Joshuah Bearman

The Believer Stalks the 2004 Democratic Candidates: Dispatches from a Few Cold Places

Introduction and Contents

Dispatch One - Sunday, January 18

Dispatch Two - Thursday, January 22

Dispatch Three - Friday, January 23

Dispatch Four - Tuesday, January 27

DISPATCH FIVE—Nursed Back to Health
File Date: Thursday, January 29

Sonny, Killed in a Gunfight

Fun Spot Family Fun Center, the country’s largest arcade, in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, was probably the best place to be as New Hampshirers voted on how to divide their twenty-seven delegates to the Democratic Convention. After the debacle of 2000, new laws have restricted news agencies from reporting any returns or exit-poll figures before voting is over at 8 p.m. A wise legislative move in the interest of democracy, I’d say, but it means that there’s not much to see for most of the day, and Steve and I were tired of hanging out in campaign offices or talking to other journalists, so we said, Fuck it: let’s drive up north and go play us some Burgertime.

Yes: Burgertime. Fun Spot is a vast complex that includes not only a standard arcade, as well as bowling, ski ball, indoor mini golf, but also one important, massive room with the largest collection of working classic games in the world. Organized by manufacturer—Taito, Atari, Exidy, Midway—Fun Spot’s Classic Room is basically a museum. Gary Vincent, the manager who’s worked there since Pac-Man came out in 1981, said that these games don’t earn back the cost of the electricity required to operate the room. They are acquired and lovingly maintained out of a sense of duty to their legacy.

It’s a legacy pretty well represented. They have around a third of the 900 or so games that came out between 1971 and 1987, the year defined as the last of Golden Age. We spent a little time with all the games in the pantheon—Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Dig Dug, Rally X, Centipede, Defender, Berzerk—as well as Fun Spot’s many lesser known specialty and early games, like Depth Charge, Circus Charlie, Zoo Keeper, and Frontline, which I used to stand on a stool to play at Tilt Arcade in the Pasadena Mall. Right at the front was a real rarity called Warlords, which, when I saw it, activated a deeply recessed complex of neurons and electrical impulses that forcibly transported me back to this pizza place where I used to wait for the bus in Minneapolis, and where I went one day with my mother and Sonny, her boyfriend who was later killed in a gunfight. But on that day he gave me and his son Larry five bucks before he got too drunk to say no. “Urgent” by Foreigner was playing. Larry and I made change and put every quarter into Warlords while refilling our brown plastic cups with soda, probably Mr. Pibb. Snow was falling out the window. My boots were wet. It was the rare kind of memory that was impossibly vivid after twenty years of inactivity, the kind that, when they do surface, are shocking because they offer a momentary trapdoor through the physiological constraints of personal chronology, and raise the bitter question: what else lies lost in there? And will I ever get it back?

Everybody Loves Jeanne—or, Liking Kerry, Despite Kerry

By midnight, I was clinking Coors Lights with Bill Shaheen, the Chairman of Kerry’s New Hampshire Campaign, at the Manchester Holiday Inn. He had laid out a hundred to buy a round for me, Steve, and a photographer named Rick Friedman, as the risers were coming down and the bar was closing up.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“You bet,” Bill replied. “On to the national campaign.”

Kerry’s party was in the Holiday Inn Ballroom, which is one of the ways you can tell his campaign is the best organized: they always book the best venues early. A few hours before, Bill had introduced Kerry to a wild crowd. With half the precincts counted, it was clear that Kerry had a bigger lead over Dean than the exit polls were suggesting at the end of the day, and Bill didn’t want to wait to announce victory. “We've had three great presidents by the name of John,” he said, “John Quincy Adams, John Kennedy, and John Kerry is on his way!” When Kerry came out, he looked tired, but the room kept him going, correcting him when he said “if I become President” with the vehement chant—When! When! When! When!

“Dean threw everything at us,” Bill said. The hotel staff members were gathering up tablecloths in the foyer outside the ballroom. “They brought in all these people, but we had a better organization. And it’s really all thanks to Jeanne.”

Jeanne is Jeanne Shaheen, Bill’s legendary wife, one of the past century’s three Democratic governors in Republican New Hampshire, and, since September, Kerry’s national campaign chair. Together, Bill and Jeanne are something like kingmakers in the Democratic politics of New Hampshire. Jeanne was instrumental in Carter’s suppression of Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge in 1980. Bill chaired Carter’s New Hampshire in 1976. It was Jeanne who forged Gary Hart's upset strategy against Walter Mondale in 1984—the same gambit, going all-out in Iowa with the hope of riding a wave into New Hampshire, that Kerry had just successfully repeated. And in the 2000 New Hampshire Primary, when Bill Bradley was edging out Al Gore slightly by 1 p.m., it was Jeanne and Bill who kicked the emergency spurs and mobilized a rearguard effort that materialized a four point lead for Gore by the end of the night.

And now Bill was sitting on a bench detailing their work on the Kerry campaign up to this point. He told us how he had stopped trying to convince Jeanne to come to the campaign, and that eventually Kerry—always best one-on-one—had to persuade her personally. With Jeanne on the team, they were able to help usher in the staff changes, including national campaign manager, that revived the campaign and oiled the Kerry whip whose sting Dean’s been feeling since Iowa. Bill said one of the key successes was their ability to enforce a single message from the campaign, something that had eluded them while Jim Jordan, the previous national campaign manager, was around. And Bill talked freely about Kerry’s public style, and the speechwriters’ struggles to keep it succinct and Presidential, rather than exhaustive and professorial. “He loves to show you smart he is,” joked Bill. “If I was that smart, I would too.”

What was incredible about this conversation is that it would have been impossible an hour earlier. Kerry’s campaign organization is one of the most difficult to penetrate, especially for a novelist and writer for a literary journal. We hadn’t even been able to get into the victory party earlier because we had forgotten to call for credentials ahead of time, and neither of us had cards to prove we were journalists. Crowd control at Kerry events is enforced by dense lines of firefighters in matching shirts, which adds to the feeling of inaccessibility, even when you have credentials. The Kerry press staff is friendly, obsequious even, to reporters, while at the same time they exercise tight control about who talks to whom and about what. As Bill said, they enforced their Message. That’s because Kerry’s is the most traditional organization, with the kind of top-down, line-up-your-ducks executive management that gets votes but makes the campaign—and the candidate—seem distant. Kerry’s stony look and his stumping persona, combined with all that military rhetoric and insider political force, can be really off-putting. In this season of outsider politics, it’s Kerry’s approach that is making people think he’s the most conservative candidate, despite the fact that his voting record is the most liberal.

But Bill is not just a machine politician; he is the machine in tiny New Hampshire, and so it’s not surprising when he says he prefers that Kerry is an insider: “I like that he’s been around for thirty years, that you know what he’s done. That he opposed the Vietnam War. That he voted to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and all these other things. There’s something to be said for experience. He knows what he’s doing.”

Bill has a point, I’m thinking. Kerry’s smarts are appealing, and I know that if he had a chance to sit down and chat with me, I’d walk out of the room with a Kerry pin on my lapel and ten more to give my friends. I like Kerry, despite Kerry. I have a strange weakness for the patrician model of government, with the philosopher-king making judicious decisions—and I think Kerry would do the right thing. Yes, he got hoodwinked into voting for the war and the Patriot Act, but even the UN got outsmarted by Bush somehow, and I’m sure that if Kerry could sit down with me, he could explain just what happened and how he’s going to fix it…

But then again, all the candidates are pretty smart. Even Bill admitted, moments earlier, that in the wider political spectrum all the candidates are basically the same (except Lieberman, who everyone agrees is a really nice guy but has been tilting at windmills from the beginning). The thing that first attracted Bill to Kerry was the chance of beating Bush. Steve maintains that electability should not be a factor, but I disagree, as did New Hampshire Democrats, who cited that as a primary reason they cast ballots for Kerry. But while Bill was rightfully patting his crew on the back for demonstrating that the old school knows how to get votes, it’s still the old school, and it may alienate the newcomers, thereby shooting electability in the foot in the early draw. I said to Bill that if Kerry is to win in November, and for the Democrats to have a viable future, they can’t ignore what Dean and Clark have mobilized. They’ll need those grass roots they’re trampling now. Bill considered this, and said, “That may be right, but we still have to worry about February 3!”