What Becomes a President Most?

DAVID BURNETT/CONTACT FOR TIME
Senator John Kerry sits for an interview after winning the Iowa caucus

Two nights, no sleep, sipping bottled water, John Kerry sits in his flying war room, a 737, cruising from frigid Iowa to frosty New Hampshire, in a state of sublime shock. He had known that for him to rise, Howard Dean would have to fall, and even that might not be enough to win. He had already fired his campaign manager, retooled his stump speech and endured months of derision from party professionals for his dead-on-arrival campaign. He had ignored every piece of conventional strategy, decamped from his home field of New Hampshire, thrown everything at Iowa and held on tight. When the first results were coming in, he did not believe them. Early Iowa exit polls suggested a Kerry win; later ones, a blowout. "We were pinching ourselves," says an aide.

Now it's 4 in the morning, and his staff is trying to figure out how to ride the wave, where to go after New Hampshire, what to spend, how to spin. Kerry finally leans back, stretches out and closes his eyes. He wakes when the plane bounces down on the tarmac, the sun rising over Manchester; he's still a little too groggy for a 7 a.m. airport-welcome event in a chilly hangar. He turns to an aide, Stephanie Cutter, and asks how many people are out there waiting for him. "It's a very cold weekday morning," she replies, to a candidate who is used to having as many staff members at an event as voters. "About 1,000."

She is exaggerating, but the hundreds there are on fire, chanting "J.K. all the way" to Springsteen and U2 music. Kerry lets it all sink in. "I guess we really did win last night."

And as a result, everyone else had to recalculate. Howard Dean found himself clawing his way back from his near-death experience, pulling his ads from other states in order to spend all his money and manpower in New Hampshire, throwing nearly $850,000 worth of ads on the air and even handing out to undecided voters 50,000 copies of his warm and fuzzy Howard-and-Judy interview with Diane Sawyer. John Edwards' team was holding on tight, hoping to scoot past Wesley Clark and at least narrow the race a little more by the time it heads south. A new story line was taking hold: the election was all about electability; once again voters had flirted with the insurgent and then kicked him down the stairs, so they could snuggle up with the safe, steady guy the party matchmakers had offered up in the first place. It happened with Mondale and Hart, Buchanan and Dole, McCain and Bush. Kerry fans were on the streets with signs saying dated dean, married kerry. "They switched from grievance to governance," explains Dick Gephardt's pollster Ed Reilly. "They switched from who was the loudest voice to who can lead. Kerry fits that picture well, and that's why they went with him." The question for every campaign is, will they stick, or are voters still shopping aroundand if so, is anyone else on their list?

You would think that all elections are about electability, the tension between whom you like and whom you think can win. But listen closely to what voters are saying, and you find that electability is a lazy word to cover all the deeper things they watch and listen for. Hearing that people want to vote for the candidate they think can win doesn't tell you anything unless you know what they think makes a winner. Is it the guy who looks most like a President or who knows the most, or the one they just like the best and can imagine watching on TV for the next four years? Will people vote for someone they agree with but don't like? Or for someone who they don't really agree with but they think can win? "I have no idea. You'll have to ask the voters," John Kerry tells TIME late Friday night on a bus from Claremont, N.H., to Manchester. "I'm asking people about what's in their hearts."

Such earnest talk is the luxury of being in the leadKerry watched his support surge in two days. For the rest of the field, the test now is to define electability to their advantage. They are trying to convince voters that whatever quality distinguishes them best equips them to take the fight to Bush. Iowa set the table and offered each some hope. Dean, the fighter, won among the voters who were looking for someone to take strong stands on the issues. Kerry, the statesman, won the people who cared most about beating Bush. John Edwards, the Everyman, prevailed among people in search of someone "who cares about people like me."

Each came out of Iowa with a calling card to show voters why Bush should fear them most. But the early contests have a habit of turning success into a cautionary tale. Dean's passion both raised him up and slowed him down. He brought new voters into the process, but nearly half proceeded to vote for someone else. Dean's performance made it safe for Kerry to be dull, which may, down the road, make Kerry just as unappealing to voters as he was when he was at 5%. Edwards' optimism and empathy open him to the charge that he won't be tough enough in the fight ahead. And Clark's claim to be able to win independents doesn't change the fact that he still had to show he could win Democrats. Given the fact that hardly anyone predicted the Iowa outcome, everyone had some course corrections to make.

So What is Presidential?

"Maybe the problem is the doc," posted one supporter on Blog for America, the official weblog of the Dean campaign, after watching Dean's Vesuvian speech Monday night. "The dinosauric yells were scary, and we probably lost many votes right there. I, a faithful supporter until yesterday, am beginning to question it all." Some went so far as to say the unspeakable: the candidate looked unpresidential, and there may be no more obvious observation than that to be electable, a candidate for President has to look like one.

But that may just be an excuse for people looking to explain their defection. There's a weird metaphysical link between seeming electable and seeming presidential. Bill Clinton played his sax and talked about his underwear and managed to win twice. George W. Bush had the genes of a President but not the resume and yet made it to the White House and spent more than a year as one of the more popular modern Presidents. To many Dean supporters that Iowa moment actually reminded them of why they liked him. "This is a passionate person who's really excited, who gets supporters excited," said Kristin Ruthenberg, 34, a church organist who brought the son she homeschools to see the Governor in Claremont. "I saw someone who's tenacious, who's going to hold on to the dream."

In fact, the issue of style and temperament has everything to do with how Dean earned his front-runner position in the first place. He was the first to correctly read the Democratic electorate and channel its angernot just at President Bush but at the Democrats in Washington who were still playing nice with a President who was playing for keeps. But this meant he could least afford to make a mistake. Once the conventional wisdom challenged his electability, the rationale for his candidacy started to crumble, and voters went searching elsewhere. "Six months ago, they were all looking for straight talk," said Joe Lieberman pollster Mark Penn. "Now they're looking for someone who is serious enough to be President of the U.S."

Dean's string of gaffes in the closing weeks before Iowa gave Kerry and Edwards their opening, but his detonation Monday night blew the race open. After voters had started to wonder about his self-control, the last thing Dean could afford was to lose it. And so, following the time-honored rituals of campaign damage control, by Tuesday his staff was looking to perform an extreme makeover, no easy feat for a candidate who is selling authenticity. He pulled down his attack ads, rolled out his wife as a softening agent and assumed a new and humble tone: to his mantra "You have the power," he added "I need your help." Hoarse from a cold, he planted his feet on the stage of the peach-and-cream Claremont Opera House with his hands in his pockets and an all but visible leash, to make sure he did not jab and roam and punch too hard. He cut his stump speech almost in half so he could take more questions, show more leg. And he started talking about his warts so much that even some of his Deanie babies asked him to quit it.

Kerry was the clear beneficiary of all Dean's bad press. In New Hampshire, familiarity with Kerry once bred indifference, if not contempt. Suddenly, it brought comfort. Even when Kerry was doing badly, says Gephardt campaign manager Steve Murphy, "he always had great favorability ratings. They were always better than Dean's. He just never really connected until the end. He shed some aloofness, and he started answering questions, and he started to listen. He just got better." His height and bearing and senatorial stature make it easy to imagine him wearing White House cufflinks on his Turnbull & Asser shirts. And in the end he was a safe haven for spooked Dean voters who had had a near-death experience. "It was a process of elimination," says a rival campaign manager.

Whom Do You Like?

"Like many of you, I worked through college. Didn't hurt me a bit. In fact, one of my jobs was unloading tractor trailers. You spend the night in North Carolina unloading a tractor trailer, and I guarantee you, you'll get up and study the next day." John Edwards, Iowa's other love child, is standing on a plastic crate in a diner in Nashua, N.H., sharing his story and giving voters a good look at his crisp blue suit and grungy, mud-caked boots. His oldest daughter, Cate, gave them to him for Christmas to help negotiate the Iowa snows, and ever since his surprise second-place finish, he has been wearing them like a talisman. At some stops, voters were taking snapshots of his feet. But even after staff members urged him to lose the boots, he refused, and plans to keep them on even when the crusade heads south.