‘Talk’ to Come at Bitter End for Bush or Gore

Sometime soon, Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush will likely sit down for the most difficult conversation of his political life--the pack-it-in dream-ender between close advisor and candidate, another step from hope toward concession.

For candidates and those who dream along with them, a campaign’s unsuccessful end is akin to the death of a loved one.

“Any way you cut it,” says Gale Kaufman, a Democratic political advisor, “it’s almost impossible.”

The conversation about ending a run for office is American politics’ answer to the snowflake. It is shaped by the peculiarities of office-seeker and race and complicated by the very nature of campaigning, all optimism and functional denial.

Sen. John McCain broached the critical conversation with the bluntness that gave his campaign its name--the Straight Talk Express. He sat his closest advisors down the day after Super Tuesday 2000 and leveled with them in the kitchen of his Sedona, Ariz., vacation home.

San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, who launched an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate in 1998, was told via cell phone by one advisor that it would be a good idea to drop out of the costly campaign and not exercise her fallback plan either--a cheaper run that year for lieutenant governor.

Sometimes the conversation is aborted early on, if the candidate believes in success to the bitter end and rebuffs even the standard opener of “Let’s talk about the victory speech and the concession speech.”

As complicated as such conversations always are, the one that Bush or Gore faces will be even more wrenching. The stakes have never been higher, the emotions stronger, the process murkier, the timing more crucial.

Thirteen days after the Nov. 7 election, the presidency rests on the tight race in Florida, where the ballot recounts continue. Every hour, it seems, brings a new judicial ruling, alternately raising and dashing the candidates’ hopes. Never have two men seemed closer to inhabiting the nation’s single highest office--or not.

“If there is a conversation that one of these candidates ends up having, it dwarfs every other because of the stakes involved,” says Paul Maslin, a Democratic political consultant. “This is such an uncertain situation that anyone would be haunted by being wrong.”

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Wednesday, March 8, Sedona. McCain sat at the kitchen table, his wife, Cindy, at his side, his four closest advisors huddled around him.

Super Tuesday was yesterday’s nightmare. With campaign funds dipping perilously, the Republican nomination for president was an increasingly distant dream. The exhausted group, which arrived from California in the afternoon, had agreed to get some much-needed rest and talk the next morning about what options remained.

Then McCain, always impatient, called a meeting. “I believe we’ve run our course,” he said. “Tell me, any one of you, if you disagree with that.”

No one did. So the former fighter pilot took aim at the next target, switching the conversation to the business at hand: how to suspend the campaign and begin discussions with Bush, who would go on to win the nomination and possibly the presidency.

Chief strategist John Weaver, who leaned against McCain’s kitchen wall as the campaign ended before his eyes, described the conversation as “tearful.”

“There was resignation in the air,” Weaver said. “Yet we were very proud of him and the campaign we conducted. You’re heartsick. At the same time you have a certain responsibility to wrap it up.”

McCain declined to comment on the pivotal conversation that led to him abandoning the race; not surprisingly, many advisors and candidates also were reluctant to discuss such a sensitive subject.

Everyone assembled in McCain’s kitchen that day had known all along that they were taking on the establishment, Weaver said. Everyone knew the risks. They knew they had to beat the well-heeled Bush in the first four primaries to win the nomination. They knew they had only won three.

While they harbored no illusions, they functioned under the biggest illusion of all, the one that powers every political campaign through months of struggle and uncertainty. Dr. Harvey L. Rich, a Washington psychoanalyst, describes it as a “necessary denial.”

“For the most part, politicians and people who work in the political world don’t think about loss,” Rich says. “It would make their daily life feel a little too fragile. And on a pragmatic level, it’s a bit of a waste of time.”

Weaver agrees. But he also notes that such unwavering optimism can be a serious impediment to the crucial conversation that ends a campaign. If timed right, he says, that conversation is “not just the right thing at the moment, but the right thing to preserve options for the future.”

Still, “it’s against every fiber in your body to stop,” he says. “People who do this are warriors, trained to fight, to ignore the odds. . . . You have to survive minefields, explosions and near-death experiences to get to that point where you’re still in the race.”

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Todd Harris still remembers the phone call in early January 1998, when he told San Diego Mayor Golding that she should drop out of the race for U.S. Senate.

Golding’s campaign was in trouble. She was running out of money and forced to juggle running her city with fund-raising so she could hold her ground with rival Darrell Issa, a millionaire largely bankrolling his own campaign.

Many of her advisors were saying privately that she should drop out of the Republican primary; publicly, they tiptoed around the issue. Speculation was growing that she might quit and run for lieutenant governor.

Golding was out of the office that day, and Harris, her communications director, called her on her cell phone just to check in. It was supposed to have been one of those regular chats that candidate and staffer have several times a day.

“I didn’t get on the phone with the intention of telling her this is what I thought needed to happen,” Harris recalled. But “she said, ‘What do you think I should do?’ And I told her.”

Pacing his drab, windowless office, Harris was frank with his up-front boss. “I said, ‘I think that you should drop out of the race, and I don’t think you should run for lieutenant governor,’ ” he recounted. “She said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear you say that.’ ”

Several days after that conversation, on Jan. 8, 1998, Golding dropped out of the Senate race. She did not run for lieutenant governor. She will soon end her tenure as San Diego mayor; term limits prohibit her from running again for mayor.

Golding did not return calls for comment on this article. As she prepares for life in the private sector, Harris describes his former boss as a woman who “was a great mayor, is a great leader and has an unlimited political potential.”

But their conversation about the future of her Senate race “was the toughest of all calls,” Harris said. “I remember I was shaking. . . . That was an awful lot to ask of a 26-year-old. I’m shaking as I recount it.”

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Campaign-ending conversations can happen throughout the political process, from the “don’t even run” chat before a candidate declares to the “you’re out of money” talk somewhere mid-race and finally to the conversation Bush or Gore faces--days, perhaps weeks, after the election is history.

Maslin advised a Democratic candidate for Congress in the Midwest in 1982. The man was an underdog from the start, but his bid was helped along by the worsening farm crisis in the region.

As the race came down to the wire, the campaign ran out of money. The only option was for the candidate to mortgage his house. Maslin was then faced with what he described as an invisible line he was uncomfortable to cross.

“We looked at the results: You have a shot if you could just get the money and the message out, and the only place the money will come from is your house,” Maslin recounted. “We had the conversation. If I had known the guy longer, I might have never broached it. Or I might have grabbed him by the lapel and said, ‘You can win and be a congressman.’ ”

The upshot? The candidate, whom Maslin declined to name, didn’t mortgage his home. He didn’t win. But he didn’t lose by much.

For a political advisor facing an office-seeker at a campaign-ending moment like this one, Maslin says, “the question is, are you willing to cross the imaginary line, to say, ‘Listen, I think this is it. For your sake and everybody’s sake do this.’ It could be the most complicated and difficult thing for anyone to do.”

And then there are the conversations that don’t happen but should. Gale Kaufman has worked with several candidates, mostly for statewide public offices, who rebuffed any talk about the worst-case scenario.

Kaufman did what she always tries to do: get the candidate alone, on election day or the weekend before, to talk about the two speeches they needed to prepare. She’d call for a victory speech and, God forbid, a longshot concession speech.

In one especially painful instance, Kaufman invited a candidate to lunch to talk about preparing for a potential loss.

“This particular candidate looked at me and said, ‘That’s not happening. There’s no reason to have this conversation,’ ” Kaufman recounted, declining to name her client.

Lunch ended, election day arrived, and the candidate “gave the singularly worst concession speech I’d heard in my life. There was no level of grip on reality.”

As important as “The Talk” is, advisors interviewed for this story agreed that what a candidate does when the conversation ends is equally critical, for his staff and supporters, for his party, and in Gore’s or Bush’s case, for his country.

“Do they handle it with grace and with some style, or do they leave the field like an 8-year-old, kicking dirt on his marbles after losing?” says Weaver. “That’s the bigger question.”

In 1996, Weaver and Jim McAvoy both worked on the primary campaign of Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who was seeking the Republican nomination for president. After battling hard in Louisiana and losing there to Pat Buchanan, Gramm went on to lose in the Iowa caucuses.

Two days later, at a news conference in Washington, Gramm pulled out of the race. Then he met privately with dozens of staff members to apologize.

“I didn’t let him. A lot of people stopped him,” recalled McAvoy, who was his communications director at the time. “We told him, ‘This had everything to do with us, not you.’ . . . It was one of the classiest things Phil Gramm did.”