All Too Human: A Political Education Read Online Free PDF

watching the coalitions form, crack apart, and come together again.
    I felt justified in my work, and that we were making a difference. The budget fight of 1990 was the best. We Democrats saw ourselves as fighting to reverse the Reagan-era priorities by pushing for tax increases for the wealthy and protecting programs for the working class, and we forced Bush to eat his words on “Read my lips,” sweet revenge for what he'd done to Dukakis two years earlier. We spent weeks at Andrews Air Force Base, wrestling with the numbers and the Republicans. Late at night, Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski broke out a bottle of gin and told stories of all the presidents he'd known up close. By day we'd make charts out of the Republican proposals, showing how they would benefit the wealthy and burden ordinary workers. Then we'd feed them to the press to build public support for our side.
    Our efforts strengthened the budget and weakened Bush politically, but as when I first came to Washington, ten summers earlier, a Republican president was still running the show and setting the agenda. All we Democrats could do was play defense, defining ourselves more by what we could prevent than by anything we hoped to create. We could block a capital gains tax cut, but not enact a tax credit for the working poor. We could stop cuts in Head Start or Medicare, but not expand student loans or pass national health care. We could piece together a bare majority to pass a gun control bill, but never get enough votes to override the inevitable veto. We could make a lot of noise about a Supreme Court appointment — maybe even block the president's top choice — but conservative judges would control the federal courts for another generation. We could win moral victories on Capitol Hill, but we couldn't make history.
    It didn't look as if we'd have the chance soon, either. By the summer of 1991, America had won the Gulf War and President Bush was being rewarded with 90 percent approval ratings. Another election was on the horizon, but no one I knew believed Bush could be beat.
    Gephardt was still looking at the 1992 presidential race, commissioning polls, testing the waters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Although my job was legislative work, he took me aside in the early summer to ask me what I thought. Should he seek the Democratic nomination in 1992?
    “Absolutely,” I told him. “You're well known, and you've run before. You can beat anyone else in the race.” (Only Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts had announced.) “Even though Bush is popular,” I continued, “someone has to take on this fight. It will be good for the party and the country.”
    Nice little speech. Sincere too — as far as it went. But I was also motivated by something I couldn't say:
I hope you'll run, if only for my sake. I've always wanted to be at the heart of a campaign, right by the candidate's side. You could win the nomination, and if you do, who knows? Bush stumbles, and I'm working for a president of the United States.
    But Gephardt had voted for Bush's unpopular tax increase and against his popular war, and he was coming from a Congress that had raised its own pay and been bogged down in a check-cashing scandal. It seemed as if the only voters not angry at Congress in 1991 were the ones too alienated from politics to care at all. In an outsider's year, the majority leader was Mr. Inside. Knowing that, he wisely decided to stay where he was.
    But I didn't want to stay. Restrained idealism and raw ambition — the pistons of my character — were powering up again, pushing me to find someone new.

2 BECOMING A TRUE BELIEVER
    N ew York governor Mario Cuomo seemed like a potential soul mate. Fresh to professional politics when I first read his published campaign diary, I thought it was the best possible story — the chronicle of a successful candidate who thought like a moral philosopher.
    Watching his 1984 Democratic