Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever

Introduction

THE WIND WAS BLOWING HARD the night of November 5, 2002—election night—hard and cold, as it tends to do that time of year in South Dakota. It was late, nearly 2:00 A.M. The cavernous main hall of the Sheraton Sioux Falls Hotel and Convention Center looked like a morgue. Eight hours earlier, the room had been filled wall to wall with hundreds of men, women, and children bursting with excitement and hope, with visions of victory for our own man from South Dakota, my colleague Tim Johnson, and of celebration for the Democratic Party across the whole nation.

Now those hopes lay in ruins. A few dozen faithful lingered around the auditorium’s TV sets, fatigued and in shock, watching the final bad news trickle in from the West Coast. We still didn’t know if Tim might hold on to his Senate seat, but almost everywhere else—Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Colorado, New Hampshire—lay a landscape of loss. Flags and banners and a few sad, sorry balloons dangled limply from the main hall’s ceiling. A battery of a dozen or so TV cameras and light towers arrayed on a platform at the rear of the room stood dark and untended, their crews off in the hospitality suites picking at leftover trays of crackers and cold cuts. The Eagles’ One of These Nights drifted out from the stage-mounted speakers.

I was up in our sixth-floor suite—my wife Linda’s and mine—standing at the window, looking down at the streetlights of Sioux Falls and out at the black, flat blankness of the prairie beyond. I was devastated. Numb. I’d done my best to put on a game face several hours before, when the network anchors—Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Aaron Brown—had moved toward the conclusion of their election evening coverage by each asking me, as I sat miked in a makeshift studio down in one of the convention center’s back rooms, to react to this sweeping victory for the Republicans.

What could I say? How could I begin to describe the heartache I felt for my colleagues who had fallen that day, most of all my dear friend Max Cleland? Max didn’t deserve this fate, purely and simply. It was gut-wrenching to watch a war hero victimized by a campaign that questioned his patriotism—this man of such courage and honor, who lost an arm and both legs to a grenade in Vietnam, linked to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden by Republican television ads that questioned his commitment to our nation’s security.

All politics is, in one way or another, personal, and that night I felt Max Cleland’s loss in a deeply personal way. I felt responsible, as the leader of our party, for what had happened to Max. And to Jean Carnahan in Missouri. And to Erskine Bowles in North Carolina. And to Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire. And to Tom Strickland in Colorado. And to Walter Mondale in Minnesota.

Minnesota. How to even begin sorting out the swirl of thoughts and emotions about what had transpired there? The shock of Paul Wellstone’s death less than two weeks before had not yet faded for any of us—sweet, unyielding Paul, his wife, Sheila, their daughter Marcia, and the five others who lost their lives in that terrible plane crash in the freezing October rain of that gray Minnesota morning.

Had any of us been able to truly and completely grieve that loss? The clock had been ticking toward an election, and it would not slow down, not even for death. A new candidate had to be found. Walter Mondale stepped forward, and under very difficult circumstances, he did his statesmanlike best. But it wasn’t enough.

For me, this was the end of two of the most grueling years of my life—and the end of two of the most eventful, tragic, and historic years in the life of the United States Senate, if not of the United States itself.

It might seem strange to begin a book about hope and the future with an image of failure and defeat. But I think that’s exactly where this book ought to begin. Why? Because we have come to a point in our nation’s history where—as individuals and as a society—the spaces that lie between hope and despair, between triumph and disaster, between vision and blindness, or between candor and deceit have never been so minuscule. We have arrived at a time in our culture where the alignment of politics, of power, of ideologies, and of beliefs is arrayed so incredibly evenly that, while the visions and views of one group or another may be a universe apart, only the narrowest of margins separates them.

The result is an unprecedented sense of precariousness. The very parity that we pursue in a society based on a desire for diversity and inclusion has created a climate of instability like never before, a sense that the way things seem at one moment can be turned completely upside down the next.

Look at the last presidential election, with winners and losers stepping forward and then back, in a tense, unprecedented dance that was ultimately ended not by voters, but by judges.

Look at the Senate, split straight down the middle by that same election, for the first time in history, fifty lawmakers on one side and fifty on the other, as fragile and contentious a context for guiding our nation as could possibly be created.

Think of how that structure became rearranged, first by one man changing his mind (Jim Jeffords), then by another man speaking it (Trent Lott).

Think of the heartaching brilliance of a cloudless blue September morning, shattered forever by the televised sight of two silver aircraft plunging soundlessly into those defenseless towers and plunging us all into a new way of seeing ourselves and the world.

Think of it—the wafer-thin shadings that have come to separate those we call friends from those we call foes, the slightest of factors that determine the difference between those who will lead and those who must follow.

The first three years of this new century have been marked by a head-spinning succession of critical turning points for America, one after the other, crucible moments balanced on the edge of a razor, where the slightest shift in the winds of circumstance can alter the course of an entire nation, and one unthinkable blow can transform the fate of the entire planet.

Forty-eight hours after election day 2000, as America was confronting the first contested presidential results in more than a century, I found myself flying to speak in Austin, Texas. I didn’t know who the next president would be. With two Senate races still too close to call, I also didn’t know whether we Democrats might actually retake the Senate—a possibility almost no one had predicted. I didn’t know if I was still the minority leader of the United States Senate or the majority leader.

All I knew for sure as the plane touched down that Thursday evening was that, even with my many close friends who live there, Austin, Texas, was the last place on earth I wanted to be. But there I was, at the Lyndon Johnson Library, speaking to a packed auditorium about the challenges LBJ had faced as the Senate Democratic leader in a situation as tenuous in its own way as the one we were facing at that moment. During the course of the 84th Congress, from 1955 through 1956—a Congress in which Johnson served as a Democratic leader—nine of his Senate colleagues passed away. Nine! I was stunned to discover that figure. I was also strangely comforted, which I told the audience in Austin that day. We might be in an unstable situation, I said, but no matter what crises the next Senate may have to weather, there was no way we were going to lose nine senators. Incomprehensible.

What I didn’t realize—what none of us could have imagined—was that the events that actually came to pass would be even harder to comprehend.

It was ten months after that address in Austin that I stood at my office window in the U.S. Capitol, looking west past the Washington Monument, across the Potomac, as smoke rose from the Pentagon, blackening the sky over Arlington Cemetery. At that same moment, two hundred miles northwest, a hijacked airliner that many now believe was intended to destroy the building in which I stood crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, both towers of the World Trade Center in New York were aflame, billowing black smoke, soon to collapse, filled with trapped human souls.

A month after that, in mid-October of 2001, my own Senate office became the site of the largest bioterrorism attack ever on United States soil, when an intern opened a letter that exposed twenty members of my staff to what we would later learn was up to three thousand times the lethal dose of anthrax. The amount of anthrax in that single envelope could have killed every person in the Hart Senate Office Building, which houses the offices of half the U.S. Senate and their staffs.

All of this lay ahead as I stood there in Austin. Two years later, as I stood in that hotel room in Sioux Falls looking out at that bleak, cold night, it all lay behind. And I was consumed by a question: Had the world around us changed so drastically in these monumental two years that the very practice of politics as we had come to know it was altered?

As for this particular election, had I done enough? What might have been done differently? What should have been done differently? Had we as the Democratic Party, and I as one of its leaders, lost our way, our vision, our very identity?

Each of these questions would resound for some time to come, and rightfully so. They still resound and are at the heart of the pages that follow. But the question that matters the most, and that tore at me as I stood at that hotel window, is: How, in the wake of this loss, with the Senate now aligned with the Republican House and presidency, could we as Democrats pull together to help lead our nation through the gathering storm of forces propelling our nation toward crises of potentially unimaginable consequences?

This was—and is—the question that matters most to America. Because those crises continue to swell, both domestically and abroad, and they will likely have grown even larger by the time these words are published.

Among them are the following:

During the two years of the 107th Congress—from the presidential election of 2000 to the midterm election of 2002—I led the Democratic Party in the United States Senate as we became the last line of defense against the forces that have pushed these crises forward.

What I firmly believed that night last November, and what I have come to believe even more as time has passed, is that our country is once again at a critical and historic crossroads. Both nationally and internationally, the ramifications could not be greater. Our choices will affect our future in profound ways. And the first choice lies with what kind of representation and leadership we want in government. It is a choice between a political party with a core philosophical belief in the power of our collective will to confront these challenges through its government and one dominated by a group of people who don’t like and don’t believe in government.

This is what I want to explore in the pages that follow –- the incredibly volatile sequence of events that have led, one after another, from the presidential election of 2000 to the present moment, with nothing less than the fate of our nation and that of the entire world now hanging in the balance.

This is like no other time for America. We Americans have always found it within ourselves during such periods of challenge and change to summon the leadership, common sense, and vision to lead our country to new heights, new achievements, and a better life for the generations that follow. More often than not, at such times Americans have found that direction with the help of the vision, values, and policies that come with Democratic leadership. I am confident those values and ideas will continue to help guide us.

As we have done throughout our nation’s rich history, we can control and determine the direction in which we are headed, both at home and abroad, but only if we understand how we came to choose that direction to begin with. The past three years, since the election of 2000, have seen an incredible shift in that direction. I’ve been fortunate to be near the center of that process, to witness that shift.

Let me share what I saw and learned during that time, a time that was truly like no other.

CHAPTER ONE

Setting the Stage

IT IS HARD TO OVERSTATE the disappointment and, yes, the despair that we—my Democratic colleagues and I—felt the morning after that 2002 election. Never mind the fact that of the seventy-seven million ballots cast across the nation that Tuesday, a scant forty-one thousand (nineteen thousand in New Hampshire and twenty-two thousand in Missouri)—less than 6⁄100 of 1 percent of the entire vote—determined the difference between our party retaining control of the Senate and the Republicans seizing it. Perception, as they say, is reality, and the perception of this defeat, reflected in newspaper and magazine headlines across the country in the days that followed, was of an unmitigated disaster. The headlines arrayed on that week’s newsstands echoed the theme:

IT’S HALLELUJAH TIME IN THE WHITE HOUSE

FOR BUSH AND GOP: A MANDATE

DEMORALIZED DEMS

A NEW LEADER IS NEEDED

The term shellacked was used more than once in these reports, and despite the narrowness of the results, that’s just how we felt. I knew when I went to bed that election night that I’d awake to a barrage of blame and recrimination that was going to continue for some time, both from outsiders and, more consequentially, from my colleagues within the Democratic Party. And understandably so. I knew we were in for a period of soul-searching and self-flagellation the likes of which few of us had ever experienced. I had doubts and questions myself. As the saying goes, Success has a thousand parents; failure is an orphan. The morning after that election, I felt pretty alone.

How had this happened? That question kicked at us all in the wake of this defeat. Everyone, of course—the press, the pundits on radio and television, my colleagues, our opponents—had their own answers and were eager to share them:

I knew that we needed not to panic. But neither could we deny that the consequences of this defeat, as narrow as it might have been, were disastrous, not just for the Democratic Party, but for the American people in terms of where they might now be led. House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt shared my deep frustration and was shaken by what had transpired.

As Congress returned to Washington in December following the elections, Dick came to visit my personal office in the Hart Building, and we had a good long talk. First, we met with staff to discuss the aftermath of the election and the legislative schedule for the final weeks of the 107th Congress, that period of time traditionally known as a lame duck session. Then, at the end of the meeting, Dick asked if staff could be excused so that he and I could talk privately. As we sat alone, we talked again about our disappointment with the election and our need to regroup and move forward. Dick then said that he had come to the conclusion that for him the way to move forward was to move on—and, hopefully, up. He told me he intended to give up his House leadership role and run for president.

I knew how frustrated Dick was with the way things had gone in the House, and I felt terrible for him. He was a terrific partner during our years guiding the Democratic leadership in Congress. Our offices occasionally acted as rivals, but each legislative challenge and each passing year cemented the friendship that Dick and I had built. He worked incredibly hard yet never got the gratitude and appreciation he deserved, largely because he had to lead the House Democrats from under the heavy thumb of the House Republicans during his entire time as leader. I hope history will recognize Dick’s service more than many of his colleagues in Washington did.

As for seeking the presidency, I told him that I, too, was weighing that same decision. If the political challenge we faced as Democrats was to truly help the people who we felt were being left out and left behind by this administration, the question was which would be the more effective role . . . that of caucus leader or presidential candidate. I told him that I would make my decision within the next few weeks.

We talked for a few more minutes, and then there was a long pause, nothing but silence as we sat across from each other in the quiet confines of my office, with its high ceilings and Native American art, the winter sun shining through the tall windows. For the first time, we were confronting the possibility that we could soon find ourselves adversaries—a prospect neither of us would relish.

Dick broke the silence. Whatever you decide, he said, you will always be my friend.

I looked back at him and replied, We’ve been through a lot together. You’ll always be my friend, too.

We gave each other a big hug. Then he turned without another word and left the room.

I knew that I had to make my own decision soon—certainly within the following few weeks. And losing the majority complicated things significantly. Had we strengthened, or even just held on to, the majority, I would have felt more confident about turning over the reins of responsibility. But now I had to make the decision about running for president with a caucus in the same minority position in which I found it when I became leader in 1994.

For the first week or two after the election, Republicans and the conservative press pointed gleefully to the results as evidence of my failure as a leader. More editorials than I can count were written that blamed my obstructionist tactics for our defeat. Whatever path my future would take, I felt strongly that as a party we needed to bounce back quickly. Yet while my mind was resolved about what had to be done, my body language apparently exposed a deeper disappointment than I realized—at least according to some of my friends and staff.

Some said it was even reflected occasionally in my wardrobe. That fact provided a moment of comic relief in one of the first press conferences I held after I returned to Washington. In the months leading up to the election, Linda and I had become grandparents—twice. There really is no experience in life quite as miraculous and gratifying as becoming a grandparent. The joy of seeing your children so happy, of watching a new person enter the world as an extension of your flesh and blood, is truly one of the great blessings of life. And we were blessed not once, but twice in the same year. On this particular December morning, with the press conference scheduled for that day, Linda and I went to an early morning family photo session at a local studio to show off the two new grandbabies. The photographer told me to wear contrasting colors for the shoot, so I brought a black shirt and a white one. While taking the pictures, our three-week-old granddaughter, Ava, relieved herself on my white shirt. Just before the press conference, I changed into the black—dark mourning black. As I entered the room, the first question from one of the reporters seated around the conference table was, What are you trying to tell us with that shirt? That got a good laugh.

Subconsciously or not, that shirt did reflect my mood, so you can imagine the gratitude I felt when Robert Byrd, a former Democratic leader himself, who had served as both minority and majority leader during his more than half a century in Congress, stood up in our first caucus meeting after the election and asked unanimous consent that I be reelected leader by acclamation. The response was a standing ovation. Harry Reid, our assistant Democratic leader, then asked, "What about me?" Everyone laughed. I said that was the shortest nominating speech on record. Harry was then reelected the same way, as was Barbara Mikulski, our caucus secretary, and then our entire leadership team.

Gratifying as that display of support was, it did not alter the fact that within our caucus a heated debate had begun that was echoed by pundits across the nation—namely, whether it was time for our Democratic Party to move back to the Left, to reclaim the liberal roots from which we had steadily drifted away over the course of the past three decades, or whether we needed to move even more toward the center to break the partisan gridlock in Washington that so much of the American public rightfully detests.

On the one side—the liberal, progressive side—were voices urging that it was time to stop accommodating, to take a stand, to reclaim our identity, to become an opposition party worthy of the name. Dick Durbin, one of the most articulate members of our caucus, argued that we needed to define ourselves more effectively and forcefully with a stronger message and more aggressive legislative strategy. Paul Wellstone’s name and the memory of his firebrand liberalism were intoned more than once in these discussions.

On the other side—the moderate side—were the voices warning that we must face reality, that with so many tightly contested elections in a contemporary political landscape as evenly divided as we now face in America, where victory or defeat depends on a tiny percentage of swing voters, we can’t afford to alienate those precious few voters by taking extreme positions. Proponents of this argument—Evan Bayh, Tom Carper, Ben Nelson—urged that we needed to try even harder to compete with the administration for the swing voters by striving more effectively for bipartisan compromise with the administration.

I had my own thoughts even then about this argument. But it wasn’t time for me to speak—not yet. In these first meetings after the election, my job was to listen to what those around me had to say. And to think hard about how we had come to this critical juncture. This meant analyzing, scrutinizing, and trying hard to understand the tumultuous events of the preceding two years. Beyond that, it meant examining the path that our national politics has traveled over the course of the past thirty years, since the time I first entered politics in 1972—a year that many, including me, consider a watershed in modern American politics, the year the Democratic Party began seeking a new identity.

It was this search for identity that has been the subject of so much internal debate within our party these past three decades. It has had a profound effect on our decisions on both leadership and issues. That has, in turn, affected my own leadership role and the issues we have faced. And it all began in 1972.

That was the year my dear friend George McGovern ran for president. For the Democratic Party, that election was a painful loss. An outspoken champion of liberalism and progressive politics, George was defeated by Richard Nixon in a Republican landslide that was considered by some to be a definitive verdict against the aggressive 1960s liberalism of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

I worked as one of George’s volunteers on that campaign—my first involvement in national politics. At the time, I was an Air Force intelligence officer stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. By night, I volunteered to help run the Omaha office of the McGovern campaign. It was a combination that gave me a window into two worlds.

As that election unfolded, I could see what was happening. We could all see. The sense of excitement, hope, and optimism that had swept up so many of us in the wave of social movements and their legislative manifestations that washed over America in the early to mid-1960s—the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the War on Poverty, Medicaid, Medicare, the Clean Air Act, the Peace Corps, and so many more—had, by the end of that decade, given way to the anguish and confusion of the war in Vietnam, chaos on college campuses, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, race riots in our cities, the lunacy of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

The center, as the poem by W. B. Yeats puts it, was not holding. Anyone who was not there at that time in America and did not experience this social tumult directly can’t appreciate how very real it all was, how alarmingly close our society seemed to be to coming apart at the seams, especially to conservatives, who blamed the social chaos on the Democrats, the liberals, and the anarchic energy unleashed by all those federally supported movements.

So Nixon and an emerging core of right-wing Republicans stepped in to stop the bleeding. Law and order was their battle cry, and a frightened, roiling nation responded. They labeled the Democrats as the party of high taxes and anti-Americanism, and the label stuck. Never again, these conservatives said, drawing a line in the sand to separate themselves from the forces that had, in their view, nearly brought down our society. This was a historical moment. Because from that point forward, liberal became a dirty word, one even most Democrats came to avoid.

It hadn’t, of course, always been so. The Roosevelts—both Theodore and Franklin—had drawn their own lines in the sand back in the 1920s and 1930s, aggressively creating government programs and institutions to respond in an unprecedented way to the needs of the American people. In the process, they established liberalism as a near religion. Teddy Roosevelt—a Republican—did it in the name of our land, creating the network of national parks that today still protects our most treasured public lands. FDR, of course, stepped in with the New Deal, the sweeping range of federal programs that helped lift America out of the depths of the Great Depression and carried us through World War II and beyond. In a 1941 speech, Franklin Roosevelt offered as succinct a definition of the difference between liberals and conservatives as I’ve ever seen—a definition that is as accurate today as it was at that time.

Liberals, he said, believe that as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.

Conservatives, he continued, believe that there is no necessity for the government to step in.

From FDR in the 1930s straight through to LBJ in the 1960s—with the brief exception of the somnolent Eisenhower administration—liberalism guided the way in Washington and conservative was the term that most politicians, even Republicans, avoided. Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 campaign for the presidency, with the civil rights movement cresting in the South and with the Vietnam War protest movement just around the corner, became the first Republican in modern times to stand on a national stage and proudly wave the conservative label with defiance. Goldwater didn’t win, but he inspired a new generation of Republican warriors to carry that banner forward, including a young Ronald Reagan, who brought down the house at the 1964 Republican convention with his fiery nominating speech for Goldwater—the same basic speech, more or less, on which Reagan built his career for the next twenty years.

Government, Reagan liked to say, is the problem, not the solution. That, even more precisely than FDR’s definition, sums up the difference between the Republican and Democratic ideologies that have evolved in the past thirty years, the schism that separates two divergent views in American politics.

On one side, the Republican side, is the belief that government should stay out of people’s lives as much as possible. The individual, they say, should be empowered to make the decisions that guide his own life, not government agencies or judicial bodies. Paramount among those decisions, the argument goes, should be the individual’s freedom to decide how his (or her) own money is spent. This is how the Republicans justify the tax cuts they so zealously pursue. It’s your money, they say, which is a fine proposition on the face of it. If only it were that simple.

Democrats, too, believe that it’s your money. But they also believe in community, in collective as well as individual strength, in the idea of people pitching in together to help one another, with the united faith that a rising tide lifts all boats. The vehicle that most efficiently allows us to collectively help one another, Democrats believe, is the government.

There’s a wonderful film called The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch, that contains a perfect metaphor for the difference I’m talking about. Lynch, of course, is best known for his somewhat surreal, off-center work, such as Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. The Straight Story is a departure for him, a beautiful true story about an elderly man coming to terms with the end of his life by making a pilgrimage on a riding lawn mower to visit his estranged brother two states away.

During the journey, the man encounters a young woman who emerges from the woods and joins him by his campfire. She’s on a pilgrimage, too, trying to figure out what her own life’s about. At one point in their conversation, the old man picks up a stick and breaks it in two. That’s a person on their own, by themselves, he tells her. Then he picks up a bundle of sticks and asks her to try breaking them. She can’t. That’s family, he says.

That’s what Democrats believe. We are stronger together than alone. I like that parable because it so clearly illustrates something that, growing up in South Dakota, I came to feel intuitively. South Dakota was settled as a result of the Homestead Act. That act was our government’s bold experiment to trade public lands for hard work and the promise of opportunity. Many South Dakotans are grandchildren and great-grandchildren of homesteaders. My own grandparents were German farmers who immigrated to South Dakota because of the promise of free land. My grandparents and those who undertook the journey with them worked hard. It is no exaggeration