The Internet was actually one of our strong points. For years I had been pushing high tech and computerization on the Republican Party. We had massive databases of names of donors, and the ability to dun them for money relentlessly. What had changed was that the Internet was becoming more and more powerful. Some of the old fogies in the party couldn’t understand it (hell, I couldn’t half the time, and I was the guy supposed to understand this stuff!) and thought it was a passing fad or trend. I set up a parallel fundraising group in Austin, composed of a bunch of young and tech savvy Republicans, some still in college, and with some funding through ARI and Marty Adrianopolis. They had a simple job — figure out how to use the Internet and the still-in-the-dream-stage idea of social networking, to get people to commit time and money. Marty and I, a couple of old RPI grads, were going to show the other oldsters what the future looked like, and Austin was going to be our showcase.
We had already seen John Kerry, John Edwards, and Howard Dean split the vote in the Iowa Caucuses in January, with them finishing a close 1, 2, and 3. They went 1, 3, and 2 in New Hampshire later that month. February was a mish-mash, with everybody but those three dropping out over the month, and each of them winning a few and losing a few. The strongest was Kerry, and Edwards and Dean were in a much lower tie for second place.
After Super Tuesday, March 2, it was all over except for the convention. John Kerry had managed to win all but one of those primaries, and John Edwards managed to win Georgia. Howard Dean didn’t win anything. Both Dean and Edwards withdrew the next day, though Edwards was making all sorts of noises about landing a spot on the ticket as the Veep.
There were still a number of primaries to finish the spring with, but with almost everybody else dropped out, John Kerry only needed to spend enough money to keep his name out front and win the last few states. He hoarded his cash, and what money he spent was actually spent on ads attacking me, not any other Democrats. He was beginning his general election campaign early, though not with a lot of spending. That would come later.
That doesn’t always work, though. Presidential calculus has a strange mathematical basis, as I well knew. Kerry was a Northeastern liberal, with a patrician air about him. Edwards brought in a Southerner with strong blue collar and union support, and a scrappy personal history. Lieberman, however, was so conservative that half the time he voted with the Republicans, and was one of the strongest Dems on national security and the military. His downside? He was Jewish, and Orthodox Jewish, to boot. Was the nation ready for that? Dean was also young and scrappy, and quite liberal. Both Dean and Lieberman were from the Northeast, which did not do well for spreading the vote around. In the White House, and at campaign headquarters (located in an office building next door to the RNC on First Street in D.C.), it made for an amusing guessing game. I didn’t think we would learn until the convention.
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!”