Odd Man Out: Vote Turns on Quirky Kerrey

All day, all eyes focused on Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.)--the last holdout.

On Capitol Hill, reporters crowded outside his door, while Senate leaders and aides tracked him, looking for clues. As he walked from his office to the Senate floor, a mobile mob of reporters and photographers recorded every footstep.

At the White House, President Clinton and his aides puzzled over how to reach a man who at times was a bitter rival during the Democratic presidential race and who at other times--quite often, in fact--seemed to inhabit a political dimension far different from that in which his colleagues spend their workaday lives.

In the White House “war room,” set up to help push the President’s deficit-reduction plan through Congress, “the message has kind of focused down from 225 million Americans to about one,” said Clinton strategist Paul Begala.

Down to one. And what a one!

Asked by reporters in midafternoon which way he would vote, Kerrey responded with a lengthy soliloquy about the need for bipartisan truth-telling in the cause of deficit reduction.

“The truth of the matter is, our No. 1 problem is very rapid growth in mandatory spending programs that principally do benefit the middle class,” he said. “So, you know, it seems to me that if we’re going to build moral consensus to eliminate the deficit, that we have to have honest, moral statements about what in fact is going on.

“And I think if we can get back up on that high road, get back up on attempting to build ethical consensus, moral consensus in the country for deficit reduction, then it’s apt to be that we can make progress.”

So, how would he vote? Kerrey wouldn’t say--not for hours more.

And when he did rise on the Senate floor, delivering the verdict that brought what a White House aide called “your basic high-five cheer kind of thing” to offices throughout the executive complex, Kerrey sounded a note that few in Washington like to hear:

The problem with Clinton’s package, he said, is that it inflicts too little pain, not too much. The middle class, he said, needs to sacrifice more, not less.

“The price of this plan is too low,” he said. “I’m sympathetic, Mr. President,” with the difficulties of getting legislation through Congress. “But I implore you, Mr. President, say no to us.”

“I teetered on the edge of voting no all day long,” Kerrey told reporters after the speech.

In the last 48 hours, Kerrey had several long conversations with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), a man with whom he has developed a “father-son, or maybe professor-student relationship,” according to a person who knows both men. Moynihan’s suasion was key to his decision to vote for the bill, White House and congressional sources said.

The Nebraska senator also had several talks with Clinton and a long conversation with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But despite all those surface normalities, the courting of Kerrey has been anything but normal.

In a city full of politicians in carefully pressed suits with carefully pressed ideas, Kerrey stands out as different.

Early Friday morning, he arrived at the White House for a 90-minute meeting with Clinton in the White House residential quarters, driving his own car, the tape deck queued up to loud rock. The day before, as the President and most other members of Congress sweated out the details of arcane budgetary issues, Kerrey took off to spend part of the afternoon at the movies, checking out “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the film based on rock star Tina Turner’s autobiography.

In recent days, as he increasingly has become the center of attention in the budget battle, reporters have occasionally spied Kerrey singing aloud as he rode the subway between the Senate office building and the Capitol.

“They say some people march to a different drummer, but Bob Kerrey marches to the beat of his own brass band,” said one Senate aide.

The edge on that comment reflects one Washington view of Kerrey: exasperation with a man who has a habit of talking about things like the “moral consensus” of a tax bill when his colleagues would rather trade horses.

“I just saw him floating over the chamber. He’s communing,” Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi said of Kerrey as Senate debate on the budget wore into the afternoon.

“In some ways, it’s very refreshing,” said one senior White House aide when asked about Kerrey’s approach. “In other ways, it can be maddening.”

Another senior aide, asked about Kerrey, started humming the theme from “Star Trek.” Asked what the senator wanted from Clinton during the 90-minute meeting between the two, the aide shrugged:

“He just wanted him to explain the meaning of the universe.”

It is probably too easy, however, to dismiss Kerrey as merely a maverick or as some “Cosmic Bob” who is too ethereal for the day-to-day realities of politics. Despite his poor showing in last year’s presidential primaries, Kerrey’s willingness to speak his mind freely has made him extremely popular in Nebraska. And his call for “shared sacrifice” echoes a theme that voters flocked to last year when it was uttered by other men, from Paul E. Tsongas to Ross Perot.

The Nebraska senator would like to see a fundamental restructuring of what government does. He has talked about wanting to see Congress convene for a special budget-cutting session this fall. And he has had very little to say about specific benefits for his state.

“Kerrey just is not a politician,” said Tad Devine, who worked as his campaign manager during the primaries. “He doesn’t approach things from a typical political perspective. It does present a difficult challenge.”

Many observers, however, thought something else, as well, was at work in Kerrey’s long road to decision. Kerrey, after all, is a man who thought that he, not Bill Clinton, should be President. And at times, the rivalry of these two 40-something former governors has been intense and personal. Kerrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was for example, the only Democratic candidate to openly criticize Clinton on the draft issue, predicting in one speech during the Georgia primary that the Republicans would “open him up like a soft peanut” on that topic.

Clinton, for his part, grumbled to others that reporters chasing rumors of his extramarital affairs would not have cared about the subject if he had just gotten divorced like Kerrey.

“I think this is get-even time,” said one exasperated White House official, suspecting that, perhaps, part of Kerrey wanted to see the man who beat him beg, just a little, for his vote.