When Sen. John Edwards is working the room, as he does quite well now, he sticks pretty much to an issueless script. If prompted by a question, he will answer it with details, but when he is trying to make the connection with voters, he does it with his life story.
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He talks about growing up the son of a millworker in North Carolina, about being the first in his family to go to college and how he paid for it himself. With his silky Southern drawl, he talks about “common folks” and the tragedy of the rich and poor in this nation divided into “two Americas.”
And he says it all with a made-for-TV smile. “The cynics didn’t build this country,” he says. “Optimists built this country.”
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts cannot match Edwards for humble roots or empathetic manner. So Kerry instead talks about the sacrifice that he, a child of privilege, made by enlisting to fight in Vietnam, putting his life in peril to serve a cause greater than himself.
Candidates for president have employed the politics of biography since the first campaign. But what is notable this time is the degree to which persona is so trumping policy. Many can still recall some of the policy positions of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. “Health care that’s always there.” “End welfare as we know it.” “Personal responsibility for all.”
To be sure, the Man from Hope played the biography card as well, but he infused his talks with voters with much more of a discussion of issues.
This campaign so far is about personality.
Message plus biography
“Kerry and Edwards’ biographies and their positive message matched with their biographies is what is pushing them to the front of the pack,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans and author of a new book on Kerry, “Tour of Duty.”
That Edwards would thrive in such a climate is not a surprise. The personality that comes through on the campaign trail and in the debates is infectious. He has run away with the likability primary.
The embrace of Kerry comes for different reasons. The voters of Iowa saw in him a steadiness, and they also gravitated to his life story as a combat veteran who, as he so often puts it, knows what it is like to land on an aircraft carrier when the stakes are life and death, and not a photo opportunity.
And he is helped greatly by his comrades, including some whose lives he personally saved, standing on the stage with him.
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark has tried to play the war-hero card and the humble beginnings card. His father died when he was 4 and his mother worked to pay the bills. He earned his appointment to West Point and finished at the top of his class, the first in a series of ticket punches that ended with a general’s stars on his shoulders. But he has failed so far to integrate his dramatic biography into his campaign in any meaningful way.
Dean’s woes
The gravitational pull of the compelling life story as opposed to any defining issues can also go a long way toward explaining the troubles of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.
Dean didn’t thrive because of his biography. He thrived because of a cult of personality that sprung up around his Internet-fueled candidacy. And that is a huge problem for him.
No one controls the circumstances of their birth, and to his credit, Dean has not tried to spin a tale of woe or hardship about growing up on Park Avenue, a son of Wall Street and not Main Street.
But his personality and his style so far, fascinating though the ride has been, now seem to be working against him. And in no way was that more vivid that his poor man’s Huey Long screed after his disastrous third-place showing in Iowa.
Dean seems alone.
He has traveled the country for the better part of two years campaigning. His constant traveling companion has not been a member of his family, but rather a member of his staff.
The heat of his early speeches and his attacks on President Bush didn’t need the accompaniment of a family’s warm glow. Nor did he need the burnishing of a hardscrabble or heroic life to challenge a president whose own roots are Yankee blue blood.
As the campaign has progressed, however, Dean also became the object of unrelenting criticism from his opponents. He was often the only candidate on the receiving end of attacks, even though the attacks were in fact a measure of his heretofore-stunning success.
But the attacks seemed to isolate him further. And when he fired back or when he attacked the president, it reinforced the notion that he was indeed an angry man. That perception served to further isolate him. His only friend on the stage seemed to be former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, who has dropped out of the race.
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Wife mostly absent
Dean’s wife, Judith Steinberg, also a physician, came to Iowa only in the final days of the campaign. Their family decision was to leave the politicking to him, that she would take care of their son and her patients. Her appearance at the 11th hour, and again Thursday in an all-sweaters interview on ABC’s Prime Time Live, was meant to make Dean seem more human and less like a human hard drive.
But the interview was not like Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992, when they held hands and acknowledged problems in their marriage on “60 Minutes” before the New Hampshire primary.
The Deans weren’t talking about their problems; indeed, there is no evidence that they have any. Rather, they were talking about his problems. Whether he was too angry, too curt or too abrupt.
“You get a feeling that people are looking for a white knight to take on George Bush,” historian Brinkley said. “You can’t be that if you are Howard Dean shouting down senior citizens.”