Democrats Split on Pushing the Personal or the Political

Sunday, September 7, 2003

By Adam Nagourney

New York Times Writer

“Does your wife know you’re running for president?”

LOS ANGELES, Cal. -- NYT
John Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, cannot pass a crowd these days without talking about his father the millworker or growing up in rural North Carolina. For Richard A. Gephardt, the campaign stories are about his father the milk truck driver and his son’s successful battle with colon cancer.

But spend a day with Howard Dean and it is almost as if his life began the day he stepped behind the governor’s desk in Vermont 12 years ago. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman is far more animated talking about the intricacies of trade policy than in sharing stories about growing up in Stamford, Conn.

A striking stylistic divide has emerged among the Democratic candidates as they struggle to determine the extent to which they can - or should - build candidacies on often intimate details of their lives, in an era that celebrates the public airing of the most personal of tales.

Their responses - from the intense intimacy of Mr. Gephardt to the rigorous avoidance of personal biography that has characterized Dr. Dean’s candidacy - reflect fundamentally different calculations by the candidates about what voters are looking for in this election.

But they also illustrate disagreements among the candidates over what is appropriate to talk about in the context of a political campaign, and the complexity of divulging intimate details that might enhance their standing without appearing to exploit personal tragedy for political gain. That perception dogged Vice President Al Gore when he ran for president in 2000, a cautionary lesson for many Democrats this time.

Some Democrats said that even before Bill Clinton changed the way campaigns were conducted by disclosing that his stepfather had abused his mother, the first task of any campaign was to introduce the life of a candidate to voters. From this point of view, voters assess candidates based on who they are and how they have lived, before they consider their political views.

“It gives people a reason to believe that when I say I’m going to do X, Y and Z, that I’m really committed to it,” Mr. Edwards, a senator from North Carolina, said in an interview in Iowa last month. “What people have to see is how sincere and authentic you are - and I think your personal background is directly relevant to that.”

But other Democrats argue that the appetite for homey anecdotes might prove limited in an election taking place against a backdrop of threats from abroad and a weak economy at home. And some suggested that voters might be recoiling from an excess of personal information that marked Mr. Clinton’s years in Washington, and are looking for less confessional candidacies, which may account for some of early success of Dr. Dean.

“Howard’s life is an open book, but frankly he thinks what people are more interested in is how he’s going to improve their lives, rather than where he grew up and where he went to school,” Steve McMahon, a senior adviser to Dr. Dean, said. “He thinks it’s much more relevant and important to people to understand what he thinks the president is doing wrong for the country. Not so much, ‘I grew up here, I grew up there, my parents were this, my parents are that.’”

Robert Schmuhl, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, said the nomination contest thus far, as reflected by Dr. Dean’s success and the difficulties experienced by Mr. Edwards and Mr. Gephardt, signaled that the campaign of personal disclosure has been eclipsed by hard-edged appeals based on partisanship and issues. sv29,1if,,v29 “The personal and biographical might not be as critical as it once was,” Mr. Schmuhl said. “The red-meat statements are much more compelling than the biography.”

“There are a whole of lot people,” he said, “who came out of the Clinton imbroglio and said: ‘There are certain areas where you crossed a line, and don’t cross it now. And give me substance.’”
(More: NYTimes.com)

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Dan