Governor Kernan is a picky eater. He likes green peppers on his pizza, but prefers to add them himself at the last minute, so their moisture doesn’t make it soggy. (“It droops, Pete,” he once explained, holding up a slice to demonstrate and staring intently yet warmly at me from under his thick white eyebrows.) The governor also does not care for pumpkin, for the understandable reason that he ate little else during his eleven months as a POW in Vietnam.
Now he was retired from politics, but his name was inseparable from South Bend. He’d been city controller, then got elected mayor in 1987, before being offered a slot as Frank O’Bannon’s running mate when O’Bannon ran for governor in 1996. Loving the job of mayor, he first refused the offer but then reluctantly accepted, and then won. In his second term as lieutenant governor, Joe faced a decision about whether to run for governor himself. He weighed the decision with friends, family, and allies, before making his decision: he would not run. Party faithful were shocked, since he was expected to be a shoo-in for the nomination if he wanted it. But he and his wife, Maggie, were ready to go back to life in South Bend. Throughout 2003, other candidates began preparing to run the following year, raising money and competing for endorsements.
Then a death changed his plans. While visiting a trade conference in Chicago in September of 2003, Governor Frank O’Bannon suffered a massive stroke, and died a few days later. Unexpectedly and immediately, Kernan went from being a lieutenant governor, preparing to retire from politics, to a sitting governor called to lead the state in the wake of a tragedy. And serving as governor changed his outlook. It was no longer a decision about whether to compete for an open seat; it was a reelection, and he decided to run and seek a full term. But he had missed crucial time to build up a campaign organization, while the Republican Party had been rallying around Mitch Daniels, a former White House official and a senior executive at Eli Lilly and Company, perhaps the most influential firm in the state. Daniels defeated him soundly.
Maybe this history explains why, after I worked up the nerve to ask him whether he thought it made sense for me to run for mayor, he stared at his basket of french fries in silence for several seconds before taking a breath and saying, “So much, in politics, is outside of your control.”
He didn’t tell me I should or shouldn’t, but described his love of the city and of the job. In fact, he said, “It’s the best job I ever had.” That was impressive, coming from someone who not only had held the top job in state government, but also went on to live out the boyhood fantasy of being president of his hometown baseball team. After his defeat, Joe had organized the purchase and rescue of the floundering single-A South Bend Silver Hawks, and divided his time between presiding in a memorabilia-filled office at the stadium, teaching a course on leadership in a seminar room under the Golden Dome, and traveling the world with Maggie and his Notre Dame Class of ’68 golfing buddies. It seemed like a pretty good life to me. Yet even now he looked on his days as mayor—not governor or lieutenant governor or baseball team owner or naval aviator—as the best job he’d ever had.
Lunch by lunch, coffee by coffee, I gathered advice around town—and began to realize that my own certainty about a run was growing. My friend Mike Schmuhl, architect of Joe Donnelly’s unlikely 2010 reelection, promised to run my campaign if I decided to go for it, and many of the community leaders I respected most were offering not only to support me if I ran but also to help raise enough money to get me started.
All eyes were on the incumbent, the longest-serving mayor in history. Steve Luecke had taken over for Joe when he became lieutenant governor in 1997, and Joe himself had been our city’s longest-ever serving mayor at that time—which meant the city hadn’t seen an open seat for mayor in twenty-four years. The small-city rumor mill had Mayor Steve announcing his intentions by Thanksgiving, but the holiday came and went with no word. Finally, on December 8, local TV stations showed him standing by the flags in the mayor’s office, flanked by tearful staff, announcing that he would not seek another term. The seat was open; the race was on.
By this point there were two credible candidates in the Democratic primary, neither of whom was me. Easygoing and relatively young himself, Ryan Dvorak had been a state representative since 2002, when he was in his late twenties. His father, Mike Dvorak, had held the same state house seat for sixteen years before Ryan, and was now the county prosecutor. The Dvoraks were almost a political party unto themselves, operating phone banks for fellow Democrats from a stand-alone headquarters separate from the party office. Thanks to his statehouse career, Ryan had the support of some labor groups, and a healthy campaign account. Lobbyists with business in Indianapolis were reluctant to cross him, as were lawyers in the area who wanted to stay in his father’s good graces. But many in the community were skeptical that he was the right choice for mayor. Some viewed him as a bit too partisan, while others remembered with displeasure his father’s legislation to prevent South Bend from annexing the suburbs around it, a bill that was popular in the unincorporated community of Granger but perceived as anti-city by South Bend residents. Awkwardly, Ryan lived on my block, and the back of his house faced that of my parents, so we crossed paths even more than normal as I explored a run.
Ryan’s rival for the nomination would be Mike Hamann. With salt-and-pepper hair combed in a sensible part, he looked like the coach and family man that he was. A well-liked teacher at Saint Joe High, Mike had been county commissioner as a Republican, then switched to the Democratic Party and was now on the county council. Like Ryan, he had the benefit of an enormous Catholic family—not only his own kids, but, by marriage, the well-liked Murphy family, which seemed to be one degree of separation from just about everyone in town. More conservative than Ryan, he was especially appreciated in pro-life Democratic circles, and he was the choice of the local Democratic Party chairman, Butch Morgan.
Asked to describe his opinion of a troublesome politician, Butch once said, “If I ever write a book, he’s going to be a chapter.” Butch would rate his own political biography, if someone wanted to write about how politics worked in South Bend when I was growing up. He once wielded influence in our county in the tradition of the urban Midwestern party boss, an enormous man with a baby face behind huge aviator glasses who more or less personally directed all aspects of the local party (except for the rebellious Dvorak wing) for years. From behind a desk heaped with walk sheets, clipboards, tote bags, chocolate wrappers, flyers, and campaign swag, he ran things mostly through the old touch-tone phone on his desk. If you went to see him in his office, he would receive and place several phone calls during the meeting, without breaking his train of thought. If someone’s name came up in conversation, he would call them on speakerphone for a ninety-second conversation, as if he were hollering to them in the next room. If his phone rang, he would take the call, give some instructions, hang up, and resume midsentence. An embodiment of the old school, he had lately taken to using email as well, but typed laboriously, with one finger, this, too, in the middle of a conversation. He was known sometimes to sleep on a couch by the phone bank; politics was his life.
Butch was deeply religious, and had become a teetotaler at some point long before we met. (“If I could get rid of three things in this world,” he once said to me, “it would be alcohol, abortion, and racism.”) He specialized in retail politics of the sort that had driven local officeholders for years—chicken and spaghetti dinners, lawn signs and nail files bearing candidates’ names, parade entries, and puckish charm. His shtick on being introduced to someone for the first time had become a well-worn routine:
YOU: “Hi, I’m so-and-so, nice to meet you.”
BUTCH: “Do I owe you money?”
YOU: “Um, no?”
BUTCH: “Then I’m very glad to meet you, too!”