On June 5 President Reagan died, and politics went on hold for a few days while we buried him. You never really have a whole lot of ex-Presidents hanging around, since we are generally in our 50s and 60s when we get the job. I was a definite aberration in that regard. All of us who were alive attended, of course. Jerry Ford was there, the oldest of us, along with Jimmy Carter, Bush 41 and Bill Clinton. It was pretty much the same bunch that had been present for Bush 43's state funeral, and if anything, this was even bigger. I made an appropriate speech, as did most of the others. After it was over, however, we went back to the blood sport that was the 2004 election.
The Democratic Convention was about a month before ours, at the end of July, in Boston. That worked well for Kerry, since his power base was Massachusetts. From everything they were spouting and saying to each other, their focus was going to be that they could obviously do things better. We would be safer, have fewer wars, kill fewer bad guys, have more jobs, lower pollution, more savings, yadda yadda yadda! Not only was there going to be a chicken in every pot, it would be a bigger chicken, and there would be two of them!
Would they be able to pull it off? That was the big question. That was why they held elections, to see who would win. In practical terms, the election was mine to lose. The economy was relatively strong and unemployment was low. By every historical measure, that was a major benefit to the ruling party in a Presidential election. I still had ample opportunity to step on my crank. We had not had a major terrorist event since 9-11, but there were still lots of asshole ragheads who wanted Death To America! All it would take was for us to screw things up and take our eye off the ball. One bad event could undo years of rebuilding. A bad scandal would hurt, and in an operation as big as the Federal government, there was always something you could call a scandal. A sudden downturn in the economy would be very difficult to deal with, even if it started overseas and then slopped onto our shores.
Will Rogers once said that he wasn't a member of any organized political party, but that he was a Democrat. They managed to prove it once again at their convention in Boston. They went absolutely bonkers on security, even to the point of creating a designated 'Free Speech Area' for the inevitable protesters – who were not allowed anywhere else! The ACLU took them to court over that and lost. Meanwhile every whack job in Boston showed up to protest, including the local police union, which was protesting their contract! They even threatened to withhold protective services from the delegates! Inside the Fleet Center things went considerably smoother. The Democrats promised to keep America strong, fight terrorism, strengthen the military, make us independent of foreign oil, and otherwise slavishly copy the Republican playbook.
The real message to the audience was quite a bit different! "If you're not a white male, we love you!" The keynote speaker was a new fellow, the biracial junior senator from Chicago with divorced parents who had lived overseas and had an Arab name. Yes, Barack Hussein Obama was introduced to America that week, with an electrifying speech. Otherwise, it seemed like the only white male speakers were going to be John Kerry and his Vice Presidential selection, John Edwards. Everybody else was a woman, or a person of color, or gay/lesbian/something-even-weirder. They were trying out a strategy that might just well work! Let the Republicans keep the white male voters, and they would take everything else and beat our pants off.
I watched a fair bit of it in the evenings, with Brewster, Ed Gillespie, the Chairman of the RNC, and Marty Adrianopolis coming up to the Residence. The one thing I did was point this out to them, and in no uncertain terms! "You want to know why we needed the DREAM Act? There it is! If they get all the women and blacks and immigrants and gays, guess what?! They win!"
Marty had read my book, and Brewster didn't care in many ways (a true mercenary), but Ed wasn't buying it. He had seen the Republicans win a lot of elections when they appealed to the party base – white, male, Christian, rural, and Southern. "I am not buying it! You push for those groups, the party loses our core."
"Where are they going to go, Ed? A third party? That just means we lose for sure! This country has never had a third party that was viable since the Republican Party was invented! They can bitch all they want, but if we want this party to be viable in the future, we have to appeal to somebody other than a bunch of crackers, and I say that with the full knowledge that most people think I'm a cracker!"
"They will split the party and we will lose anyway."
"Then the party becomes irrelevant for another generation, until the crackers die off. We can be a regional party, and a spoiler party, but we won't be a national party with a chance to win the Presidency or the Senate. We need an outreach program to immigrants. Look at the list of speakers they have! We'll never get the blacks back, but there is no reason to lose immigrants, too!"
Brewster piped up at that point, "Ed, I don't like it either, but the numbers don't lie. It is very easy to run a primary to the base, but beyond that, it doesn't work. You want to win the base, you just ramp up Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest of the bunch and turn them loose, but with anybody with an IQ above room temperature it will go over like a lead balloon. If this is the way the nation is trending, and the numbers don't lie, we need to be out in front of it, or we will never catch up from behind."
"We will be slitting our throats."
"Ed, right now Texas is a solid Republican state, but if the Hispanics vote Democratic, in ten years Texas becomes a battleground state, and in twenty years it becomes solid Democratic. Ditto Arizona. Ditto ditto New Mexico. Wait until it's Colorado or Florida or Kansas. It's already happening, Ed." I replied. "On the other hand, we show some respect and support, we have a chance. Latinos aren't just a single voting bloc. Some are liberal, some are conservative. We have as much of a chance as the next guy."
We argued it back and forth, and I don't know whether we would win or lose this particular debate. Ultimately, I made the final decision. Brewster was ordered to ramp up Hispanic language advertising in all the various high Latino population states – even places like California, which we had no chance in hell of winning! The Kerry campaign would have to match us in a countermove, and they had more limited funds than we did. Furthermore, the campaign spots were to be tailored to what the focus groups were determining to be important to Latinos, not simply Spanish translations and voiceovers of our regular ads.
John and I simply had to keep our A game going. For all of 2004 we were planning a schedule of trips around the country. Every week or two one or the other of us would fly somewhere and visit a factory or infrastructure project, meet with workers, give a speech, and do a fundraiser with the local political bigwigs. We would always be stressing something that we had gotten passed. It might be a defense plant building ships or planes, it might be a lock on the Mississippi that was being rebuilt, or a highway in Minnesota that was getting repaved. We made sure to attend a few citizenship ceremonies, especially if it was a minority that we had a chance of swinging into the Republican column. We definitely focused on Latinos, regardless of what the base thought. We needed to keep them Republican, and not let the Democrats grab them. Marilyn called it cynical, and I called it realistic. It was one of those differences in our world views, I guess.
A lot of this is basic Campaign Politics 101, what I had done in northern Baltimore and Carroll Counties for years, only now across the entire nation. Thank God John had done this before, because he actually knew what he was doing. I could give a good speech, but after every trip he took to giving me a critique. It wasn't enjoyable, but it needed to be done, and it's the only way I would learn. By the summer I was able to critique him as well.