The Rules

Time-tested secrets for capturing the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004

By Seth Gitell

Would-be presidential candidates, like good reporters, live by one simple credo: don’t wait.

Five months after the swearing in of President George W. Bush, a slew of Democrats are embracing that philosophy as they test the waters for a presidential run in 2004. While former vice-president Al Gore and his 2000 rival Bill Bradley are mulling comeback campaigns, others have already gotten busy. Among potential challengers for the next Democratic presidential nomination, the top tier consists of Senate majority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota; Senators John Edwards of North Carolina, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Joseph Biden of Delaware; and House minority leader Richard Gephardt. Rounding out the mix are governors Gray Davis of California and Roy Barnes of Georgia.

Gone are the days when a senator could toy leisurely with the idea of running for president and get in a year before the race, the way Senator John McCain tried to do. With each four-year cycle, the lag time between presidential bids shortens. And this type of early action isn’t really anything new. Although Jimmy Carter seemed to come out of nowhere in 1976, politicians and journalists know that the peanut farmer had been working Democratic activists for years. Al Gore ran as a Southern candidate in 1988 to prepare for a future campaign. And by the time Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention in the same year, he had already helped found the Democratic Leadership Council and positioned himself for an eventual run. (His convention keynote speech — well, that was a different matter.)

Of course, a candidate can’t be guaranteed the nomination through hard work alone: former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander worked feverishly between the 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns, but he never resonated with voters or GOP powerbrokers. Still, a candidate can guarantee failure by starting late. That’s one reason John Kerry didn’t get into the 2000 race; he knew he couldn’t catch up after the long marches Bush and Gore took toward the 2000 nomination. When they faced challenges — Bush from McCain and Gore from Bradley — they were able to fall back on organizational support and money to quash their rivals.

Adding to the accelerated pace of the presidential campaign these days is the perception that Bush is a weak president who gained power illegitimately after losing the popular vote. Recent polls suggest that Bush is taking a beating. A Wall Street Journal?NBC News poll has Bush’s approval rating at 50 percent, and a New York Times poll shows Bush’s popularity down seven points since March.

“In 1994, you could tell the day after the election that Bob Dole was running for president two years out,” says Vaughn Ververs, the editor of the Hotline, a prestigious political newsletter that features daily updates (“White House 2004”) on the activities of presidential hopefuls. (Get a glimpse of Hotline at www.hotlinescoop.com.) “This time around, you’ve known who is running a week after the Supreme Court decided the election.”

With this timetable in mind, the Phoenix has created a 10-step plan, aided in part by Hotline reports, for candidates who hope to have half a prayer in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries.

1. Get thee to Iowa

The June 24 Boston Herald featured Massachusetts senator John Kerry, making a foray into Iowa to attend Governor Tom Vilsack’s annual picnic in Mount Pleasant. Less well noticed was that the senator helped Vilsack raise funds — a chit he might try to collect in 2004.

Kerry isn’t the only Democrat interested in Iowa these days. Even before Kerry’s visit, former New York Knick and 2000 presidential hopeful Bill Bradley returned to the state to attend a basketball tournament. Tom Daschle, now a Senate bigwig, traveled to Iowa in May for the ostensible purpose of helping Iowa senator Tom Harkin raise money. In March, John Edwards, who is emerging as a media darling, set foot in Iowa for a second time to receive an award from Drake Law School. The visit gave him an opportunity to stress his success as a plaintiff’s lawyer — admittedly, not the most beloved profession of the American people. But at a time when Democrats like to brag about fighting for working people, this could have a more positive resonance as well. During his career as a personal-injury lawyer, Edwards won jury verdicts totaling $152 million, including a $25 million verdict in 1997.

Yet it seems that Gephardt took the cake: he catered to the needs of Iowa voters without even going there. Even before President Bush announced his energy policy in May, Gephardt invoked ethanol, of all things, in his critique of the policy. Political wonks know that ethanol is an alternative energy source made from crops that grow in — guess where? — Iowa. “We understand that Bush’s energy plan may not address ethanol as an alternative fuel in our overall energy policy,” said Gephardt. “We think that’s a big mistake.” It’s a double mistake if you’re a Democrat going into the 2004 Iowa caucuses.

2. Get thee to New Hampshire

Fortunately for New England’s political reporters, the Granite State is still the place to be for prospective presidential candidates. This is also a boon to Kerry, who hopes to do what Paul Tsongas, another Massachusetts native, did in 1992: use local connections for a head start on the nation’s first primary. Kerry hasn’t been up there yet this year, but he already established some visibility with New Hampshire voters when he campaigned in the state for Gore last year. And it doesn’t hurt that the senator has friends in New Hampshire’s high places: last election cycle, for instance, Kerry raised $100,000 for Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

Gephardt has his eye on New Hampshire too. He’s already snagged one of Bradley’s former New Hampshire campaign staffers to work for his campaign committee, and he visited the state in early June to talk with Democratic activists and to raise money. He’s also been getting the word out to Democratic voters: on May 22, Gephardt did an interview with talk-show host David Brudnoy of Boston’s WBZ, which has a strong signal throughout New Hampshire.

Others have also been making their presence known. Biden spoke at a local St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, signaling that he’s putting himself in play for 2004. In June, Lieberman speed-dialed New Hampshire activists, and he’s now scheduled to address a Democratic gathering in Coos County come November. Edwards has not yet made it to New Hampshire, but don’t be surprised if that changes soon.

There’s always talk of de-emphasizing the New Hampshire primary, but if this crop of prospective candidates is any measure, it doesn’t seem to be taking hold. Why would it? If you’re an ambitious politician with enough fire in the belly to be campaigning now, you can’t gamble on the notion that New Hampshire won’t be a factor next time around.

3. Devise a Southern strategy

Senator Zell Miller of Georgia caused a stir with a June 4 New York Times op-ed titled “The Democratic Party’s Southern Problem.” “Had Mr. Gore won any state in the old Confederacy or one more border state, he would be president today,” wrote Miller . “Our party can’t let this happen again.”

To that end, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe is looking at Southern sites for the 2004 convention, including several cities in Texas. And prospective presidential candidates have been flocking South. Of course, two of them already live there: Barnes of Georgia and Edwards of North Carolina. In his Times piece, Miller praised Barnes for taking down the Confederate battle flag as Georgia’s state flag. And Barnes took center stage at South Carolina’s Jefferson-Jackson Day in May. If Democratic Party activists succeed in rescheduling the South Carolina primary to immediately after the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, Edwards will have an advantage not unlike Kerry’s with regard to New Hampshire.

The current spin about the South is prompting even Kerry, who is routinely stereotyped as a Massachusetts liberal in the Dukakis mold, to forge a “Southern strategy” of sorts. At a Jefferson-Jackson Day event in Atlanta, the decorated Vietnam veteran made a point of invoking the duty of the citizen soldier. Last Saturday, Kerry spoke to a group of Texas Democrats, under the auspices of the centrist Texas branch of the Democratic Leadership Council, on the subject of how the party could win in the Lone Star State. He mentioned the contributions of the DLC — welfare reform, targeted tax cuts, 100,000 more police officers on the streets — and highlighted his role as a veteran and a Democrat. “We did make a difference — in the war in Vietnam and the fights at home,” said Kerry, who also paid homage to two former World War II pilots from Texas, former president George H.W. Bush and former senator Lloyd Bentsen. Kerry’s speech could be seminal in turning him into the anti-Duke.

4. Wave the bloody shirt

To win most of the South, you’ve got to move to the center. To win one very special state in the South — Florida — you’ve got to do what Republicans did in the North for the generation after the Civil War: wave the bloody shirt. Today this doesn’t mean reminding people of the sacrifices made in the war to end slavery. Now it refers to the way the Republicans pilfered the election in Florida last fall, about which emotions are still raw in the Sunshine State. A Miami Herald poll found Bush’s approval rating up by only six points last month, while former attorney general Janet Reno, a gubernatorial aspirant, is polling well against the president’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush. The Democratic masses are ready to be energized.

In May, former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman thanked Democrats in Broward County for their efforts during the campaign. And just last weekend, Lieberman returned to the scene of the crime to rail against the Bushes. “Some people say that your governor deserves to lose just because of what he did to Al Gore and me last fall,” he said, speaking at the Miami Beach Hilton. “But to tell you the truth, he deserves to lose because of what he’s done to the people of Florida for the past four years. ” But Lieberman didn’t stop with rhetoric; even as he stressed the trauma of the Florida election, he reached out to conservative Cuban voters who turned away from Gore last time, meeting with the Cuban American National Foundation during the same visit.

Meanwhile, Edwards invoked Florida at a meeting of African-American Baptist leaders in North Carolina. Speaking to the group, Edwards said he was “outraged by what happened in Florida, particularly to African-American voters.” He added: “It was wrong. It was undemocratic, and we’ve got to see that it never, ever happens again.”

What not to do • Don’t go into hibernation. • Don’t gain 30 pounds. • Don’t wait for stories about your tortured relationship with President Bill Clinton to make their way into the glossies. • Don’t teach a hokey class at Columbia and tell your students it’s “off the record.” • Don’t let your most high-profile gossip write-up be an item about escorting your elderly mother to Harvard University’s commencement.

5. Pick an issue

Let’s face it. Polls showed Democrats winning on the issues last fall; the trouble was simply that Gore never sealed the deal personally. So identifying winning issues for the Democrats shouldn’t be difficult. Edwards has staked his ground with Republican senator John McCain, pushing the so-called patients’ bill of rights. He’s fighting most vigorously for that part of the bill allowing patients to sue HMOs — a cause that should both win him points with the public and set him up to raise big money from trial attorneys. The high-profile issue poll-vaulted Edwards into a position to give the Democratic radio response to a Bush address earlier in June: “Here’s the bottom line — President Bush has a decision to make. . . . He has to decide whether he’s on the side of patients and their doctors, or if he’s on the side of big insurance companies and HMOs.” Not bad for someone elected to the Senate just three years ago.

It should come as no surprise that Kerry is focusing on the environment, as he’s been working on the issue for two decades. In June, the day after Bush issued a statement on global warming (Global warming? What global warming?), Kerry gathered a group of scientists at the Center for Global Health and Environment at Harvard Medical School to respond to the president. He criticized Bush for “repeatedly question[ing] the underlying science of climate change” and for reversing a campaign pledge to lower the level of power-plant pollutants. Kerry, a sponsor of the Energy Efficient Buildings Incentives Act, also urged Bush to “stop, to take time to understand the issue . . . and to change course.”

Meanwhile, Lieberman, now free of his pairing with Gore, has retaken the center with a values-driven campaign centered on the entertainment industry. The chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, Lieberman wants the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the current entertainment ratings system.

6. Scrap with Bush

The flip side of finding a popular issue is finding an issue you can use to show the president up. The master of this technique so far is Governor Gray Davis in California. By now everyone knows that the Golden State’s chief executive has taken a beating during the West Coast energy crisis. Rather than simply allow himself to be buffeted by the issue, however, Davis has managed to turn it into an advantage. When Bush traveled to California on May 29 to respond — many thought belatedly — to the power crisis, Davis dramatically exited his 35-minute powwow with the president to announce his intent to sue the federal government for failing to regulate the spiraling price of electricity. Later, Davis sat stone-faced as Bush stated his opposition to price caps at a World Affairs Council luncheon. Bush and Davis stared each other down like a pair of gunslingers. Also in May, Davis attacked Bush on ABC’s This Week. “While everyone believes in the profit motive and while I’ve been strongly pro-business, you don’t charge $1900 a megawatt-hour for something that last year you charged $30 for,” Davis said. “That is obscene. No one can defend it. The company is named Reliant. It’s in Texas. It’s a big buddy of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney.” Davis’s hiring of Gore-campaign pit bulls Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane at $30,000 a month confirmed both the governor’s higher ambition and his willingness to rough Bush up.

Biden is taking swipes at Bush as well. The new Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Biden is using his perch to go after Bush’s lack of international acumen. The senator didn’t miss a beat when, during a recent trip overseas, Bush called Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar “Anzar” and declared, “Africa is a nation.” During Bush’s trip, according to Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe, Biden quipped at a Boston fundraiser: “I don’t want him making a mistake . . . we have a problem internationally not when they doubt our power. It’s when they doubt our wisdom.”

7. Do the Sunday shows and schmooze the pundits

Appearing on the marquee Sunday shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, and even Fox News Sunday — is a must for any candidate looking to raise his or her profile. CNN also has a lower-profile Sunday show, Late Edition, that shouldn’t be taken lightly either. Although the mass public doesn’t watch these shows, political insiders do — along with those who fancy themselves as such. It’s fair to say that the people who matter — the activists, the fundraisers, the journalists — take in these shows like oxygen, and some even make appearances on them.

Kerry, for example, saw his national visibility skyrocket after controversy erupted over the news that a similarly named Nebraskan, former senator Bob Kerrey, killed civilians in Vietnam. Kerry appeared on This Week with a group of other Senate Vietnam veterans, including Senators Max Cleland of Georgia, John McCain of Arizona, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, to vet the issue. The more Vietnam talk Kerry engages in, the less people are likely to see him as another Dukakis.

Overall, Kerry has done well in the battle for Sunday-morning exposure, with 10 appearances since Bush became president — including three on the high-profile Meet the Press. Considering that he took a voluntary six-week hiatus from the morning shows this spring, his cluster of TV appearances is even more impressive. In comparison, Kerry’s Southern rival, Edwards, has surfaced eight times on the Sunday shows, with two coveted spots on Meet the Press. But Lieberman’s got both men beat with 11 appearances — though, like Edwards, he showed up only twice on Meet the Press.

Just as important with opinion leaders is schmoozing the pundit class — that is, themselves. The biggies include Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press, Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor, and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. A couple of months ago, Kerry was spotted breaking bread with Fineman at Washington’s posh Bombay Club. Getting these guys to mention you brings you a step closer to the nomination. And then there’s Don Imus, who some say helped Bill Clinton get elected in 1992. Not taking any chances, Lieberman and Kerry (along with John McCain and Christopher Dodd) are Imus habitués.

Of course, to succeed on a show like Imus, candidates need to be funny. Edwards seems to know this. He cuts a forceful television presence, but his persona can be a bit heavy for Northeastern audiences; his simplistic delivery grated on both the Massachusetts and New Hampshire delegations during last year’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles. So last year, Edwards blew $3000 to hire the Sound Bite Institute, a Manhattan outfit run by television-comedy writer Mark Katz, according to FEC documents. Katz made a name for himself writing jokes for Clinton. Maybe the Sound Bite Institute will work some of its magic with Edwards too.

8. Control your playground

Daschle took a huge step closer to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue thanks to the defection of Jim Jeffords of Vermont from the Republican ranks. Daschle is now the titular head of the Democratic Party and becomes the first call on a number of issues for the Sunday-morning shows. Whether Daschle runs for president depends on his success as Senate majority leader. He says he won’t make a decision about running for the presidency until after the 2002 elections. But even if he waits to declare, he will probably have difficulty managing both the Senate and a presidential campaign. That effort certainly hurt Dole’s 1996 bid for the presidency.

Daschle’s counterpart in the House, Gephardt, is in a tighter position. He can’t reasonably expect to run for president unless the Democrats retake the House in 2002. Then, if he decides to run, he must immediately begin campaigning before even getting his feet wet in his new leadership role.

Yet both men also have a strong advantage: their current jobs require the same basic activities as campaigning for president — traipsing around the country to help fellow Democrats get elected. Such travel raises national visibility, and helps gather a base of supporters for a real presidential campaign.

9. Raise money

These guys don’t need us to tell them this one. Kerry has traveled to California frequently to raise funds. This spring he visited the Hollywood home of producer Lawrence Bender; he later returned to Silicon Valley to break Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fundraising record among the high-tech bigwigs, raising $250,000 in one weekend. While many prospective Democratic presidential candidates were in California seeking to raise money, California’s Governor Davis ventured outside his state, raising money in Dallas and Chicago. Closer to home, Biden, Lieberman, and McCain have all made stops in Boston to prime the fundraising pump.

10. Get written up

Nothing helps the dollars roll in more plentifully than a nice puffy profile in a glossy magazine. Lieberman’s had two so far — one in New York magazine, another in the New York Times Magazine. Michael Tomasky of New York observed that “politicians coming to New York, in my experience, tend to fill . . . holes with small fundraising events on Park Avenue to which the Fourth Estate is expressly uninvited. But they become more inclined to fill them with interviews when they’re thinking of doing something big. Like running for president.” James Traub of the New York Times Magazine wrote, “Having emerged from the 2000 campaign with his reputation enhanced rather than diminished (the same cannot be said of Al Gore), Lieberman is a figure to reckon with inside the Democratic Party.” New York also devoted a long profile to Edwards, who is less well-known in the Big Apple than Lieberman, who is all but a native son there. (“Why is the soft-spoken 47-year-old, whom one publication recently christened ‘the Democrats’ New Golden Boy,’ meeting the elite all over the city? He wants a shot at the Big Job, the presidency. And for a Democratic candidate, the interviews start now, in New York.”) An Edwards profile even showed up in the June issue of Elle magazine, which — while covering him more seriously than you’d think — also gushed over his “dazzling smile” and likened him to John Travolta in A Civil Action, but with a twang and a blue work shirt. Like an appearance with Oprah Winfrey or Regis Philbin, this is the kind of media hit that presidential candidates usually don’t get until they’re in the thick of a campaign.

If candidates follow these 10 easy steps, they’ll be positioned for play come fall 2003, when the New Hampshire primary starts heating up.

Anyone for 2008?

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell@phx.com.