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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But no one else really has the edge on experience either. Dean hammers home the fact that he's the only candidate who has ever balanced a budget. But while he promises to do the same in Washington, he has yet to explain how he would pull it off, particularly if faced with a Republican Congress. Kerry long ago made his resume his running mate, but his legislative accomplishments are not plentiful, and his experience in the Senate has taken a toll on his persona. Where Dean denounces the ways of Washington, Kerry honors them; he dwells on the commissions he has chaired and the bills he has sponsored as his way of explaining what values he holds and what skills he brings. The Republicans quickly dispatched party chairman Ed Gillespie to push the line that Ted Kennedy was the more conservative Massachusetts Senator.

Listen to the far less experienced Edwards, and it seems to be an advantage that he has not served in the Senate long enough to have been shaped by it. He pulls in voters by appearing more like an outsider than the other Senators, but more in tune with how Washington actually works than the other renegades. That still leaves him with a problem Clark and Kerry do not have: a relative lack of national-security experience that in these dangerous times could be disqualifying with some voters.

Edwards milks what credentials he does have, mentioning that he serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee and never missing the chance to cite his meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who is conveniently one of the leaders George W. Bush couldn't name four years ago. In fact, he has more experience than candidates Carter, Reagan, Clinton or the present incumbent had, but in the post-9/11 world, that still may not be enough. All Edwards can do is fall back on faith that experience is not the key to winning. "Voters don't elect a resume," he told Time. "They never have, and they never will. The most important thing is that people get a sense that you have an understanding of what's happening, of what America's role is around the world and whether you're strong. Do you have character? Do you have judgment? Can they trust you? I think those are the things people look for in a President."

The Character Test

It's especially amazing that a campaign that is rewriting the book on how to make biography a character reference found its best chapter by accident. Like most men who served in Vietnam, Kerry is reluctant to talk about his combat experiences. But Jim Rassmann, a passenger on Kerry's swift boat 35 years ago as a young Green Beret, was not. With less than 72 hours to go till caucus night, Rassmann phoned the campaign's Washington office and offered to help. Kerry's aides rushed him to Iowa with no idea what the 56-year-old Republican former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy might say.

Rassmann told his story all over Iowa in the final days: about how Kerry's boat ran into a Viet Cong ambush and hit a mine, knocking Rassmann out of the vessel. Wounded in the blast, Kerry ordered the boat to race out of the cross fire, not knowing Rassmann was overboard. Two hundred yards downriver, when he discovered that the Green Beret was missing, Kerry turned the boat around and raced back to find Rassmann, still in the water, dodging bullets. His arm bleeding, Kerry reached down from the bow of the boat and pulled him in. "John didn't have to, but he came to the front under fire and pulled me over," Rassmann said, adding that Kerry "could have been shot and killed at any time. I figure I owe this man my life."

In political terms, Kerry could say the same. This race has shown that voters do want to know a candidate's biography, but not necessarily because it tells them how to vote. Instead, it offers the key to the qualities that matter, a candidate's faith, fortitude, judgment, courage. Kerry's war record helps him across the board. He knows a Massachusetts liberal has to show he'll be strong on national defense. He loves contrasting his experience with aircraft carriers to Bush's. One aide dates his comeback to when the campaign started airing the ad of testimony from another Vietnam crewmate named Del Sandusky. In speeches, the battles Kerry discusses most are those he fought as part of the antiwar movement when he got back. That bit is code for saying, I took on a Republican President when I was 25; I can do it again.

Each campaign puts biography to different use: Clark's and Kerry's heroic tales show all they ways they are better than us. Edwards' bootstrap story shows how he is just like us. Only Dean dared to design a whole strategy around the idea that the personal was not political. Rejecting the rituals of revelation, he adamantly refused to talk about himself, his family, his faith journey, his heartwarming moments as a doctor. Some of this was camouflage: the tribune of the common man who grew up on Park Avenue and went to prep school. During one debate, Dean talked about how, when Vietnam started, he was at college in New Haven, Conn., the accepted Wasp way of avoiding saying that he went to Yaleas did John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush. But there was also a principle involved: the idea was to keep people focused on what he would do for them.

The problem was, voters then had no sense of the guy to fall back on when he started shooting off his mouth. There was no context to his meltdown in Iowa. So Judy Dean, the invisible woman of the campaign so far, is suddenly at his side, talking about why she loves her husband and how he would make a great President.

All sorts of instincts and insights go into a voter's calculation about whom to support. But after two years of quality time with the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, the candidates are in a crowded race of first impressions. Are the qualities that make for a good first impression the ones that make a good President? And where exactly do ideas fit in (not just why you have the best chance of winning the office but what you would do when you get there)? The 2004 race plays out between parties split over war and peace, rich and poor, justice and fairness, but voters seem caught up in the meaning of electability. But in the end, even being presidential doesn't mean you'll be a good President.