Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (15 page)

As a reporter, I had little relationship with Rosty, who might have hoisted a few with the Washington press types but who had little use for the ink-stained wretches in Chicago. At the behest of Rich Daley, I agreed to do a few radio ads for Rostenkowski in 1992, when he faced a minor primary challenge. By 1994 he was even more vulnerable, and for good reason. Rostenkowski had overcome his youthful image as an undeserving machine princeling to become a towering force in Washington. Now all that was threatened. Rosty was under siege—the subject of a federal investigation for the kind of two-bit chiseling one had come to expect from a Chicago alderman, not from the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. Having worked a lifetime to be seen as more than a Chicago ward heeler, he was in jeopardy of joining some of the hacks from back home in prison.

“Did you see them out there?” he demanded nervously one day when I visited him at his campaign headquarters. Both the White House and City Hall had asked me to help Rosty again, and despite the gathering storm clouds, I was eager to do what I could. Still, it was jarring to find this legislative powerhouse sitting at a small desk in the middle of a cavernous and largely empty headquarters, his eyes darting back and forth between me and the storefront window. “The G, the government—the FBI. They’re out there. They’re all over me.”

Helped by a rousing endorsement ad from Clinton, Rosty survived a serious primary fight, but he would be indicted before the general election, and swept away by a political unknown on the Republican ticket.

While Clinton’s endorsement might have been valuable to Rostenkowski in the Democratic precincts of Chicago, 1994 was a national disaster for the party. By 1996, though, Clinton’s Republican foil, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, had overplayed his hand, the economy was improving, and the president was cruising to reelection.

Chicago would be the scene of the Democratic National Convention, which promised to be more harmonious than the last party confab in the Second City. Mayor Daley, who sat by his father’s side when the ’68 convention dissolved into chaos, was determined to supplant those bitter memories with happier images of his city.

In the spring of ’96, I got a call from Doug Schoen, a New York-based pollster with whom I had worked, asking me to come to Washington to meet with Dick Morris, the politically ambidextrous Svengali whom Clinton had turned to for help in salvaging his presidency after the disastrous midterms.

“Dick wants to talk to you about Chicago,” explained Schoen, who, with partner Mark Penn, had teamed up with Morris to take over the president’s polling after Clinton cashiered the team that had helped elect him.

I had mixed feelings. I wanted to help Clinton, but I had deep suspicions about Morris, who had worked for liberal Democrats but also for arch-conservatives like Jesse Helms. To me, Dick seemed like an opportunist, often pushing the envelope—and always leaving with his own nicely stuffed. Still, I liked Schoen, and decided that if Morris was Clinton’s guy, I should, at the very least, hear him out. We set up an appointment for the Jefferson Hotel, where Morris was living, just five blocks from the White House. Morris burst into the hotel lobby, forty-five minutes late, with an entourage of aides, including Penn. In his suite, he settled into a high-backed chair and summoned me over in the fashion of a Mafia don.

“I heard you were a smart guy,” he began, “but I didn’t call you, because I also heard you were a liberal. But Schoen says you’re all right.

“You see, we’re in a battle with Ickes and the liberals in the White House for the heart and soul of this administration,” Morris said, referring to Harold Ickes, the president’s deputy chief of staff and a progressive stalwart, who kept a close rein on Morris and his budget. “So you’re either with us or you’re with them.”

As Morris talked, the disheveled, wild-haired Penn paced anxiously behind him, occasionally casting a wary eye in my direction.

“Well, gee, Dick,” I replied. “I’m here because I am with the president. I just want to do what I can to help him.”

Morris pondered my answer, and tried a different approach.

“Okay, okay. Fair enough. So how do you think the president’s doing?”

“Very well,” I said. “He’s done some great things. The economy is picking up. The only thing is that there still are a lot of folks who aren’t sharing in that recovery.”

With that, Penn exploded.

“Come on, Dick, let’s get out of here,” he shouted. “He’s one of them!”

Without looking at Penn, Morris waved him off and resumed our conversation.

“Look, it would be useful to me to have someone who really gets Chicago and could help me understand where the opportunities and problems might arise there,” he said. “Let me try and get you on board with the campaign for that.”

I never heard from Morris again; maybe my liberal leanings scared him off. Nor did he get the chance to experience much of Chicago. Just as the convention opened, the story broke that Morris had been entertaining a prostitute in that same suite at the Jefferson, and that his guest had taken some positions that would prove far more distressing for Morris than mine. Morris was banished from the campaign, leaving Penn as the chief strategist.

Meanwhile, I was able to make a small contribution to the president’s effort. I had watched the Republican convention, where their nominee, Senator Robert Dole, had spoken of being a bridge to the values of the past. This struck me as off-key, particularly coming from a candidate whose age and worldview already seemed retrograde. I wrote a memo to Rahm in the White House, suggesting that the president consider inverting Dole’s reference in what would be the last acceptance speech of the twentieth century.

“The odd thing about Dole’s speech is that rather than offer a vision for the future, he served up an ode to the past,” I wrote. “Clearly, people yearn for the values and comforts—and sense of control—of an earlier time. But they also recognize that we can’t put the genie back into the bottle. They want a President who confidently meets the challenges of changing times, not one who curses and shrinks from them, or pretends they aren’t there.” So, for Clinton’s speech, I suggested a formulation: “We must build bridges to the future, not the past. Much as we might like to, we can’t go back. As we enter a new century and a new millennium, wistful reflections about simpler times won’t be enough to solve the challenges of today and tomorrow.” I also proposed that the president pivot off the rancorous tone of the other convention, and challenge the Republicans to a “contest, not of insults, but ideas.”

Michael Waldman, the president’s speechwriter, generously credited my memo in his memoirs as a spark behind the “bridge to the twenty-first century” theme Clinton embraced, and when I ran into Stephanopoulos after the president’s speech, he seemed familiar with it as well. “Ideas, not insults,” he said, with a smile. “Highest-testing line in the speech.”

The run-up to the convention presented me with another challenge.

The previous fall, I had signed on to help a spirited, young state legislator, Rod Blagojevich, who was angling to knock off the Republican who had lucked into Rostenkowski’s seat the previous election.

I liked Rod. He was fun-loving, warm, and self-effacing. The son of a Serbian immigrant—his father had been a steelworker, his mother, a ticket taker for the Chicago Transit Authority—he seemed genuinely to identify with people who, in his words, had come from the “wrong side of the tracks.” His thick helmet of black hair was an homage to Elvis Presley, his favorite working-class hero.

Rod’s story was not entirely a Horatio Alger tale, however. His political career had taken off only after he began courting the daughter of Richard Mell, an influential Chicago alderman and ward boss. Still, Rod had voted a solid independent line in Springfield, bucking party leaders on some key votes.

In the midst of the congressional race, the
Tribune
decided that it would commit considerable space in its convention editions to a feature the paper dubbed “Lord of His Ward.” The idea was to clue visiting delegates and media into the quaint, old ways of Chicago politics. Many of the most likely candidates to be profiled were close to reporters at the
Trib
, who lobbied to spare their sources the “honor” of this special recognition. So the editors chose Mell, in part because his effort to elect his son-in-law to Congress would provide a colorful backdrop for the story.

Seven months before the convention, the editors assigned a team to work on the series, including several investigative reporters. Soon they began asking unfriendly questions of Blagojevich’s colleagues and associates. Freedom of Information requests were being dropped all over town, and it became clear that the
Trib
’s team was intent on painting the picture of an incompetent ghost payroller—an empty suit propelled up the ladder by his powerful father-in-law.

The series was mildly threatening to Blagojevich’s chances, though it wouldn’t appear in the newspaper until after the crucial Democratic primary. To me the exercise seemed a bit like bounty hunting. Having been cut loose for months to produce this opus, the reporters understood it would be bad form to come back empty-handed.

To counter, I dusted off my old skills as an investigative reporter and began tracking their inquiries. Anticipating their charge that Blagojevich had not worked for his paycheck when he was a part-time hire on Mell’s aldermanic staff, I collected close to a hundred affidavits from people for whom Rod had been a caseworker. I looked into his law cases to rebut charges about his legal competence. As summer approached, I wrote a twelve-page memo to the
Trib
’s editor, rebutting the many lines of attack and arguing why the piece should not run. “Somewhere this project got off the rails,” I wrote. “Instead of an honest and balanced profile, it became, at least for some involved, a search-and-destroy mission. And now, it seems, every negative inference is accepted as fact; every bit of positive information is deemed irrelevant.” The piece I feared did not run. Ultimately, some of the material was used, but in a less prominent form.

Rod won. In Congress, he became known more for his elaborate pranks than his body of work. Still, he took on my son Michael as an unpaid intern for three summers, and helped lift the spirits of a boy who was burdened by many challenges. For that I will always be grateful.

When Rod went on to run for governor in 2002, however, it was without my help.

“Why do you want to be governor?” I asked him when he summoned me to talk about the race.

“You can help me figure that out,” he said, an answer that was, for me, a conversation stopper.

“Look,” I said, “if you can’t tell me why you’re running, I can’t help you explain it to others.”

I left the meeting, and our seven-year relationship was over.

I believed in Rod in 1996, and in what I was doing. Later, when he went to prison for corruption as governor, I revisited ’96 in my head and wondered if, even then, he had conned me as he had so many others.

We racked up more victories in ’98 and ’99, and the firm’s national reputation continued to grow. Forrest Claypool had left our firm to serve Daley as his chief of staff and had won great notices for his tenure as the reform-minded chief of the Chicago Park District. In 2002 he beat the Democratic organization for a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners. John Kupper, a skillful communications specialist with Capitol Hill experience, had now replaced Forrest, and would work at my side for two decades.

One of our most satisfying races of this period took place next door, in Iowa, familiar terrain for me after years of reporting and consulting on campaigns. We got a call from a little-known state senator, who was lagging far behind in his race for the Democratic nomination for governor in a state that hadn’t elected a Democrat governor in thirty-two years. “Right up our alley,” Kupper joked. “Buy low, sell high.”

Tom Vilsack had a story straight out of Hollywood. Left on the doorstep of an orphanage in Pittsburgh, he was adopted by a dysfunctional family. His abusive mother wrestled with alcoholism and prescription drug abuse. His father struggled financially, and secretly sold much of what the family owned to send Tom to college. There, Tom met Christie Bell of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, an aspiring schoolteacher. The two would marry, and when Tom graduated from law school, they would move back to Mount Pleasant. Tom joined Christie’s dad at his small law firm, and basked in the warm embrace of this quintessential small town, quickly becoming a pillar of the community. When Mount Pleasant’s mayor was shot to death at a City Council meeting, the slain mayor’s family and the traumatized town drafted Tom, then thirty-six, to replace him. When Tom tried to step down after two terms, 90 percent of Mount Pleasant’s voters wrote his name on the ballot to ensure he continued in office. He went on to win a seat in the state senate from a predominantly Republican district in southeast Iowa and, in 1997, was pondering a race for governor when I met with him at his modest law offices. The odds were long, but Vilsack was the real deal, and I badly wanted the race.

“There were some pretty slick guys from Washington in to see me right before you,” the slightly rumpled Vilsack would tell me later. “I hired you because your shirttail was sticking out, and I figured I could relate to you.”

It turned out that Iowans were as impressed with Vilsack and his story as I was. He would go on to win two spirited, come-from-behind victories in the primary and general election. It helped that the Republican nominee, Jim Ross Lightfoot, had been a part of the Republican majority in Congress, which in four short years had fallen into disrepute. One of our ads pictured members of a fictional Iowa family standing in front of their home and disappearing from the screen one by one as we catalogued Lightfoot’s votes for budget cuts. The ad slashed a fifteen-point lead in half, and Tom’s momentum never waned.

 • • • 

While the Vilsacks were celebrating their victory, Susan and I were struggling with an increasingly bleak prognosis for Lauren. She was so hobbled by seizures and drugs that she could barely speak intelligibly, and struggled just to keep her head up. We tried a vagal nerve stimulator, implanted in her chest, to combat the seizures with electrical impulses, but it didn’t help. We also tried a draconian 90 percent–fat diet, precisely measured to stimulate anti-epileptic ketones in her system. It failed. When she was fifteen, Lauren had brain surgery. A hole was drilled in her skull, and a strip of electrodes was laid on top of her brain to try to identify the source of her seizures. If the doctors could locate it, they would remove the tissue. After ten days of monitoring, though, during which her drugs were withdrawn to induce constant seizures, Lauren’s neurologist glumly shared the results: “We couldn’t find it,” he said. “The focal point is too deep in her brain. I’m so sorry.”