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Tom Quixote? [Vilsack 2008?]
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Candidate
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| Contributor | COSDem |
| Last Edited | COSDem Jan 26, 2006 12:56pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| News Date | Thursday, January 26, 2006 06:55:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | In the fall of 1991, Des Moines attorney Jerry Crawford received a phone call from Mark Gearan. The two had met during Michael Dukakis' failed presidential bid four or so years earlier with Crawford serving as the Dukakis campaign's chair and Gearan as its senior member. The Democratic Party was floundering the day Gearan picked up the phone to call Crawford, and it was essentially understood that popular New York Gov. Mario Cuomo was going to be the one pulling the party up by its boot straps and challenging incumbent George H.W. Bush for the White House in 1992. Gearan, however, informed Crawford that little-known Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was pondering a run, as well, and asked Crawford if he would be willing to sit down with Clinton if he flew up to Iowa. Crawford, who had watched Clinton's performance as the keynote speaker at the 1988 Democratic National Convention and deemed it an "unmitigated disaster" and felt, at that time, that Clinton could never be president, said he would.
"So we're sitting there in the Hotel Savery coffee shop," Crawford says, "and person after person is coming up to say 'hello,' and not one of them has any idea who this guy sitting next to me is."
One year later, Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States, going from virtually unknown and seemingly unpolished to leader of the free world.
"He understood the most basic tenet of politics," says Fred Duval, who served as head of Inter Government Affairs in the Clinton White House. "You can't win if you don't play."
Like Clinton, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack came from a background of less-than-modest means and faced any number of hardships growing up. He was an orphan. His adoptive parents struggled both professionally and personally. Unlike Clinton, though, who felt he was presidential material - even as a teenager - Vilsack did not choose politics so much as politics chose him.
On Dec. 11, 1986, 10 minutes before the expected adjournment of a Mount Pleasant City |
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