The Charisma Tour

It’s pretty exciting, all right, meeting the man “Politics in America” says has a “studied quality” to everything he does, and whose “caution and attention to detail” mean that any mistakes he makes are “apt to stem from belated action rather than haste.” Okay, so it’s not that exciting. But there’s Graham, kissing a girl full on the mouth.

I whip out my pad, prepared to document the first indiscretion of the campaign cycle. But it turns out to be his granddaughter Sarah. There are nine more grandkids where she came from, and they are all here, along with their mothers (Graham’s four daughters) and fathers, as well as Graham’s wife, Adele. That makes 20 in all, and they have come–and this is exciting–for the annual “Graham Family Vacation.” Every year, the Graham family vacations together in places like the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, or the Caribbean. But just five months before the Iowa caucuses, the Graham family coincidentally decided to pack two RVs, a couple of luggage vans, and a media bus, and take a tour of Iowa. One can almost hear the children begging, as children do everywhere, “Grandpa, take us to lunch with the Warren County Democrats, and then on to the John L. Lewis Mining and Labor Museum!”

There are only two actual candidates at the parade (Graham and Kucinich), but almost every campaign has a contingent marching. The Howard Dean campaign, like the candidate, is loud and slightly obnoxious, cranking James Brown’s “Get Up” from speakers that they hold up to the windows of their pace car. But they are drowned out by a raspy and repeated hog call of “WHOOOOO! You got it Dad!” It comes from Cissy, the second of Graham’s four daughters (who range in age from 34 to 40).

The Graham family, it should be noted, is a White House-ready family. They are the Kennedys without the extramarital affairs and bad livers. The grandsons are all buddies who easily throw their arms around each other. And the granddaughters are model-quality, many boasting ringlets of natural curls. The sons-in-law (Cissy is married to William McCullough, son of author David McCullough) are generous and quick-witted and don’t mind reporters’ flirting with their wives. And those wives–the entity known as the Graham girls–are all attractive and warm, the surest bet to become the sex symbols of the 2004 cycle, assuming their dad’s around long enough. They are like the Gore girls of last cycle, only better. The Gore girls were girls. The Graham girls are women.

They are the same, but different. In girl-band archetypes, the oldest, Gwen, would be Posh Spice–smoldering and fashionable, and their nominal leader. Suzanne, number three, is the Ginger Spice-ish bad girl–“bad girl” being a relative term in the Graham family, meaning that she’s the one who’ll wear the non-uniform article of clothing (anything without Bob Graham’s name on it). Kendall, the youngest, is Baby Spice. When I ask Cissy which one would be Strong and Silent Spice, she points to Gwen. “She’s strong, but not silent. None of us are silent,” which Cissy proves by letting out another ear-splitting “WHOOOOO!”

The politicians, stuck near the back of the processional, are all set to march. But in an unfortunate bit of stagecraft, they’re forced to wait as clowns shovel horse droppings (from the mounted police) into a bulldozer bucket. The clowns miss a few, however, and Graham’s striking wife, Adele, steps in one. It doesn’t ruffle her. A lifetime political wife (married to Graham throughout his two terms as Florida governor and three terms as senator), she has encountered her fair share of manure. She maintains a regal bearing that is best conveyed not in words, but in song. Specifically, “My Beautiful Adele”: My beautiful Adele / You are more than words could ever tell.

The song comes from the upcoming “Bob Graham Charisma Tour 2004” CD, with tracks written and performed by Graham’s good friend Frank Loconto. The CD is not only the Graham soundtrack to the parade, but over the next week, the soundtrack of our lives. Graham, who is known for breaking into song (he once composed an Elián González operetta), lustily sings his campaign theme, “Friend in Bob Graham”: We’ve got a friend in Bob Graham / That’s what everybody’s sayin’ / All the way across the good ole’ USA / From Atlantic to Pacific / We all say that ‘He’s terrific!’ / America needs Bob Graham today! It may be the most hilarious campaign song since William Taft’s “Get on a Raft with Taft.” But the Grahams like it so much that the CD even features a Spanish-language salsa version called “Arriba Bob” (Desde el Atlantico al Pacifico / Le dicen el magnifico!).

Though he just had heart surgery this year, the thinner but still pillow-cheeked 66-year-old Graham keeps up a brisk pace, rolling his hips in a sort of speed-walking motion. “Zig-zag, Dad!” Cissy coaches. He does so, and as he does so, he points out random people in the crowd to an aide, commanding “Get them a sticker.” While Graham sings along to the “G.W. Bushonomics Supply Side, Economic Blues,” the Graham girls fill me in on their dad. He is the most popular politician Florida has ever had. He has never lost an election. “When America gets to know him, he’ll pull away,” assures Gwen. “He’s the only choice,” says Cissy. At the risk of being rude, I point out to Cissy that there are eight other choices. “Line ’em up,” she says. “He’s the best. WHOOOOO! I figure if I scream as loud as I can,” she explains, “people will notice him.”

Cissy needs to do a lot more screaming. Though conventional wisdom on Graham is that he is stuck on the stairwell somewhere between the first and second flight of candidates (he has one of the most impressive résumés, having served eight years on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee), he is, as Iowans like to say, sucking hind teat in the polls (1 percent in Iowa, 2 percent in New Hampshire). That doesn’t matter, say the Graham girls. And who knows? At this point in 1991, Bill Clinton was clocking zero percent in Iowa polls. Still, the signs aren’t encouraging. Several Iowans over the course of the week think Graham is Phil Gramm of Gramm-Rudman fame. Before hooking up with Graham, I asked a freckled woman with “Stub” tattooed on her arm whether Graham had come by. As she tended her baby, who was ripping a piece of Kucinich campaign literature to shreds, she said, “I wouldn’t recognize him if he did.”

The next day, at the Iowa State Fair, is a heart-stopping gustatory delight. Apparently, Iowans will only eat food if it comes deep-fried or on a stick. There are deep-fried Twinkies, fried candy bars, and “refreshing fried ice cream,” pork on a stick, salad on a stick, and even “Mac & Cheese” wedges on a stick. Visiting politicians must be careful not to slight the local cuisine. Last year, says Graham spokesperson Kristian Denny, she saw Joe Lieberman refuse pork-on-a-stick, saying his rabbi wouldn’t approve. “That’s when I knew he was finished in Iowa,” she says.

All over the place, Grahams are thick on the ground, enjoying their vacation. One of the Graham girls cautions her offspring, “Remember, if you get lost, say your grandfather’s name.” When I ask if the children are going on the rides, she says, “They have rides here?” As Graham works the room in the Varied Industries Building, making his way past the portable spas and Maytag dryer displays, he meets voters and displays several facets of his character.

Aside from the megalomaniacal impulse it takes to run for president, Graham, by all accounts, is a humble man–one of the rare politicians who would just as soon talk to voters about themselves as he would about himself. This is evident from his “workdays,” a campaign gimmick he boosted from Iowa’s own Tom Harkin back in the ’70s, which has become more than a gimmick. At least once a month, Graham, throughout his political career, has worked an entire day alongside regular Americans, performing difficult and even humiliating jobs (horse-stable pooper scooper, KFC counterman, political reporter). Tallying 391 workdays and running, he has recently issued a “Working for America” calendar.

Along the way, Graham became a compulsive collector of minutiae. He interviews the people he meets, like C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, and often writes down the answers. At the fair, he approaches a booth manned by a director of alumni relations for Waldorf College. He asks not only about the most popular area of study, but about the preponderance of Norwegian-speakers in the college’s area, and even how they got the name “Waldorf.” At the “Field of Dreams” baseball field in Dyersville (the field carved out of a cornfield, used in the 1989 movie), I watch him corner an incoming Florida Gator, asking the kid everything from “When do you report,” to “Do you know what dorm you will be in?” At a Dairy Center in Calmar, his grandkids complained of near asphyxiation when we walked past a manure lagoon. But Graham (whose family owns an angus farm) donned plastic booties and walked up to the pens, obliviously getting his nether regions nuzzled by a cow named Gretchen. As bored reporters chatted among themselves, Graham peppered our tour guides with hair-splitting questions, taking furious notes at the milking parlor, asking about screw-worm flies, artificial insemination, and whether the dairy uses “all of its discharge.” The beauty of covering a Graham campaign is that if you miss a name or fact, you can just ask the candidate to check his notes.

Surprisingly, Graham’s staff doesn’t dive-tackle him when he whips out his pocket-size spiral notebooks (he has over 3,000 of them, color-coded by season). At this point, his habit is arguably an act of political courage. For it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to say that if Graham didn’t log every minute detail of his life, Al Gore might well be president today. In 2000, Graham was on Gore’s very-shortlist for vice president (as he was on Clinton’s in 1992 and Dukakis’s in 1988), which would have surely swung Florida Gore’s way. But he fell out of contention after Time magazine published excerpts of his notebooks.

Not quite a diary, more like a log, the notebooks have been excerpted many places over the years (the Graham campaign has wisely stopped dispensing samples). Accounting for his time, sometimes down to the second, the jottings have what Graham apologists might call a James Ellroy-ish hardboiled economy: “9:05-9:10: Waiting room. Read New York Times, mingle.” But other people might call it the work of a disturbed mind. When daughter Cissy went into labor, and he was preparing to go to the hospital, one notorious entry went: “1:30-1:45: Rewind ‘Ace Ventura.’ 2: Adele ready to go. Drive to Baptist Hospital. 2:15: Stop at (video store) to return ‘Ace Ventura.'” Another time, when his plane experienced mechanical failure over Brazil, a panicked Adele reached for his hand. But Bob was taking notes. Staring death in the face, the senator, reported the Washington Post’s Michael Grunwald, scribbled: “2:39 pm–pilot announces hydraulic failure, must make emergency landing.”

Graham defends the practice by saying he is merely garnishing important details with prosaic ones to help him remember specifics (a line of defense buttressed by his meticulously observed out-of-print book “Workdays”). And several journalists have ridden to his rescue, by calling the appropriate obsessive-compulsive disorder experts to assure voters he doesn’t have any sort of problem. Still, it is never a good day for a politician when reporters write stories about his mental health, even if it’s to clear him. And consequently, the Graham curse is now to be labeled “quirky”–a nice way of saying somebody is eccentric without the benefit of being interesting.

Graham’s compulsive attention to detail hurts him on the stump, and helps goose along his “boring” label. (When I spied some messages of the day, they read: “Waste Water Infrastructure” and “Ethanol As An Alternative Energy Source”–snoozers even if you’re running for mayor of Bettendorf.) His speaking style could be labeled “Grandpa Gore.” Like Gore’s of old, his speeches take off down tributaries of policy arcana without always making it back to the main channel. His voice is slow and crackly, perfect for voiceover narration in a Spielberg film–one in which the codger is about to spin a yarn. Not good with eight other whippersnappers doing tapdances around your issues. While Graham says modified versions of the same things the other candidates harp on–the evils of Bush tax cuts, the need for something approximating universal health care–he takes twice as long to say it. If he were a VCR speed, he’d be “extended play.” As one laborite I ran into at a candidate forum in Waterloo puts it, “He seems so elderly.” Spying John Edwards working a nearby table, she turns dreamy: “He’s like cream cheese. Very smooth.”

Still, if you have the patience for it, Graham is knowledgeable on nearly any subject. Especially cows. At the state fair, he squares up in front of the “butter cow”–a lifesize Ayrshire sculpted out of butter, which, as of this writing, still had not been fried or put on a stick. Partly as a parlor game to see how long we can keep him talking about cows, partly because we couldn’t stop him if we wanted to, we take notes as Graham shares on all matters bovine: from their four stomachs, to the lowest butterfat producers, to the descending sizes of breeds from Holsteins to Jerseys. “Any questions on dairy cows?” he asks at one point with a glint in his eye.

In front of the 4-H pen, we ask what kind of cow valve he received when his aortic valve was replaced in January. That would be a Holstein’s, the breed he now holds so dear that he referred us to a song written for his “Charisma Tour” CD, the relevant part of which he now sings: Oh, I’ll forever have a black and white friend / Close to my heart / Everyday, ’til death do us part.

If Graham can ever break out of second-tier purgatory, it might be no small advantage that he knows his cows. One day, floating on the Mississippi River near Dubuque, watching Graham fruitlessly trying to land a bass, we are joined on our pontoon by Graham’s bubba-vote wrangler, Dave “Mudcat” Saunders. Not only is Mudcat the mastermind of Graham’s foray into NASCAR sponsorship, but he–along with communications director Steve Jarding and road spokeswoman Kristian Denny–is one of the sunniest and savviest staffers on the trail. So appealing is the Graham campaign staff, along with the natural asset of the Graham family, that it prompted one reporter to remark, “There’s only one thing wrong with this campaign–the candidate.”

A rural Virginian, Mudcat is author, along with Jarding, of the “NASCAR Dad” strategy that worked so well for Gov. Mark Warner in rural Virginia. It is a neologism that is already getting as overworked as “soccer mom” in the last cycle, and it’s shorthand for the theory that there are scores of disaffected rural white voters in traditionally Democratic hotspots who in recent years have voted Republican, but who are nonpartisan enough to be wooed back.

Mudcat, an avid outdoorsman, former sports reporter, and current real estate developer, wears a red “Motorcraft” hat, and dispenses fishing tips in his languorous drawl. Graham’s boat, he says, has an oversized engine, because if “you hang a bass at 125 mph, it takes the fight right out of ’em.” When asked what needs to happen in this race, Mudcat deadpans, “We need to get the most votes.” When reporters nitpick him over Graham’s soft spots, Mudcat, a self-described “eternal optimist,” grows cranky: “I’m about to Bobby Knight y’all’s ass.” When asked what Graham needs to do more of, Mudcat looks over at Graham, aimlessly drifting in his bass boat. “Use dynamite while he’s fishing,” he says.

To some degree, the historically buttoned-down Graham has used dynamite against Bush. The only time he ever shows a spark on the stump is when he’s kicking Bush’s teeth in on Iraq or national security issues, which he tries to do three or four times per speech. Graham is the only member of Congress in the field (besides Kucinich) who actually voted against the Iraq war resolution. He was given a slight boost in his accusations of administration thumb-scaling and obstructionism when his Intelligence Committee’s 9/11 report was first bottled up, and then heavily redacted, in what he charged was the administration’s prostration before a terrorist-sponsoring ally (read: Saudi Arabia).

His critiques of the war have ranged from the constructive (the administration underestimated the difficulty of postwar occupation) to the hysterical (Bush’s deceptions in making the case for war might rise to the level of an impeachable offense). The problem with Graham’s antiwar critique, from a consistency point of view, is that he himself made some pretty categorical prewar assumptions about Iraq, having told “Face the Nation” last December, while still chair of the Intelligence Committee, that “We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.”

But Graham’s constant harping on the administration’s overstating the imminence of the threat does not mean that he is a Kucinich-style, Department of Peace dove. Graham’s primary line of opposition before the war was that Iraq was the wrong priority. Graham, for instance, has advocated throwing “a few cruise missiles” into Syria. But with the crazy-Bob impeachment talk, such nuances are mostly overshadowed, and Howard Dean has seized the antiwar momentum. Which these days–getting torched in the polls, suffering fundraising setbacks, struggling to define himself with sleep-inducing issues like increasing broadband access and transportation infrastructure–is the least of Graham’s problems.

More pressing are his stump performances. On one recent night, he talked about the “bloody pulpit” of the presidency. On another, he told a story about a Civil War relative (“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to remind voters he’s only two generations removed from the Civil War,” said one onlooker). After one tough night at a sparsely attended event, Orlando Sentinel reporter Mark Silva consoled the family. “Tonight was a bad night,” he said. “But don’t sweat it. You have 100 more bad nights ahead of you.”

There is, of course, Graham’s secret weapon: the Graham girls. He should take them with him wherever he goes. After the tour’s last “Grillin’ with the Grahams”–the nightly brat’n’burger cookout with potential Iowa caucus goers–the girls take their place for the evening sing-a-long in matching white overalls with embroidered picnic foods on their stovepipe pants. As they get a beat going–with lots of make-a-pancake clapping and oom-pah chugging–Cissy pulls out a piece of paper, from which she reads a call-and-response cheer: “When I say Bob / You say Graham / Bob! / Graham! / Bob / Graham! When I say 44th / You say president / 44th! / President! / 44th! / President!“–and on it goes, until Cissy concludes with another decibel-busting “WHOOOOO!”

Back on the press bus, we show enthusiasm our own way. Full of the Graham family’s Budweiser and brats, we play the Charisma Tour CD on our laptop computers, until the Sentinel’s Silva interrupts with his own call-and-response cheer: “When I say running / you say mate / Running! / Mate! / Running! / Mate!”

Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.