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

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2003 by Walter Shapiro

But Lieberman didn't have to wait. Instead, the news broke mid-afternoon Sunday the 15th. Lieberman had just returned from Connecticut to his Georgetown home in one of Washington's rare gated communities. His wife, Hadassah, was in New York City, and the senator was sharing the house with their 14-year old daughter, Hana. Suddenly he got a message from a Senate staffer on his BlackBerry wireless console: There's a rumor that Al isn't running. Lieberman and his daughter immediately switched on CNN to learn that Gore would indeed announce on "60 Minutes" that he had chosen not to be a candidate. A surge of adrenaline shot through Lieberman as he thought, "This is what I hoped for, this is what I dreamed about and, uh-oh, this is just the beginning of a long and grueling ordeal that can end who knows where." Hana, a deeply religious teenager, let loose with what even Orthodox rabbis would agree was the only appropriate response: "Holy shit!"

About an hour later, Lieberman received a text message on his BlackBerry from Gore formally confirming everything and asking to postpone their meeting so that the former vice president could work through his must-call list. When Matt Lieberman, a teacher in New Haven, called, he found his father's mood to be well-modulated enthusiasm (more "How about that?" than "Yippee!") mixed with an undertone of seriousness about the gravity of the undertaking. As Lieberman later told me, "That day I felt a combination of excitement and seriousness because this was it. I was now faced with this awesome responsibility. So I wasn't jumping up and down:' At the time, the mostly vacationing Lieberman loyalists were a far-flung lot, since they had been operating under the assumption that the first hints of a Gore decision would not come until after Christmas. So the residents of Lieberworld--the loyalists and staffers plus the senator and his family--got together on a conference call that evening and merely decided that Lieberman would hold a Monday press conference to announce that he "probably is a candidate." But that was a mere fig leaf of plausible denial. For during the call, Rebecca Lieberman concluded, "It's definite all right. We're doing this." The yarmulke was ha the ring.

The Idealist

If you believe the venomous critics of John Forbes Kerry, he's been running for president since his prep school days when he first realized the implications of the initials "JFK." Yet for all the sneering put-downs of his overweening ambition, after nearly two decades on Capitol Hill, he is only now embarking on his first race for the White House. On a Sunday in mid-August 2002, I accompanied Kerry on a trip to New Hampshire. The senator at times radiated eagerness about the coming Democratic contest, saying, "I feel that people are ready to get things going with the presidential race. It can't happen soon enough."

On that afternoon, Kerry was still months away from commissioning the stump speech mad the scripted sound bites that would later define his campaign for the White House. Instead, like all the other Democratic hopefuls at this premature stage, his speeches were a personal "Greatest Hits" album--applause lines from his Senate campaigns, tropes that he has been using for years, flights of rhetoric salvaged from his mental attic--fascinating in their own right as a Baedeker to his political persona. There was a time-warp quality to Kerry's words as the calendar kept drifting back to the 1960s, the decade that carried him from Yale to the Mekong Delta as a navy officer (where he received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts during two tours of combat) and eventually transformed him into a disillusioned crusader against the Vietnam War.