CHAPTER 20

ON NOVEMBER 12, 2003, Massachusetts senator John Kerry took a walk through the woods along the Merrimack River in Litchfield, New Hampshire. The air was misty and the leaf-strewn ground soggy as Kerry strode with his hands in his jacket pockets, a pack of campaign reporters following closely behind. The intent of the arboreal photo-op was to provide an evocative background for the Democratic presidential candidate, in order to highlight his strong record on the environment, but there was a problem: all that any of the reporters wanted to ask him about was his sinking campaign.

Kerry’s presidential hopes were in free fall. Unable to find his footing in a race that had been his to lose at the outset, he had fired his campaign manager four days earlier, and then two of his senior aides had quit in protest. Meanwhile, Howard Dean was cruising. On the strength of his full-throated opposition to the Iraq War, his passionate support base of “Deaniacs,” and his revolutionary online fund-raising juggernaut, the former Vermont governor had surged from an afterthought to the top of the Democratic pack in Iowa and New Hampshire and had become an unlikely phenomenon.

As Kerry trudged along the sodden branches and dead leaves in his rain boots, he criticized the Bush administration for ushering in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while at the same time providing giveaways to some of the nation’s worst polluters. A few feet away, Andy Hiller—a political reporter for Boston station WHDH—was taping his prerecorded tease for a segment that would air later that night. With the candidate close enough to hear every word, Hiller delivered his memorable line: “Howard Dean… surging in the polls. And John Kerry… lost in the woods.”

As far behind as he had fallen, Kerry did have a couple of factors working in his favor in New Hampshire. First of all, he was from neighboring Massachusetts, which was worth more politically than any advantage that Dean might gain by way of hailing from just across the western border (the Boston media markets reached far more New Hampshire voters than the Burlington, Vermont, media did). Second, two months earlier, Kerry had won the endorsement of former governor Jeanne Shaheen after her husband, Bill, had signed on as chairman of his New Hampshire campaign, and he had gained the backing of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), which was the first union to endorse a Democratic candidate that year other than Congressman Dick Gephardt. These weren’t token endorsements. Shaheen was on the ground in New Hampshire working on Kerry’s behalf nearly around the clock, and almost every day when he was campaigning in the state, Kerry would attend multiple IAFF “firehouse chili feeds.” The events gave the blue-blooded candidate some blue-collar cred, and he always made sure to eat some chili (appreciative, no doubt, that it was low-carb).

Two days after his “lost in the woods” ignominy, the worst appeared to be over for Kerry’s campaign when he brought the house down with a resounding speech at the Democratic candidates’ big Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. It was at that event where Kerry revealed his campaign’s new slogan, “The Real Deal.” The context of the phrase was an implied warning to Democratic voters as they made their decision on who was best positioned to take on George W. Bush, a wartime president, in November. This was no time to nominate an untested wild card like Dean, Kerry was arguing. As a Vietnam War hero and an experienced Washington hand, he was the far safer bet.

When Kerry returned to New Hampshire after a triumphant night in Des Moines, his campaign rolled out what it called “The Real Deal Express”—an homage to the Straight Talk Express that Kerry’s buddy John McCain had driven to victory in New Hampshire four years earlier. Then, just as the Real Deal Express was about to set out for its inaugural New Hampshire stop, there was WHDH’s Andy Hiller standing nearby in front of a camera. Once again, the local TV reporter was ready to shoot another tease, and Hiller still wasn’t impressed. “How many times,” he asked his audience, “can you kick off a deflated football?”

It may have been a wiseass question, but it was also a fair one. Not only was Kerry still well behind Dean in the polls, but the anecdotal evidence suggested that the Massachusetts senator would continue to have an uphill struggle to catch him. On the stump, the sixty-year-old candidate was good at connecting with people from his own generation, bantering easily about Peter, Paul, and Mary; Vietnam; and LBJ. But he was awkward with people who had been born after Woodstock. When an eight-year-old boy asked Kerry at one New Hampshire town-hall meeting what the candidate planned to do about Iraq, Kerry, in an effort to come off as personable, replied by asking the kid what he would do about it.

Once voters got past the easily lampooned facets of Kerry’s personality, however, they often found that they liked him. The firefighters helped with that, and so did Kerry himself. During a January visit to the Timberland company headquarters in Stratham, Kerry, a multimillionaire, purchased a discounted coat that he wore every day on the campaign trail from there on out. The crowds and energy on the trail picked up noticeably, as the winds now seemed to be shifting in Kerry’s direction.

Dean, however, was still in the lead. Although he may have been an unconventional candidate, the campaign that the Vermonter’s team was running in New Hampshire was utterly conventional. Since the day he began to actively explore a long-shot candidacy all the way back in May 2002, the populist firebrand had been solidifying his online fund-raising prowess with a slowly building, solid structural foundation in New Hampshire. Like many successful New Hampshire underdogs before him, Dean had begun speaking at house parties with only a couple of dozen people in attendance and, mostly through word of mouth, the crowds had gotten bigger and bigger, until he finally outgrew the house-party format altogether and had to move his events to larger venues.

Dean appeared to be just as strong in Iowa as he was in New Hampshire. But amid all the excitement of his massive crowds of fired-up young people, the other major Democratic candidates in the race began training their fire almost exclusively on the now established front-runner throughout the fall. The attacks, in turn, began to have an impact. By December, Dean’s numbers started to slip noticeably, and he began referring to himself in speeches as “a human pin cushion.”

Then in early January, NBC News aired a report on comments that Dean had made on Canadian television four years earlier, in which he’d disparaged the Iowa caucuses, noting that the event was “dominated by special interests.” The timing couldn’t have been worse. Dean was still leading in the state at the time, but the bottom quickly dropped out of his Iowa campaign. In a misguided effort to rally his troops upon Kerry’s massive victory and his own devastating third-place finish on Caucus Night, Dean screamed the scream heard ’round the world, and his standing heading into New Hampshire became desperate.

For Kerry, on the other hand, everything was now going right. Straight from his victory in Iowa, he flew overnight and landed in Manchester early the next morning, where several hundred cheering supporters were at the airport waiting to greet him. His bounce coming out of the first voting state was dramatic, and he quickly overtook Dean in the New Hampshire polls. An alarming number of Dean’s New Hampshire precinct captains, meanwhile, were calling their candidate to let them know that they were abandoning ship. All the signs were there that it was just about over for Dean, and yet the former Vermont governor remained largely oblivious of the extent to which the already infamous shriek had devastated his chances. “We were trying to help him understand how damaging it was, and he just wouldn’t buy it,” recalls Karen Hicks, who was Dean’s New Hampshire state director. “He was so cranky after Iowa and really feeling mistrustful of people on his campaign.”

Shortly before a rally in Peterborough, Hicks and a group of other aides pulled Dean aside and told him that he needed to acknowledge the effect that the scream was having on people’s perceptions of him and to try to turn it to his advantage. The right move, they suggested, would be to hold up the moment as an example of how he was not just another scripted, blow-dried politician. Dean agreed to do it, but he didn’t follow through.

Not that it would have mattered much anyway, as Kerry ended up winning New Hampshire by a comfortable twelve-point margin. In the general election, he struggled painfully to connect, but for those couple of months leading into Iowa and New Hampshire, Kerry was at the top of his game. Right when he appeared to be down and out, everything started clicking for him. Nearly a decade later, just before he was confirmed as secretary of state, John Kerry was still wearing in public the coat that he purchased at the Timberland headquarters in Stratham—a reminder of his halcyon days as a presidential candidate who was at his best when he was almost vanquished.