The Run of an Also Ran

By Joel Stein

There is something noble about this. Driving hundreds of miles across Iowa, fueled by fast food and a few hours of sleep, Willie Lomaning to groups of 20, selling them on how to make our country better. You have to be real close, however, to see this nobility. Because from a distance, running for President as a second- or third-tier candidate looks like self-delusional narcissism.

There are 17 people left running for President from the two major parties, most of them powerful, important Senators and Representatives who, when they decided to run, seemed as viable as a black first-term Senator, a Mormon former Governor of Massachusetts or a much reviled former First Lady. Yet now, for various reasons, they can't get anyone to pay attention.

Joe Biden, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a man who has been in the Senate since he was elected 35 years ago at age 29, is sitting in the fluorescent-lit community center in Grundy Center, Iowa, facing 18 senior citizens, when his tiny wooden chair snaps in two. "Ruth," he says, standing up and looking at the first name tag in front of him, "this is a dangerous job, running for President." In a time of war, Biden is the candidate with the most foreign policy experience. He was talked up as a possible front runner when he ran for the 1988 Democratic nomination. This time, however, his candidacy has gotten nowhere.

Biden clearly knows a lot, rattling off practical liberal-policy solutions for all manner of domestic and international challenges, but he's just all wrong for 2007. He refers to himself in the third person, calls the Russians "Soviets," leans patronizingly into people's faces and brags about passing legislation by saying "I did it with my own little paw, folks." When a young girl from the Scholastic journalism program asks him when he'll bring the troops home, he gives her a three-minute-long answer that's not really an answer.

That night, he attends a Democratic presidential debate. This is not one of the ones nationally broadcast on CNN or even PBS. It's held by a tiny Democratic group in Waterloo, Iowa, that got in its head that anyone can host a debate at the local high school. More absurd than this is the fact that Biden and Chris Dodd both show up. As the elderly moderator goes over the detailed, confusing rules about time limits--the breaking of which will result with loud beeps like a very unfun game of Taboo--the Senators stand quietly at their lecterns, having been rebuked for interrupting. Only 20% of the seats in the high school auditorium are filled, but the audience gets to witness the only political debate outside of China with 100% agreement on everything.

Chriss Dodd, the head of the Senate Banking Committee, pulls in 1 more percentage point in national polling numbers than you do. Instead of trying to get people to come see him, Dodd goes where the people are. On a Friday night he's buying a buffet of Irish stew and soda bread at Jameson's Bar in Waterloo and walking around like the perfect dad at his daughter's wedding.

If you live in Iowa and you haven't had your back slapped by Chris Dodd, you are not getting out enough. Steve Ferguson came to Jameson's after work to meet some friends and talk about his baseball league. "I was just sitting there, and I got a slap on the back, and it's Senator Dodd," says Ferguson. And for those who don't get out enough, Dodd has scheduled "kitchen table" events, in which he goes to your house and talks about the issues.

Sure, a quarter of the people at the packed bar are talking through his speech, with its perfectly calibrated shouting that doesn't feel like shouting, exactly what Howard Dean was attempting when he derailed, the kind that makes you want to totally crush the other football team. But even the talkers like the bits they catch. "Buck, I tell you what we're going to do," Dodd yells from the stage to the bar's owner. "I'm going to need a bartender in the White House."

Dodd isn't leading a campaign so much as a party at which the host is having too much fun to realize no guests have shown up.

Tom Tancredo, the far-right Republican Congressman with such an extreme stance against illegal immigration that, he says, he's been barred from the White House, handles his dying campaign like a bombing stand-up comic. "I must admit, there was a debate I won hands down," he tells a group of supporters he's gathered for lunch. "The NAACP one. I was the only Republican that showed! But I got a standing ovation. It was because I showed up! But they gave me a standing ovation when I left. Maybe that's because I left!" Tip your waitresses. But check their papers first.

Tancredo's version of Dodd's Irish bar is anywhere there are guns. In two days in Iowa, he hits up two shooting ranges. His speech is riddled with self-interruption, his anti-immigration venom prefaced by endless apologia about how this isn't about race, guys, seriously. He simply cannot match the intensity of his base; in fact, when he took an online test to see which candidate he would support, Tom Tancredo was only 89% in alignment on the issues with Tom Tancredo. And he's not sure how long he can keep this up--these delayed connecting flights causing him to miss votes in the House and his grandkids' football games.

With just over $100,000 cash on hand, and having decided not to run for re-election in Congress, Tancredo is down to just a few aides, one of whom, not seeing the irony, signs off her campaign e-mails for "Tank" Tancredo with "Keep on Tankin'." The Colorado Congressman says he was never running to win; he just wanted to move his anti-amnesty, pro-assimilation agenda to the forefront of the party's agenda. But now it seems as if he's wondering if he's the wrong messenger. And if he'll be glad when it's over.

Each of these candidates harbors a Rocky-like hope. But they're also in deep--financially to donors and emotionally to volunteers who have quit jobs or taken a semester off from school--so they need a reason to stop other than pride or exhaustion.

In mid-October, a few days before he will drop out of the race, Republican Senator Sam Brownback is lost and late, being driven around Iowa by a college intern in the Brownback family's Chrysler minivan. He is looking at a map, pumping his own gas, paying with his own credit card and then running into McDonald's. "$7.15? For a yogurt parfait and a small cheeseburger?" Brownback asks the cashier, who explains that the college kid got a Big Mac. "Oh," he says, and drags a $20 bill and a quarter from his pocket.

The Kansas Senator cannot figure out why his conservative message isn't connecting, and is confounded when Republicans bemoan the lack of a real conservative in the race. "Whenever I hear it, I'm over in the corner raising my hand: 'Hello? Hello?'"

Now, at Loras College, a tiny Catholic school in Iowa, Brownback is speaking to a pro-life group. Five minutes into his talk, standing in front of a statue of Jesus on the Cross, he mentions his daughter. He has been talking to her on the phone all day as she boards flights to head home to Kansas. He hasn't seen her since she joined Teach for America months ago. It will be days before he's home. And he starts to cry.