Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [118]
“Well, you know, I don’t know.”
“It looks like you’re going to finish third here, Howard. You know you’ll have to get out of the race.” Silence. Howard was grappling with all that was inside him, all that had been inside him since the extraordinary tower he had built started collapsing.
Howard did not think John Kerry should be the nominee. I don’t know whether that was political calculation talking or the residual effect of the nasty campaign between them. But he believed that John, not Kerry, could beat Bush. Everyone was focused on Ohio being the big swing state. “The shop foreman in Ohio, those people will vote for you. They will not vote for Kerry,” he said, “because they feel a connection to you and they don’t feel any connection to him.”
“But the way things are going, he will be the nominee, Howard. You have to do something. You can’t just stand by and watch.”
Howard paused. “When,” he asked, “are you going to get traction? You beat me, but you lose here by about twenty-five or thirty points, it’s over.” Why should he go out on a limb for somebody who was not going anywhere? It was a perfectly reasonable question. What we didn’t know—and he didn’t know—is that it wouldn’t be twenty-five or thirty points. It would be six. And Howard took eighteen percent of the Wisconsin vote.
We didn’t push him. This was a deeply personal decision. Howard and I hugged, and the men shook hands warmly. Howard left, and John and I waited upstairs so that no one would see us leave with him. Howard was trying to talk himself into doing something. That’s why he was there. But, John said, he’s not going to do anything, and I agreed. He’s grieving, I said. It was natural. Everyone assumed he had a completely clear path to the nomination. When we’d go back to Washington, The Washingtonian would have big articles about what a Dean administration would look like and who would be doing what. He’d been on the covers of Time and Newsweek. And then, in what seemed like an instant to all of us, it was over. And Howard knew that, but it was just too hard to let go.
What we didn’t know was that around the corner, on Monday morning, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would endorse John. Unlike the Des Moines Register, which endorsed eight days before the caucuses, this endorsement was the day before the primaries, too late for us to add that endorsement to television commercials and signs. The public polling at that point—and we had no money for private polls—said that John was anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five points behind.
By the afternoon of the Wisconsin primary, John had already started doing satellite television into the Super Tuesday states. He was in his chair in front of the camera when he saw the staff buzzing around whispering to one another.
“What are you all talking about?” he asked.
“We’ve gotten the first exit polls,” Miles said.
“Don’t tell me. We’ll go to the room. You can tell Elizabeth and me both.”
I was getting ready to go down to the coffee shop to have lunch with Meryl Gordon when they came in. The early exit polls were showing a virtual tie. John had won the expectations game. The press was stunned by this comeback, but again in the end, it was second. It was Kerry’s face, not John’s on television screens above the words Wisconsin Winner.
That night we didn’t fly out at midnight.
Wisconsin, we knew, had been our best chance to turn the tide in the race for the nomination. It wasn’t just Howard, we all played what-if games. What if the endorsement had come earlier? What if Howard had pulled out before Wisconsin, or Clark before Oklahoma or Tennessee? But those are parlor games. The real contest is out there, in America, and there, we knew, it was nearly hopeless. There were two more weeks until Super Tuesday on March 2nd, when California, New York, Ohio, Georgia, and six other states would go to the polls. I talked to Amy, the pretty, bright, and endlessly energetic woman who had been a leader in the Dean campaign in Minnesota, and John talked to their group; John might get