Looking Forward to It: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process - Softcover

I. Looking Forward to It
A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.
-Ernest Renan

July 2-3
No Time for Explanations; Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Washington; Davenport; Cedar Rapids, Car Politics

It's been a long, boring summer and it's only July. July 2003, to be exact, nearly a year and a half before two people you would never invite over to dinner, and probably wouldn't want to live in your town, will come head to head in the 2004 presidential election.
The weather never changes in San Francisco, it's always sweater weather, never cold enough for a coat, and for the past two months I've been dating Wilhelmina, a demon woman down in San Leandro who eats at places like Applebee's and swears if I ever write anything about her I'll be sorry.(1) She's already cut me four times with a scalpel. When things started to go bad between us, after she nearly tore my rotator cuff at 10:30 on a Saturday morning, I told her I was running off to join the campaign trail early. She said I'd be back. She didn't even question why someone would get on the trail a year and a half before the election. Just a couple of weeks ago she had told me that I better not cheat on her, but then followed it by saying she knew I wouldn't anyway. She said I wanted her to be angry, but she wasn't going to indulge me in that.
I could write about politics from my studio in San Francisco, but San Francisco doesn't matter when it comes to the big game. Whatever washed over San Francisco forty years ago, back when they were running naked in Golden Gate Park and killing people at Rolling Stones concerts and getting Clean for Gene, has left a residue of gray political impotence, a city so far Left it has ceased to exist.San Francisco liberals, they call them. In political circles it's the worst thing someone can say. It means you don't matter, you're worthless, you're dog shit, get out of my way. The country doesn't care what San Francisco thinks. No, I need to go where the action is, the fertile plain, the glistening bio-diesel stalks of Iowa, the libertarian hills of New Hampshire.
I meet my photographer, Stefan, at Eastern Iowa Airport, and we pick up an Enterprise economy and beeline to the University of Iowa, home of the Hawkeyes. Howard Dean is scheduled to speak at seven p.m.
"Do you think he has a chance?" Stefan asks me. He's more of a realist than I am. We met in Israel, where I was spending time with rock-throwing children, putting together an article for a magazine nobody's ever heard of. Stefan was on the other side of the line taking pictures of settlers for The Washington Post. Stefan's smiling a little because he lives in Washington, D.C., and probably already knows how all of this is going to turn out. What he doesn't know is that I'm writing for a magazine that doesn't carry photographs.
"What do I know about winners," I tell him. "I haven't voted for a winner since I started voting, which wasn't as long ago as it should be."
When Howard Dean comes into the small room with the low ceiling on the third floor of Memorial Hall, the students who are still in school for the summer let out a mad cheer. The room is packed with close to two hundred supporters. Dean is a small man with a long torso and a square head. He walks in smiling and shaking hands. I shake his hand and tell him I'm going to be shadowing him for the next eight days. I say I'm writing for GQ, which is a lie, but I can't help it.(2) "Oh, good," he says. "I'm looking forward to it." I'm not sure what he means. Then he goes on to the next person. He seems a little uncomfortable, a little surprised, a little too short to be a professional quarterback. Why do I keep thinking of Doug Flutie? Throw the long ball, Doug!
This is the first time I hear Dean talk on his big topics: the budget (Republicans don't know how to handle money or balance the budget), universal health care (for people up to age twenty-three), services instead of tax cuts, foreign policy (we need a foreign policy that is consistent with American values), education (more), Dean Core (volunteers representing in blue "Dean" shirts while working for Habitat for Humanity). If you've ever followed a politician, you know how amazing it is that he's saying what he's saying. That is, when he says, "We need a foreign policy that is consistent with American values," most politicians stop there. But Dean continues. He says we shouldn't have invaded Iraq and we should be in Liberia. But most people don't listen that closely when politicians talk, so they're unlikely to 0 notice the difference.
After the meeting, half of the people leave, but half of the people stay to have a Meetup. Every month across the country there are Meetups where groups of people get together and decide what they can do to help Howard Dean. It happens through meetup.com, completely independent of the campaign. His campaign is making meetup.com an enormous success. But whether Dean can harness the grassroots energy of the fifty-five thousand signed-up Dean supporters will probably be the difference between whether he gets to be the next George McGovern or the next Bill Bradley.
In a room in the back, Jeffrey Zeleny is interviewing Howard Dean. Sarah Leonard is guarding the door. Sarah Leonard, the Iowa communications director, is a long, tall drink of water. Stefan has brought a picture of her leaning over a table during the Gore campaign. She's got the big smile and unhealthy glow of a compulsive exerciser---the kind of person who orders a banana at an ice-cream stop (of which there will be plenty). We say hi early, but she turns away. And when Dean goes into a private room, Sarah shuts the door on me. But her fingers still wrap the edge, and if I pulled slightly, she'd let out a yell and that would get some attention. She closes the door all the way and sits down, leaning on the table in her shirtsleeves and long gray skirt, while Zeleny, national correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, his button-down shirt tucked, calmly prods the candidate with a three-hundred-dollar tape recorder between them.Look at me, Sarah, I think, look at me.


At a brick bar near the Iowa City Sheraton, Stefan and I meet with some of the kids volunteering on the campaign. They are enthusiastic and come from all over the country. They are young and good and not quite so freaky as some of the weirdos who showed up on the Nader trail. We buy them a bunch of pitchers ($3.50 per), and afterward Stefan and I head toward Washington, Iowa, a town of not many, where Dean will be meeting the breakfast crowd at Buc's Steakhouse at eight in the morning.
"On a scale of one to ten, how charismatic is Howard Dean?" I ask Stefan.
"Seven."
"That sounds about right." We drive on a little farther. "There's something wrong with him. He's stiff."
"I know," Stefan says. Stefan has photographed every Democratic candidate, so he knows something. "You meet Gephardt or Edwards or Kerry-these are guys who were popular in high school. But Dean, you know, he wasn't unpopular, but I don't think he was popular, either. He was probably middle." It's well past midnight, I'm driving, and I almost run into a chicken truck.
"What the fuck are you saying?" I say.
"I'm saying those guys are golden. They walk around, you watch them, they're all shiny. They have charisma. Dean doesn't seem like he deserves it. Like, if Dean won, he'd be surprised, because he doesn't really feel like it belongs to him."
I think for a minute about what Stefan has said. "You don't know anything," I tell him.
"You don't know anything," he mimics back.
"That Dean Core thing," I say....