 “... they’ve done nothing but paid their taxes, fought our WARS, raised our KIDS ... we don’t need to give them a FAVOR ... WE OWE THEM ...”
 And the crowd yelled:
 “NUFF izza NUFF!”
 Dick was yelling, too: “We will WIN in New Hampshire ... We will WIN in NOVEMBER ...”
 Gep-HARDT
 Gep-HARDT ...
 “And when we WIN, we’re gonna TAKE BACK THE WHITE HOUSE and GIVE IT BACK to th’AMERICAN PEOPLE AGAIN ...”
 Gep-HARDT-Gep-HARDT-Gep-HARDT-Gep-HARDT-Gep ...
 “I thank you for your help on this cold and snowy night, and I ask for your help ... to change America and give it back its soul.”
 With that, the band issued a few bars of Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” and the crowd noise swelled higher in a rhythmic scream ... Gep-HARDT-Gep-HARDT ... as Dick gathered himself, and roared out the only line outside his text, the simple thought closest to his heart:
 “WE’RE GONNA WIN THIS THING!”
 And the band sped the song into full cry, as the crowd screamed GepHARDTGepHARDTGEP-HARDT ... except with two or three thousand people screaming off the beat, only the strongest consonants came through, so the noise was just a frantic bark:
 GARP-GARP-GARPT-GARPT-GARPT-GARPT ...
 And there was no script anymore, so Dick turned and hugged his mother, and he missed Jane, but he found his kids, and he bent way down for Katie and hugged her hard and quick, and then Chrissie, hard and quick, and then Dick stood and looked straight into Matt’s eyes, and threw open his arms and advanced on Matt, who grasped him tentatively, and was going to step back, but Dick grabbed him harder, and Matt forgot the crowd and disappeared into his father’s embrace, and Dick laid his head on Matt’s shoulder, and they held like that, neither one would let go. And when they did, they were both fighting tears, but Dick was being pulled to the podium—some business ...
 It was Bob, who took the sack off the portrait, and Dick’s eyes popped open a few millimeters at the shock of azure ... and ... Hey! That’s him! He gave Bob a big thumbs-up ... and he started to wander the stage again—Tony Coelho, a hug, Nancy Gephardt, Frank ... and the band was thumping hell-for-leather, but the crowd couldn’t keep barking like that, and the halogens were clicking off, as Dick listed from hug to hug ... and it could have been over—Dick had his back turned—but Loreen understood, maybe better than her son, just what this was about.
 She took the painting and strode to the podium, she faced it away from her, and with her fingers grasping the sides of the frame, she mounted upon the podium the Portrait of Dick Regnant. She disappeared behind this icon ... even Dick alive in his hugs disappeared ... and the halogens clicked back to full glare, and the crowd looked up at Dick, and the Dome, and the Flag ...
 GARPT-GEHPT-GARPT-GEHPT-GARPT-GARP...