Children’s crusade

It was a social event more than a political one, with lots of cocktails. The stylish crowd gathered at a Hancock Park home in early November was thirtysomething, mostly Democratic and largely undecided. For many, the candidate was barely a blip on their political radar.

A handsome but unassuming young man took the floor. He wore a hooded gray Army sweatshirt, jeans and scuffed sneakers. He had the sheepish hunch of a guy who would rather be doing anything than this.

Until he started talking.

Wes Clark Jr., 33, a Hollywood screenwriter who lives in Silver Lake, spoke about why his dad, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, should be president. He gave a son’s first-hand testimonial to the former four-star general and NATO chief. He spoke of growing up in genteel poverty as an Army brat, and how the family scrimped to send him from a dusty California military base to a Colorado boarding school. He spoke of a need for universal health care for those under 21, better education, a fairer tax system, the need for a leader with career expertise in national security. He decried the war in Iraq, and said his dad did too. He fielded questions on immigration, trade, the state of things in Myanmar.

He was passionate, informed, charismatic and -- from the Clark campaign’s perspective -- highly effective. He brought in $2,500 that night, and sent a pack of potential converts out into the hipper reaches of young Hollywood.

Michael Webber, the grass-roots coordinator for the Clark campaign in Los Angeles, calls Wes Jr. a “serious asset.” Webber has been to more than a dozen of these house parties. “He communicates the message in a way that is just not possible for anyone else,” says Webber. “I’ve seen him turn a room of Deaniacs -- that’s what we call Dean supporters -- of Kucinich supporters, into Clark supporters. It’s just magical.”

Wes Clark Jr. is just one of the children of this year’s presidential candidates stumping for their fathers. Chrissy Gephardt, 30, has been campaigning since June, and her brother, Matt, 33, took a leave of absence from his job in December to campaign full time. Vanessa Kerry, 27, and her stepbrother Chris Heinz, 30, have been speaking on college campuses since September. Alex Kerry, an actor enrolled in the American Film Institute’s director’s program (her manager asked that she not give her age), spoke at informal gatherings in Los Angeles last fall, helped formulate the “Dorm Storm” concept with her sister, and jetted off to campaign with Dad & Co. on a 24-hour bus tour in Iowa as soon as she finished the fall semester. Rebecca and Matt Lieberman (34 and 36, respectively) have been fundraising since May.

Candidates’ kids have campaigned before but never in such numbers. Some are full-time employees on campaign payrolls (the Liebermans, Chrissy Gephardt); others work for free, in their spare time (Clark Jr., Alex Kerry). By the end of January, there may be more kids than candidates crisscrossing New Hampshire.

“I can’t think of anything like this,” says Gil Troy, a professor of political history at McGill University in Montreal and the author of “See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate.” “This is like the Children’s Crusade from the Middle Ages. The Democrats are mobilizing whoever they can.”

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The next best thing

Out on the campaign trail, children can perform all the functions paid staff can, and many they can’t. They can be used to target particular blocs, like Chrissy Gephardt speaking to gay groups. They allow a campaign to, in a sense, clone the candidate, creating the political illusion of being in more than one place at a time. They can humanize the candidate in a way no one else can, telling funny, personal stories -- especially important in countering a reputation of aloofness. They give voters a sense of direct access to the candidate: When a son or daughter talks to Dad on the phone, he will listen.

And, in the age of Oprah, the inside dope is part of what we demand from our public figures. Who better to dish than the candidates’ kids?

“There is a whole Freudian thing going on,” says Troy. “Kids are a way of getting into the president’s personality....We want to know what he thinks, what he feels, how he acts. Children are not just emissaries. They are ways in, in a culture that is obsessed with character.”

Putting one’s kids on the campaign trail is not a requirement. Democratic front-runner Howard Dean’s children have not made any appearances, nor have the children of Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun, John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich. President Bush has done everything he can to keep his daughters out of the public eye.

“This is not something that the American public demands of the candidate,” says Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist not affiliated with any of the campaigns. “My sense is that the kids want to do it.”

Indeed, of all those interviewed for this story, only Chrissy Gephardt said it was her father’s idea.

“Both my sister and I wanted to do this,” says Matt Lieberman, a private school teacher in New Haven, Conn., who took a leave from his job to fundraise full time for his father. “My Dad didn’t want to pressure us into doing it, although, in a very soft-sell kind of a way, he indicated that we would be a big help. He left it completely up to us. He told us the natural flow of our own lives was important, and he didn’t want us to feel we had to disrupt it. But the truth is that my sister and I both like politics, and feel it is important. When moments like this come, it is hard to even contemplate doing something else.”

Clark had never voted in his life before the California gubernatorial recall, but he says he had been thinking his father should run for president ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he lived in lower Manhattan. He began speaking to local groups this fall, and since Thanksgiving has done at least one campaign event a day. Webber says Clark told him: “Except for the 24 hours my wife is giving birth, I am committed to the campaign.”

“I’m convinced he is the best man for the job,” says Clark. “If they say, ‘Wes, we need you to go to Timbuktu and run through the streets naked because that will help Dad win the primary,’ I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever they want.” (Wesley Pablo and his mother, Astrid, are doing fine after his arrival on Christmas Day.)

“I think the world is a pretty messed-up place right now,” says Vanessa Kerry, calling from the “Real Deal Express” bus tour in Iowa. “Everything I care about is being so completely ignored or assaulted by this administration. Everything I care about is at stake. I am in the incredibly lucky position of having a father who is in the position to do something.”

The notion that children could agree so completely with their parents is confounding to those whose parents are not in politics. But the kids on the campaign trail are aligned almost completely with their fathers on almost all issues. At least in conversations with a reporter.

“His policies, his arguments behind his stances, are so logical to me, so pragmatic, so well thought out, I can’t imagine not agreeing with him,” says Alex Kerry.

Clark says he fought with his father when he decided to get out of the Army after four years, because he was disillusioned with military life. But he says he believes absolutely in his father’s policies. If anything, he says his father steered him closer to the center, to a path of reasonableness. “I was an extreme right-wing conservative in college,” he says of his days at Georgetown University.

Chrissy Gephardt admits wishing that she could have changed her name to Smith when she was in junior high. Rebecca Lieberman allows that there are areas where she disagrees with her father, but she is too savvy to go into them with a reporter.

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Family’s role on the rise

For much of the 19th century it was considered unseemly for even the candidates to roam the country asking for votes. As late as 1896, in the race between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, McKinley stayed home in Ohio and supporters were brought in on trains. He would talk to voters from his front porch.

“It was demeaning for the candidate to go out and say, ‘Vote for me! Vote for me!’ ” says James Campbell, a professor of political science at the University at Buffalo.

Franklin Roosevelt leaned on his family, sometimes literally, to help prop him up, and sometimes as emissaries. John F. Kennedy put every Kennedy with a wide smile on the campaign trail, to great effect, though they were siblings, not children. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford relied on their children as spokespeople, and in the 1980 presidential debate with Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter brought up his daughter, Amy, saying her biggest concern was nuclear weapons.

“That backfired, when it came across as the candidate relying on a 13-year-old to make decisions for a world superpower,” says Troy. These days, children are no longer simply proof that Dad is a good family man. “This is celebrity channeling,” says Troy. “This is what [the candidates] are trying to achieve. You are trying to blur the line where the child ends and you begin. In the 21st century, that is useful, and necessary.”

The children on this year’s trail have a range of exposure to politics, campaigning and the media exposure that goes with it. At one end of the spectrum is Clark, who has lived in relative anonymity. When he moved to Los Angeles and told people his father was in Kosovo for NATO, entertainment types frequently thought he was referring to the National Assn. of Theater Owners.

He seems to be in both awe and denial of his new role. “No one knows who I am,” he says, sitting in a Silver Lake coffee shop, where it appears that no one does know who he is. “I like being totally anonymous. That’s why I’m a writer.” And yet he acknowledges that things have changed. “People want to hear from you. That is what is so weird about it.”

At the other end of the spectrum are Chrissy Gephardt and the Kerrys, whose fathers have served in Congress for decades.

“My earliest memories have been campaigning for my Dad,” says Gephardt. “I remember going door to door in St. Louis, Mo., knocking on doors with a stack of brochures sky high, telling people to vote for my dad. I didn’t know any of the issues. People would say, ‘I’ll vote for your dad, you are so cute.’ ”

“We’ve always been political children,” says Vanessa Kerry, who took the fall semester off from Harvard Medical School to campaign. “We behaved ourselves. We were aware that there are repercussions to my father from anything we do. I am not going to go streaking down the street in Boston because I am drunk.”

Her older sister, Alex, the more private of the two, says politicians and sports stars are celebrities in Boston. She talks about the phenomenon of the “political child” with the analytical distance of a psychologist, but there are clearly issues she’s still dealing with.

This past summer, during her father’s kick-off campaign, she took her camera with her out on the road. She planned to make a documentary about the experience. “I took great pleasure in shoving my camera in reporters’ faces,” she says. “There is great power behind that lens.” Now she thinks a fictional piece might be more appropriate. “It is hard to negotiate between the personal, private, public. It’s my family. I’m not interested in doing reality television. I can dramatize with a fictional presidential candidate, and it becomes a much safer route. Loyalty is really important.”

Sometimes, even with all her savvy, she forgets who she is. Like this past summer. She was celebrating her birthday on her father’s campaign plane, and entered a section that is considered “open territory,” where anything you say or do is on the record. She wanted to offer the reporters some birthday cake.

“Suddenly there were like 10 cameras in my face,” she says. “I was in rough waters.”

Reached in New York -- while doing her laundry before hitting the road again for two weeks -- Rebecca Lieberman says that in her family politics was a way of life but never a form of celebrity.

“My father was in the state legislature,” she says. “It was what he did. It often meant that when we went out, people would come up and talk to him at restaurants, but we grew up in New Haven, a small town where people just know each other. He didn’t get elected to the Senate until I was in college. It’s very different for my sister, who is 15.”

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True passion

Each candidate’s child is scripted to a different degree. Some receive no guidance from the campaign, others receive gentle directives, and still others have staffers helping them with speeches. Clark is now spending hours each day on the Internet, reading blogs, scanning news and reviewing information from the campaign. Alex Kerry says her apartment is strewn with “film books, underwear and briefing books.”

The high of working on a presidential campaign is addictive, and almost impossible to describe, they say.

“The struggle for power -- it’s the stuff of Shakespearean drama. To be that close to the center of where it’s all going on, there’s an adrenaline there that most people just don’t deal with.... It is so unique, so difficult to articulate. I can be here in Los Angeles, in my bubble, and my sister calls, and I can feel the energy through the phone.”

Days before departing for Iowa, Kerry wondered if she would be sucked into the vortex full time.

“I feel like I’m studying for the exam of my life,” says Chrissy Gephardt, reached in Washington, D.C., two days before heading to Iowa for the final push before the caucuses on Jan. 19. “So much of your heart, your soul, your energy go into this.”

Matt Lieberman says campaigning is not as pleasurable as teaching, and yet there is not a moment he wishes he were back in the classroom. “It is so emotionally intense, so important. There is nothing I would rather be doing,” he says. “If you think about TV, if you watch ‘The West Wing,’ a number of those people don’t seem terribly happy, but you get the sense they are quite invested in what they are doing. I couldn’t be more invested in what I am doing, because I love my dad so much.”