The running men: how candidates decide to run for president reveals how prepared they are to win

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2003 by Walter Shapiro

Campaign chronicles, the spiritual descendants of Teddy White's trail-blazing The Making of the President, have sadly become a dying genre. No matter how beautifully crafted and meticulously researched, these now-it-can-be-told political narratives, which traditionally come out after the campaign is long over, suffer from a built-in flaw--readers know the inevitable conclusion before they get to the first page. Even as a card-carrying political junkie, I would find it hard to curl up right now with a backward-looking recap of, say, the 2000 race filled with passages that begin, "Bill Bradley was nervous ... "That's why I thought that it would be glorious fun to publish my impressions of the early phase of the 2004 Democratic presidential race at the precise moment when Americans are becoming transfixed with the wide-open, anything-can-happen battle for the nomination.

During my quarter century of covering presidential campaigns, I have found that the most telling glimpses of the candidates have come when they were just beginning to step into the cauldron of ambition. This is the time when their lines were still unscripted and their public veneers hung loosely like a suit that they had not yet grown into. Yet most political coverage during this early period is buried in the back pages of the newspapers. With a war in Iraq and other breaking news stories, who can blame editors for decreeing that full-tilt coverage of the presidential campaign could wait until the fall of this year? But what this means, in practice, is that most Americans tune into the campaign at the point when the Democratic contenders have thrown off the last vestiges of spontaneity, and virtually every syllable they utter is an echo of an earlier speech, question-and-answer session, or interview.

It is a Washington cliche that every senator peers into his shaving mirror and sees the next president. But few ever start that journey. Those that do must weigh the competing obligations to country and family, the challenges of fundraising, the evaporation of privacy, the odds of being elected, and ultimately the deep, dark-night-of-the-soul quandary, the question that should leave any self-aware politician in fear and trembling about the implications of his own ambitions: whether he is ready to assume the responsibilities of actually serving as president. For those who ultimately grab for the brass ring, the way they make the decision to run can be revealing.

For instance, retired Gen. Wesley Clark's year-long private agonies over whether to become a candidate are telling, reflecting either a preternatural self-confidence about his presidential prospects or a Bambi-like innocence about the political process. While his rivals were taking questions from real voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, Clark was charming elite audiences at forums like the Aspen Institute. On the other hand, Florida's star-crossed senator, Bob Graham, who decided in late 2002 to enter the race, chose--or rather stumbled into--a weird way of announcing his candidacy. Appearing on a call-in show on a Haitian-American radio station in Miami, a listener asked the senator whether he was considering the presidency, and Graham couldn't bring himself to obfuscate. By the end of the day, the rest of the media was onto the story. Graham's unwillingness to play the game and save his big news for, say, "Meet the Press" revealed an admirable decency and forthrightness. But his inability to master the news cycle also served as an early warning sign of his inability to master the rigors of a presidential campaign. In early October, with his fund-raising lagging and his poll ratings negligible, Graham became the first 2004 drop out.

But beyond the obvious extremes of the dilatory Clark and the impetuous Graham, I am convinced that something essential about the character and temperament of each of the 2004 candidates was revealed by the way that be made the decision to begin the long trek toward the White House.

The Rookie

In early December 2002, when a rumor buzzed around Washington that John Edwards was having second thoughts about running, I scheduled a lunch with the vacillating candidate's most trusted adviser, the one person sure to be privy to his inner deliberations: his wife, Elizabeth Edwards. Elizabeth--a bankruptcy attorney until their 16-year-old son, Wade, was killed in a freak automobile accident in 1996--normally projects an air of bemused confidence. But that afternoon, Elizabeth, dressed in jeans and a sweater, fluttered nervously in the kitchen of their sprawling rented house in the Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington over the simple act of toasting the white bread for our lunch of egg-salad sandwiches. With her husband arriving home that afternoon from a four-day, burnish-the foreign-policy-credentials visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels, the uncertainty and waiting were taking their toll on the home front.

We sat down at a table in the large, comfortable library that serves as the casual center of family life. Nearby was the computer that Elizabeth uses to thread her way through strand after strand of the latest campaign stories, typing her husband's name and those of his putative rivals into the Google News search engine. Elizabeth immediately confirmed the rumors. Yes, they had intense discussions about the pros and cons of the race when their eldest daughter, Care, was home from Princeton over Thanksgiving, and Edwards has been talking with his fellow senators. At my request, Elizabeth outlined the case for not running this time around: "That John's doing it too soon. Should he wait and do it, if he's going to do it, in 2008?" She pauses and then adds, "The first question that he has to ask doesn't have to do with the field, it has to do with himself. Am I up to this? Not only am I up to the job of the campaign, but am I up to the job of presidency?"