What Becomes a President Most?

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

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Edwards is superstitious, which is a curious trait in a campaign that sells itself as being all about optimism. He is sunshine all year round, unchanged in the vision of hope and help he lays out for voters. The least known and least experienced one in the field was also the only one to pick a plan and not blink when Dean was getting traction, the only one not to get caught slicing someone else's tires. For months his vision of two Americas made whole and fair again felt a little mushy and out of step with these tumultuous times. But by the last days, the Iowa race had turned so ugly that his approach made him Mr. Clean.

But is likable the same as electable? How much does winning Mr. Congeniality help convince voters that you are the one to send into the ring against Bush? History helps here, because the more optimistic candidate nearly always wins, and most recently, it worked for George W. Bush. In the 2000 campaign, pollsters found that even voters who didn't like his tax plan or his inexperience did like him, saw him as a regular guy. Phoniness is a political toxin and charisma, a vaccine, and Edwards claims to have the cure.

While Kerry and Clark are making a visible effort to climb down off their pedestals, Edwardshis professional life spent before juries as a trial lawyercould establish rapport with a saltshaker. Where Dean's populism can sound hostile, Edwards' is sugarcoated, the mill-town boy who knows what your life is really like because he married his wife with an $11 ring. Speaking to Time between events, Edwards recalled, "My father always said, 'I can tell if someone is talking down to me in 30 seconds.' Voters can tell that, they can sense it. The only way you can effectively communicate is if people feel that you're real."

Kerry may be the one using the Real Deal as his slogan, but there's a sense that he's protesting too much. Herbert Hoover once said of Franklin Roosevelt that "he was a chameleon on plaid," and there has been something of that quality throughout Kerry's campaign. He has written poetry and wind-surfed and ridden a Harley. He has played both hockey and his guitar. It was meant to make him seem more human, change the scale, since he looms over the field like a tall dark cloud. For months nothing seemed to work. He still came across as a classic Massachusetts Yankee, easy to admire but hard to like. The consolation out of Iowa was that maybe it didn't matter if he wasn't all that likable if he's what voters think they need.

For his part, Dean proudly sat out the personality primary. He declared that he didn't have to feel anyone's pain as long as he could heal it. He seemed to care less about whether people liked him than whether they agreed with him. In the few days after Iowa, he did make an attempt at being a kinder, gentler Dean, telling voters that if they had come to hear his red-meat speech, they would be disappointed. Having denounced his rivals as Bush Lite, he declared they were all good guys. He was going back to talking about his nice moderate record as Governor. But when all else failed, Dean's best bet was to make bluntness an asset. "I'm willing to say things that are not popular but ordinary people know are right," he said. "I'm not blow-dried. I'm not coached. I obviously don't look at polls, and if I did, they didn't do me any good, anyway, in Iowa."

Clark's campaign was also among those on a self-conscious likability crusade, especially when it came to female voters. He was so determined to prove his feminist bona fides that he defended abortion right up to the moment of birth, then spent last week dialing back to a position that was viable. Faced with a 17-point gender gap between him and Dean, Clark dropped the uniform navy blue suit, put on a sweater and was not afraid to tear up in interviews. But traveling too far down that road would undercut his main rationale; the Gentle General might be a hard sell. "You don't elect a President to go have a beer with," he told reporters, ignoring evidence to the contrary in every election since Nixon. "You elect a President to do a job for the country. A lot of people say they like [Bush]. I'm not trying to tell them, 'Don't like him.' I'm trying to tell them he hasn't done his job." But perhaps that's what you would expect from a man who, when asked if he has a nickname, says, "Other than 'Sir,' no."

Experience Counts

Fire-breathing filmmaker Michael Moore is at a huge rally for Clark, with as many as 2,000 people at the Pembroke Academy in Pembroke, N.H., explaining why the author of Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! has fallen in love with a military man. "We have been handed a gift," he told the crowd. "A four-star general, Rhodes Scholar, head of his class at West Point, captain of the debate team." Moore was interrupted by cheers at this point. "I want to see that debate! I want to see that debate! I want to see that debate!" he shouted. "That's right! The general versus the deserter!"

It was that moment Peter Jennings referred to when he asked Clark during Thursday's televised debate whether he agreed with Moore's "reckless charge" about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. This posed an interesting test for the general, who pundits say has three things going for him: resume, resume and resume. But Jennings' question revealed the kind of experience Clark doesn't have and can't fake: the ability to deflect or diffuse a question that is bound to hurt you with someone, no matter how you answer it. Clark responded that he didn't know the facts of the case, but he said, "I've seen this charge bandied about a lot" and that Moore was entitled to his opinion. That meant Clark had to spend precious time the next day answering the same question over and over, until he finally declared, "I can't agree with Michael Moore." But by then the damage was already done.

Clark has a war-hero story at least as compelling as Kerry's, but he rarely talks about it. Instead, he spends most of his time arguing for Clintonian education and health-care proposals. He often sounds like he was just briefed an hour before. It's good he's a quick study, but that just reminds voters that he has to be. Asked what he would do to promote preventive health care, he recalls how in his Army days, "we used to march our troops to the dental clinic to make sure they got their teeth X-rayed. We called it 'dental readiness.'"

But it was not clear how that approach would work in a world where you can't order people to stay healthy. He can talk about education, but what he knows about is training. At the Seacoast Family ymca in Portsmouth, N.H., he came across Duncan, a preschooler daydreaming at the art table. Clark walked over, took hold of the kid's chair (with the boy still in it) and turned him around to face the table. "Aren't you supposed to be coloring?" he asked. "Isn't that the project right now?"