Stay Calm and Kerrey On

[CountDeMoney]

Bob Kerrey was always good people.

Bob Kerrey's last stand to mend Washington
By: David Rogers
October 14, 2012 06:55 AM EDT

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — That sound you hear from the empty corn fields is Bob Kerrey gaining on Deb Fischer and the collision of two ideas in American politics: Is the goal to gain power in a broken Congress or to find those best for the Senate to mend it?

Republican Fischer is of the first school: a hard-edged rancher who combines grass-roots gumption and the modern money politics of the KRR machine: Koch, Ricketts and Rove. Make no bones about it, Nebraska's Senate seat is her lever to topple Democratic leader Harry Reid and health care reform and Republicans are supremely confident she will be on her way Nov. 6.

But in her climb to the top, Fischer has locked herself into so many rigid positions that the 61-year-old state legislator will find it harder to tackle the boatload of problems waiting in Washington. Amid the worst drought in a generation, Fischer stunned many this summer by denying man's role in global warming. She's signed herself over to the anti-tax insiders, making it harder to get any budget in balance. When dozens of fellow state legislators endorsed her Monday, not one was a Democrat.

All this creates an opening for Kerrey, who is showing new life behind a campaign that stresses his record of independence and bipartisan appeal.

Last Sunday's Omaha World-Herald captured the scene: an inside editorial endorsing Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama and a front-page spread with the headline: "Kerrey Seeks to Bridge Partisan Divide."

The paper's own polling in September put Kerrey 10 points down among registered voters and he appears caught in the backwash of the presidential contest. But from his internal tracking, Kerrey is convinced that he's pulled within single digits. And the billionaire Koch brothers are nervous enough that their political operation went back up on the air this past week with new ads attacking the Democrat.

It's still very much an uphill fight. Time is short, Republicans enjoy a 3-2 registration edge over Democrats and Nebraska's farm economy has grown rich — and perilously content. But to write Kerrey off is to miss the larger dynamics of this race.

"I'm not pessimistic at all," insisted Paul Johnson, Kerrey's campaign manager and longtime political adviser. "This is going to be a very, very close race at the end."

For sure, a posture of no politics is smart politics for a Democrat like Kerrey in Nebraska today.

There might as well be "Wanted" posters up for Reid's hide, and the once popular, now retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson saw his numbers plummet after voting for Obama's health care reform.

But history's hand is genuinely felt here, giving Nebraska and Kerrey a unique opportunity to have a larger impact.

No one in the Senate would be able to ignore him or his reform message if he were to win next month. The experience gap between him and Fischer is huge. And this maverick, native son has come home like some Bruce Willis time-traveler, warning that change is needed to avoid a darker future for Nebraska and the nation.

"I don't believe you can solve any problem unless you begin by saying there's a problem" is Kerrey's frequent opening. "Somebody has to go back there and change Congress. Somebody has to stand the middle ground."

"We're going to have to look at the truth. We're going to have to change. And I want to be the person that makes that change happen so that we are remembered more favorably."

"The challenge right now is Republicans. I need another 10 percent of them," Kerrey told POLITICO. "I've had people on their own say, 'I know you are more competent ... but I don't want to give Harry Reid one more vote. I don't want to give Barack Obama one more vote.'"

"What I have to do is allow people to see both the status and the capability differential. So they start to ask themselves the question: Do we really want to do this? Do we really want to throw away this chance?"

More than Fischer, Kerrey has been willing to tackle reforms to Medicare and Social Security. And his campaign has churned out a wealth of domestic policy detail, dissecting what it sees as the adverse impact of Fischer's economic plan while also pledging support for specific Republican spending cuts.

But make no mistake: for all the numbing numbers, this is still part romance.

Older, grayer at 69, Kerrey is still Kerrey. "Stay Calm and Kerrey On" read the T-shirts distributed by fellow veterans on his behalf. He has come home from New York with an attractive wife and young son, who march by Kerrey's side here in Grand Island. Who else gets endorsements from both comedian Steve Martin and pitcher Bob Gibson, the Hall of Fame Cardinal great and Omaha native?

In the midst of Mass last Sunday, a parishioner turns — from two pews up — to tell Kerrey: "I'm rooting for you."

Much depends, too, on how Nebraska breaks along a line of prairie populism that runs through the state's politics — and crosses party lines.

William Jennings Bryan, the "Boy Orator of the Platte" and great "siege gun" for farmers in the 1896 presidential election, was first a Democratic congressman from Lincoln. Republican Sen. George Norris, a congressional reformer and ardent proponent of public power, worked with Franklin D. Roosevelt to create the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s. "No man can stick his legs under the tables of the idle rich every night," Norris once warned, "And be fit the next day to sit in judgment on those who toil."

The corporate attacks on Norris and public power in the '30s echo some of the debate now over health care reform. And Nebraska's unique commitment today to public power and a unicameral Legislature speak to his legacy.

Kerrey now tries to channel this history. He traveled to the Norris homestead in rural McCook to announce his own plans to dramatically alter Congress with a constitutional amendment to require lawmakers to organize in a less partisan fashion. In an exchange with Fischer in Lincoln last week, Norris seemed again at his elbow.

"I appreciate that you don't like government and you think government should get out of everything," Kerrey snapped. "But it's because the government's involved that we have low-cost power. That's a fact. That is undeniably true."

Fischer rolls her eyes at Kerrey's promised Senate reforms. Trost jokes that a Steve Martin video for Kerrey last week was timed to distract the press from financial reports filed that same day showing backdoor support for Kerrey from the much-despised Reid political machine.

Most important, Fischer's supporters would argue she brings her own home-grown populism to the table, albeit a very different sort.

In the May GOP primary, she rode a wave of late-breaking support to beat two better-known Republican men who spent a small fortune destroying one another. Former Gov. Kay Orr was an early patron; Sarah Palin followed. But Fischer was very much the dark horse, more purely movement candidate.

And she stands now to be the first senator genuinely rooted in rural Nebraska since Carl Curtis, the "Mighty Mite of Minden," held court in his hometown for nearly four decades in Congress.

"She's played her cards right. Very steady," said Hal Daub, a former Republican congressman from Omaha. "She's doing an actual grass-roots campaign and she's been doing it full steam for months," added Chuck Conrad, the Adams County GOP chairman. "How she can keep up with it I have no idea."

Fischer has her share of outside angels to help. The Koch and Karl Rove political operations spent early and heavily to tear Kerrey down — so much so that he is only now beginning to show a net positive favorability rating in his own polls. And in the last days of the primary, a super PAC funded by TD Ameritrade's founder, Joe Ricketts, came in with $250,000 in ads to bloody Fischer's chief rival — and help her across the finish line.

But inside Nebraska's ornate limestone Capitol, Fischer is a player in her own right.

She won a precedent-setting battle in 2011 over the future allocation of sales tax revenues to road construction. "Regal-looking" seems the adjective of choice in the Omaha papers. "The General" is the double-edged nickname given to her by legislative colleagues.

Her public image has taken a blow recently with the resurrection of details about a rather nasty and unsuccessful lawsuit that she and her husband filed in the '90s against an elderly rancher whose land they coveted along the Snake River. But in televised debates, Fischer conveys an implacable, almost eerie calm — with a smile that seems to taunt the more animated Kerrey.

"I wouldn't know Joe Ricketts if I saw him," Fischer insists, downplaying the impact of outside spending on her success. While most education advocates strongly protested her roads bill as siphoning off money from schools, Fischer says it illustrates her pragmatic governing style.

"It was obvious that tax increases were not going to work. Fee increases were not going to work. In this climate, that was not going to happen. So you look outside the box. You set priorities ... and you use existing revenue and that's what we did," she told POLITICO. "I've always said you set priorities in government. We weren't stealing money from anybody."

"The Nebraska way" is Fischer's favorite refrain. But she has also committed herself to a set of purely Washington partisan creations: the Cut, Cap and Balance bill authored by the House Republican Study Committee last year and the strict anti-tax pledge promoted by Grover Norquist as a litmus test for his Americans for Tax Reform — and the right.

Most striking, Fischer signed on with Norquist last spring even as one of her most prominent allies in the May primary, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), was signing off.

In an interview then with The American Conservative, the monthly journal, Fortenberry was unsparing, saying it was his responsibility — not Norquist's — "to make judgments about hard, complex issues that I believe to be right."

"Simply looking at the status quo and suggesting that the tax code is sacrosanct and can never change, and that decisions made in the '80s and '90s can never change, is absurd," Fortenberry said. "The tax code is weighted toward the ultra-wealthy and ultra-wealthy corporations, and has created an offshore aristocracy of people who can afford to hire an army of accountants and lawyers."

Fischer's bigger math problem is the Cut, Cap and Balance bill, which seeks to reduce federal spending to 19.9 percent of GDP in 10 years, to be followed by a constitutional amendment setting a still lower spending goal of 18 percent of GDP.

Defense appropriations are allowed to grow, requiring still bigger cuts from domestic programs — including farm and education funding. Yet independent projections suggest that revenues under her platform would run near 17.5 percent of GDP, leaving the government still in the red by hundreds of billions of dollars in 2022.

Fischer answers that new economic growth will close this gap. But she makes getting to a balanced budget that much harder by supporting added tax breaks that do less to benefit Nebraskans than wealthier households outside the state.

For example, Fischer wants to entirely wipe out both the alternative minimum tax and estate tax. But recent IRS data show that fewer than 3 percent of the taxable returns in Nebraska were affected by the AMT. And the state ranks 24th in the nation, paying far less than New York and California, for example.

In the case of the estate tax, IRS data show that the number of returns from Nebraska still paying the tax had dropped to an average of 60 in 2009 and 2010 — even before Congress raised the threshold from $7 million to $10 million per couple.

"Remember the Cinderella story with the glass slipper?" Kerrey exclaimed in a recent debate. "Well, Sen. Fischer has created this glass slipper with a constitutional amendment and pledge to Grover Norquist. That's the glass slipper and all the things she talks about, you can't get it in there. The foot's too big. That's the problem with her plan."

When Fischer first made her comments on global warming in a debate here in Grand Island, Kerrey — the former pharmacy student — was incredulous.

"We are warming the planet. All you need is high school chemistry to figure this out," he exclaimed, and then came back to the same point with more force in Lincoln Oct. 1.

"I know that people don't want to change. I know they are concerned about the costs. But we grow our food outside!" Kerrey said. "No state is more vulnerable to adverse impacts on weather than Nebraska."

His own relationship with agriculture is rich — and not without irony.

As a senator in the '90s, Kerrey co-authored a landmark bipartisan bill that gave new life to the modern crop insurance system so vital to farmers in Nebraska. But the very success of that program and the farm economy makes it harder to sell his message of change.

The numbers tell the tale.

Agriculture and food processing account for about 10 percent of Nebraska's economy, not counting the added impact of ethanol production and manufacturing jobs owed to farm equipment. Economists like Creighton University professor Ernie Goss say this has an outsize impact in that farm income is a more volatile sector affecting the margins for growth.

This helps explain Nebraska's low 4 percent unemployment rate — half the national average. Six months after the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008, in fact, farm returns were already beginning to rebound. Net cash income for Nebraska farmers rose by 20 percent from 2009 to 2010, and then leapt by 58 percent into 2011.

It is a remarkable success story: net farm income per operation in Nebraska is second only to California. And at a time when Nebraska Republicans are lined up against health care reform, farmers owe a debt to their own federal mandate — a fuel standard spurring ethanol demand — and heavily subsidized crop insurance.

This same coverage is now hugely important given the losses associated with this summer's drought. With $8.7 billion in insured liability, Nebraska ranks fourth in the country, and to help finance this coverage, taxpayers are providing almost $396 million in premium subsidies.

Kerrey hits home on this point, warning that if Fischer's budget plan were enacted, agriculture and crop insurance would face severe cuts. But she is the candidate with the R after her name, and he battles an almost "we've got ours, you need to work for yours" swing in the political pendulum.

"He has embraced a change that we have not," said one Nebraska Republican.

Kerrey's late entrance into the race last spring was famously contorted as he wrestled with the conflicts for his family after a decade in New York.

"I've gone from hoping he would not run to really wanting him to win," said his wife, Sarah Paley. At an Omaha rally, she first speaks and introduces their son, Henry, who then introduces his father.

Indeed, this courtship will be decisive.

Has the bad blood of the past four years been so bad that there's no love left for anything Democratic? "I think the brand has been more Washington-ized," answers Fischer's campaign manager, Aaron Trost.

Or will GOP moderates, fearful of the tea party rightward tilt, split their ballot and take a gamble again on the man they helped elect governor and twice senator in the '80s and '90s.

"Stop the partisan games. ... We need to put country ahead of party" are the punch lines in a Kerrey television spot. "End the Gridlock" is the title of a super PAC organized by wealthy friends to help his cause.

It's a poignant moment. "Age wise, we're not the future," Kerrey tells the crowd. "That young man who just introduced me is the future. Right now, we're not putting enough of our time and our money into our future. We've got to change that."

And whatever happens in November, no regrets?

"If I win, it's really worth doing," he told POLITICO. "If I don't win, it's really worth doing because I made the effort."

"They can't say I sat on my ass and watched my home state elect the tea party."

[Ed Anger]

Him being in New York was such a waste of his abilities.