All Too Human: A Political Education Read online

  Years later, that image sticks with me — not as a counsel of despair or an excuse for cynicism, but as a reminder to be humble about the promise of politics and the potential of government. Because I believe in original sin, because I know that I'm capable of craving a cold beer in a village of starving kids, because I understand that selfishness vies for space in our hearts with compassion, I believe we need government — a government that forces us to care for the common good even when we don't feel like it, a government that helps channel our better instincts and check our bad ones. But I also believe in containing government and tempering the claims we make for it. I don't think government is good, just necessary. I'm a liberal who accepts limits.

  My second year at Oxford was an attempt to reinforce my intellectual instincts with systematic study of Christian ethics. Back to basics. I wanted to build a better foundation for my political views, to ground my personal beliefs and partisan experience in philosophy and theology — another way of reconciling the life I was leading with the life I had imagined as a boy. I knew a lot about the “how” and “what” of politics. Now I wanted to think more about the “why.” So I read Augustine and Aquinas, Martin Luther and Reinhold Niebuhr, analyzing the fundamental questions of politics — war and peace, life and liberty — from the perspective of what was right rather than what would work. This would offer me a guide to which questions to ask and a reminder of where I was going wrong when I got too caught up in the game.

  And I still loved the game. After my Rhodes I went back to Washington, where Congressman Feighan made me his chief of staff. The next year I signed on with the Dukakis-for-President campaign. This was a no-brainer: a Greek American liberal from Massachusetts was running for president. How could I not work for him? After volunteering in the primaries, I moved to Boston for what I thought would be a short, happy hiatus before returning to Washington with a new president.

  When I arrived, we had a seventeen-point lead. Then came the summer assault. The Bush campaign, led by Lee Atwater, opened up a disciplined, ruthless, and sustained series of attacks on Governor Dukakis's record and character. Flags, furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance. Willie Horton became a household name, and President Reagan even joked that Dukakis was an “invalid.” This “joke” was a calculated effort to ignite the false rumor spread around Washington by Republican operatives that Dukakis had been treated for depression — and, politically, it worked. Though the allegation was false, Dukakis was forced to call a press conference with his doctor to deny it. By August's Republican convention, our lead was gone, our candidate was a caricature, and our campaign was effectively over.

  A few months after the election, I left politics to become the assistant to Father Tim Healy, the new president of the New York Public Library. Father Healy, a brilliant Jesuit with the bearing of Jackie Gleason, wanted to rebuild the branch libraries that had meant so much to him when he was a kid growing up in the Bronx. I wanted to learn how to manage a major institution and to be part of that educational effort — and, with the Republicans still controlling Washington, Manhattan seemed like a good place to be.

  But just after I found an apartment, Newt Gingrich's campaign to topple Speaker Jim Wright succeeded, and the shake-up in the Democratic congressional leadership that ensued ended with Tom Foley as Speaker, Richard Gephardt as majority leader — and my getting a call from Kirk O'Donnell. A veteran of former Speaker Tip O'Neill's operation, Kirk had been my boss in the Dukakis campaign and was now a Washington lawyer scouting talent on the side for Dick Gephardt.

  Kirk called my office overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue and got right to the point: “I know you just started with Father Healy, George, but would you consider coming back to Washington to be Dick Gephardt's floor man?”

  Consider? Are you kidding? Kirk was offering me a starting job in the Democratic Party's major league — the House leadership. The majority leader was one step away from the Speaker, who was two steps away from the president. As executive floor assistant to Gephardt, I would be his shadow, his surrogate, his eyes and ears. In my old job with Feighan, our successes had been satisfying but small, like successfully petitioning for the release of a political prisoner or sneaking an amendment onto the foreign-aid bill to create microloans for third-world farmers. With Gephardt, I would get the chance to help set a national agenda for the Democratic Party, to figure out how to blunt Bush initiatives and force Bush vetoes. With Feighan, I couldn't get my phone call returned by the majority leader's floor man. With Gephardt, I would be that guy. Although I had never met the man, I knew Gephardt was a good Democrat, and there was a bonus: In 1992, he was planning to run again for president. So much for getting out of politics.

  My new job was as exciting as I expected, even though I couldn't explain exactly what it was. Someone once compared it to being an air traffic controller at a busy airport on a foggy night; and as I stood near the Speaker's chair on late nights at the end of session and tried to explain to frustrated legislators why they had to stay for the last vote even though they had nonrefundable tickets for Florida with their families, I knew exactly what he meant. But most of the time, being the floor guy was a more substantive mix of policy and politics. It boiled down to two central tasks: knowing what was going on and getting things done.

  I spent my days in perpetual motion, walking the marble halls from meeting to meeting, member to member, getting information and giving it out. Members would grab me by the tricep if they had a message for the leadership or wanted to know what was going on. Reporters slipped around the columns in search of news. Everything you needed to know had to be in your head, in your pocket, or no more than a phone call away.

  But it wasn't enough to know the rules, or the fine points of policy. In the House, the personal is political and the political is personal. To know the House you have to know the members — their home districts, their pet projects, their big contributors. You have to know what votes they'll throw away and which lines they'll never cross. You have to listen for the message in a throwaway line and laugh at the joke you've heard a thousand times. A personal feud might persist for decades, or an alliance could shift in a moment. The most fascinating part of the job was following those patterns, figuring out who held the key votes or which amendment would lock in a majority, watching the coalitions form, crack apart, and come together again.

  I felt justified in my work, and that we were making a difference. The budget fight of 1990 was the best. We Democrats saw ourselves as fighting to reverse the Reagan-era priorities by pushing for tax increases for the wealthy and protecting programs for the working class, and we forced Bush to eat his words on “Read my lips,” sweet revenge for what he'd done to Dukakis two years earlier. We spent weeks at Andrews Air Force Base, wrestling with the numbers and the Republicans. Late at night, Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski broke out a bottle of gin and told stories of all the presidents he'd known up close. By day we'd make charts out of the Republican proposals, showing how they would benefit the wealthy and burden ordinary workers. Then we'd feed them to the press to build public support for our side.

  Our efforts strengthened the budget and weakened Bush politically, but as when I first came to Washington, ten summers earlier, a Republican president was still running the show and setting the agenda. All we Democrats could do was play defense, defining ourselves more by what we could prevent than by anything we hoped to create. We could block a capital gains tax cut, but not enact a tax credit for the working poor. We could stop cuts in Head Start or Medicare, but not expand student loans or pass national health care. We could piece together a bare majority to pass a gun control bill, but never get enough votes to override the inevitable veto. We could make a lot of noise about a Supreme Court appointment — maybe even block the president's top choice — but conservative judges would control the federal courts for another generation. We could win moral victories on Capitol Hill, but we couldn't make history.

  It didn't look as if we'd ha
ve the chance soon, either. By the summer of 1991, America had won the Gulf War and President Bush was being rewarded with 90 percent approval ratings. Another election was on the horizon, but no one I knew believed Bush could be beat.

  Gephardt was still looking at the 1992 presidential race, commissioning polls, testing the waters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Although my job was legislative work, he took me aside in the early summer to ask me what I thought. Should he seek the Democratic nomination in 1992?

  “Absolutely,” I told him. “You're well known, and you've run before. You can beat anyone else in the race.” (Only Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts had announced.) “Even though Bush is popular,” I continued, “someone has to take on this fight. It will be good for the party and the country.”

  Nice little speech. Sincere too — as far as it went. But I was also motivated by something I couldn't say: I hope you'll run, if only for my sake. I've always wanted to be at the heart of a campaign, right by the candidate's side. You could win the nomination, and if you do, who knows? Bush stumbles, and I'm working for a president of the United States.

  But Gephardt had voted for Bush's unpopular tax increase and against his popular war, and he was coming from a Congress that had raised its own pay and been bogged down in a check-cashing scandal. It seemed as if the only voters not angry at Congress in 1991 were the ones too alienated from politics to care at all. In an outsider's year, the majority leader was Mr. Inside. Knowing that, he wisely decided to stay where he was.

  But I didn't want to stay. Restrained idealism and raw ambition — the pistons of my character — were powering up again, pushing me to find someone new.

  2 BECOMING A TRUE BELIEVER

  New York governor Mario Cuomo seemed like a potential soul mate. Fresh to professional politics when I first read his published campaign diary, I thought it was the best possible story — the chronicle of a successful candidate who thought like a moral philosopher.

  Watching his 1984 Democratic convention keynote was even better. Here was a politician who could use words like love and compassion without seeming like a wimp, who talked about the “mosaic of America” and called on the country to replace Reagan's “social Darwinism” with “the idea of family.” Cuomo was saying everything I believed, in a way that made people want to fight. Pacing the floor of my place on Capitol Hill, I screamed at my TV and hoped the convention would get carried away and nominate him from the floor. Mario immediately became the great liberal hope — our Ronald Reagan. If only he would run. But by the summer of 1991, Cuomo still wasn't running — at least not yet.

  Bob Kerrey was glamorous. A Medal of Honor-winning senator from mainstream America, he was irony personified, balancing a dark side with whimsy and intellectual conviction in a way that would play well at the Georgetown, Manhattan, and Hollywood cocktail parties where campaign funds were raised and fashionable opinions congealed into conventional wisdom.

  Kerrey would also make the Republicans squirm. They couldn't do to him what they did to Dukakis, pillory him as a soft-on-defense, hate-America-first Democrat. A war hero is a patriot by definition, so Kerrey could pull off feats few other Democrats would dare, like when he had transformed the fight against a constitutional amendment banning flag burning into a winning political battle. Kerrey had the charisma of a Kennedy without the baggage — and he didn't share Cuomo's ambivalence. The day I heard he was running, I let his staff know I was interested in signing up.

  Paul Tsongas, a Greek American, was my intended. Joining his campaign would have felt like accepting an arranged marriage. He had been a good senator, and I had once sent him a fan letter after reading his book about his struggle with cancer. But Tsongas had no charisma, and his economic plan read more like a corporate report than a populist manifesto. He was for cutting capital gain taxes and cutting Medicare spending, precisely the policies I'd been working against. And after 1988, there was no way the Democrats would nominate another cerebral Greek from Massachusetts.

  Which put me in a bind. But for the fact that he was Greek, I wouldn't have even considered working for Tsongas. Because he was Greek, I had to explain to my extended family why I wouldn't. In my community, ethnicity still trumps ideology. Although Greek Americans generally vote Republican, they support Democrats who are Greek. They would line up behind Tsongas just as they had for Dukakis — and expect me to do the same.

  Bill Clinton wasn't my type. He was a Southern conservative; I was a Northern liberal. He was a governor; I was a creature of Congress. I hadn't met him, and I had heard him speak only once: at the 1988 Democratic convention, where his droning nomination of Dukakis drew sustained applause only for the words “In conclusion …”

  But friends of mine who knew him well insisted I would like him. Mark Gearan, the Dukakis spokesman who was then heading the Democratic Governors' Association, said Clinton was more liberal and less boring than I thought. My Gephardt colleague David Dreyer said Clinton's philosophy of personal responsibility would appeal to me, and he introduced me to John Holum, George Mc-Govern's former issues director, who was collecting resumes for Clinton. If they all liked this guy, he must have been better than I thought. And any Democrat beat four more years of Bush. Maybe Clinton's more conservative side would make him more appealing. Maybe it was time for the party to sacrifice ideological purity for electoral potential.

  Not all of my friends thought it was wise for me to join a campaign. Kirk O'Donnell took me to breakfast in the House dining room to talk me out of it. We were surrounded by the world I knew. The white-coated waiters had saved my regular table. Members came by to ask for a favor or pass a message to the leader. I was a big shot, or at least felt like one.

  “Be smart,” Kirk said. “You've got one of the top jobs in Congress. Why throw it away? Stick with Dick. If you really want to work in the campaign, wait until after the convention.”

  This was a kind voice of reason and prudence, but I was restless and willing to gamble. Although waiting to work for the nominee was a safe bet, the sooner I signed up with a candidate, the closer I'd be to the center of the action. And for someone like me, with more ambition than actual campaign experience, it was an ideal time to be looking for work. Like the top tier of potential candidates who had already announced that they wouldn't challenge Bush — Gephardt, and Senators Bill Bradley, Jay Rockefeller, and Al Gore — most top staffers were sitting this one out. They had upended their lives for two losing campaigns in a row, and they weren't going down that road again for an effort that appeared hopeless. The best jobs were still open.

  I met Kerrey and Clinton on the same day in September 1991. It was a sunny Friday morning, and I walked to the Senate side of the Hill from my office in the Capitol aware that whatever happened that day could start a chain of events that would change my life.

  Kerrey was announcing the next Monday. My “interview” was an invitation to join the prep for his post-announcement press conference — a “murder board” in which staffers played reporter and peppered the boss with all the tough questions he could expect to hear. I joined Kerrey's core team on the sofa across from his desk. The senator waved an offhand hello, and we began, with me trying to ask questions that were challenging enough to be useful but not so harsh as to seem hostile. After all, I didn't even know the guy. But I liked what I saw.

  Later in the meeting, Kerrey started reading aloud a draft of his announcement speech, which closed with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was executed for plotting to assassinate Hitler. Nice: Bonhoeffer — the noble martyr willing to dirty his hands and sacrifice his life for a righteous cause. The me that had studied Bonhoeffer's Ethics and admired his moral heroism was captivated. Then my internal political twin kicked in, reminding me that quoting a German minister on the subject of sacrifice might not be the ideal way to open a campaign for the hearts and minds of middle-class Americans who already felt squeezed. It would appear obscure at best, condescending at
worst.

  There was also something vaguely unsettling about the atmosphere in Kerrey's office. Staffers always defer to senators, but as Kerrey spoke to us from behind his enormous desk, I noticed a slow nodding of heads that suggested that the words Kerrey spoke were deeper than your average political talk — that the senator's terse replies were political koans. A cool but unmistakably messianic zeal hummed just below the surface of the Kerrey campaign.

  I wasn't immune to it, and had I joined his team, I probably would have succumbed to it. But after the meeting, when I met with Kerrey's campaign manager to discuss the logistics of a possible job, she was distracted and slightly dismissive, unsure how I'd fit into their top-heavy hierarchy. As the interview crept on, I felt more like the son of a big contributor seeking an internship than a political pro applying for a top job. When I said I would appreciate a quick decision because I needed to give Gephardt notice, she looked at me and said: “You have to understand something. This is about a cause, not a career.”

  I was beginning to figure that out.

  The Clinton meeting was at the town-house office of Stan Greenberg, a former Yale professor turned pollster who had signed on with Clinton. I didn't know what to expect but had plenty of time to wonder, because Clinton was late. When he walked into the room with Stan and Mark Gearan, I got the full treatment.

  Bulky and butter-cheeked, Clinton looked like an overgrown boy in his light summer suit. But he had the gait of a man used to being obeyed, admired, courted, and loved. Slow but not stately, almost lazy but loaded with self-confidence. Gearan introduced me with a light setup: “You know George's work. He wrote jokes for Dukakis.”

  “Not really,” I demurred. “They just needed a short Greek with no sense of humor to test-market the lines.”

  Clinton held my eye with a smile while he shook my hand. His was soft, and the grip was surprisingly light for a politician. “Sounds to me like you have a sense of humor,” he said. “What else do you do?”