Terry Goddard feature
It is easy to get in touch with Terry Goddard these days. If you phone him, he phones you right back. If you ask to meet with him, he easily finds the time.
When you arrive at the high-rise office on Central Avenue where he practices law, he comes into the lobby himself to greet you. He is alone, where as a mayor and a gubernatorial candidate he was usually surrounded by aides. He is a tall man, but without attendants he seems taller than before, and as abandoned as the sole tree to have survived a forest fire.
In his cubbyhole office at the end of a hall, he reflects on the way he is enjoying gardening again, now that the campaign is over. He says, "It has been so long since I have been able to do something for me."
His words are ebullient and relieved, but his voice is flat. Although he smiles, it never comes into his eyes, and his complexion is a little gray. The thing his friends are saying about him is that he's tired--that the strain of campaigning as a career can't be erased in weeks or even months.
Perhaps there is more to his listlessness than fatigue, though. You begin to suspect it when his voice picks up speed. He starts recalling the ways that Phoenix grew and changed during the six years he was mayor, the way downtown began to shimmer with the likes of Herberger Theater Center and Arizona Center. He begins running down a list of commissions that didn't exist before he threw his support behind them--the Phoenix Arts Commission, the Historic Preservation Commission, the Phoenix Excellence in Education Commission, and more.
Then he switches tacks and explains the project that holds his attention now as a private-sector lawyer, a project that seeks to put together low-income housing for Phoenix and other cities. An actual lilt has come into his voice. "What I am interested in is not just the financing but the design and the construction techniques," he says. "I have gone all over the country and all over the world looking at communities that are building affordable housing, and it doesn't work very well. I think the private sector could do a much better job."
It is the old Terry Goddard talking, the Terry Goddard whose enthusiasm for improvements and new ideas is his primary fuel. In the years since 1980, when he first burst upon the public consciousness by leading a citizen initiative to earmark gas-tax funds for the development of public transit, it has been his sense of how things could be that has made him come alive. It's not difficult to see that he misses being called upon to lead the charge.
"It is a terrible dislocation," says Mike Sophy, a longtime supporter who has worked on all Goddard's campaigns. "A year and two months ago, he was one of the most popular and effective political animals in this state. He was working long hours and making things happen that he cared about."
But if a love for public policy and projects has brought meaning to Goddard's life, some observers believe it also helped him to lose the governor's race.
There are many reasons he lost, and any campaign insider is quick to list them a little defensively. The reasons include an opponent who outspent Goddard nearly two to one and an inexplicably unfocused Goddard campaign. ("In the general election, I would struggle to tell you what the message even was," says Chris Hamel, a strategist brought in by Goddard to help plan the run-off after Goddard lost to J. Fife Symington III in November.) They include lousy timing, which found the Gulf War and AzScam knocking news about the governor's race off the front pages and the air. ("I met with the TV stations early in January, before the war and the sting, and they were planning to run three or four stories a week on the governor's race," remembers Goddard's press aide Jim West. "They ended up running three or four stories total.")
There are other factors, though, that people close to the Goddard campaign discuss a little less, probably because discussion makes their candidate appear not as viable for the future. These are not reasons of strategy or fate, and thus are not likely to disappear.
They have to do with the inflexible way Goddard leads, and the way he cannot help envisioning the future in the black-and-white terms of the reformer. They suggest that Goddard's stiffness and stiff-neckedness--sometimes exhibited as an admirable ability to take principled stands, sometimes as an inability to listen to others--leapt into the management of his campaign and contributed to his defeat.
Says a campaign insider, "Most candidates are not so set in their ways and don't feel they are right all the time. Terry does not listen to many people."
It is not something that has only recently become clear. Observers have been declaring that Goddard is difficult to reason with from the time he became mayor of Phoenix in '84. "When he didn't get what he wanted in City Hall, he'd be jumping up and down in the same spot and yelling! I swear to God he would!" a former Phoenix city councilmember has said.
Goddard was the first mayor to implement the district system of city government, which replaced elitist Charter Government and for the first time provided true representation for Phoenix's many different neighborhoods. The watchwords of Goddard's campaign were "opening up City Hall" and government by the people, and from the moment he took office he was lofty and pure-minded about these principles. He was probably incorruptible.
The other side of his idealism was that he had no particular gift for compromise and reconciliation, and in fact became famous among his councilmembers for drawing a line in the dirt and daring anyone to step over it. "He is gifted with a great amount of vision, but after he makes a decision, he has a difficult time with accepting that anyone else has an alternative point of view," says Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson, who also served as a councilmember under Goddard.
Insiders also remember that he liked to let warring factions in a discussion slug it out among themselves, rather than rushing to be the peacemaker. It was such a divisive approach to government that Johnson says it is taking some time to heal the damage, now that Goddard is gone from the helm. "Instead of splitting groups apart, there needed to be a pulling together," he says. "We have tried to recognize some of the groups that felt ostracized and bring them back in."
All of which is to say that Goddard had a long-range view and some courage to offer and not much else. At the time he became mayor, they were enough--were in fact the essential things, because Phoenix was changing fundamentally and needed to be guided.
But Arizona on the whole has never been enamored of vision. You have only to drive once through Phoenix, particularly past its boxy City Hall, completed in 1961 and apparently modeled after a warehouse, to understand what Arizona is enamored of: doing it on the cheap for the short term.
"If an idea doesn't make sense for tomorrow, we have a tendency in this town to turn it down," says Kay Jeffries, a board member of the Neighborhood Coalition that worked closely with Goddard when he was mayor. "I think Goddard was a guy who could see the benefit of short-term sacrifice for the long-term, and there ain't many left."
She adds that, partially because growth has slowed in the Valley along with the economy and partially because the city council is peopled once again with some strong pro-development voices, the city is in less of a mood to sacrifice than ever.
She may be right. Maybe Terry Goddard is simply not a versatile leader, and his time has come and gone.
WHEN THEY CONSIDER the question of what Terry Goddard has meant to Phoenix and what he may mean in the future, not everyone sees him as a politician who couldn't have lasted. Quite a few supporters think he is practicing law today only because of simple realities that have to do with numbers, and that more philosophical theories are hooey. "If Terry had had $3.5 million and Symington had had $2 million, everybody would be talking about what a brilliant campaign he had run and how he is the man of the time," says Paul Eckstein, a Goddard supporter and the managing partner of the law firm Brown and Bain. And it is true that Symington borrowed nearly $1,300,000 from his wife and mother and outspent Goddard grandly. (If you don't count the family money, the two candidates raised close to the same amount.) Symington was able, for instance, to spend more than $80,000 on the postage alone for a key mailing that went out shortly before the run-off vote, and to underwrite an absentee-ballot effort among Republicans in impressive numbers.
It is true that Goddard never was able to afford such sophisticated moves, and that in spite of being able to afford them, Symington won in the end by fewer than 45,000 votes--less than 3 percent of the electorate.
But if Goddard didn't lose by much, so that any single thing can be blamed, observers think that the way he turned aside the advice of his most experienced advisers and friends shouldn't be overlooked, seeing as how it illustrates the fact that Goddard can't pay attention to anyone but himself.
Insiders speak, for instance, of Goddard's determination to support the Arizona Citizens for Education Initiative--the $5.6 billion proposal that would have poured money into the state's education system if the voters hadn't defeated it at the polls.
Goddard came out in favor of ACE early in the general-election campaign against the advice of nearly every one of his strategists, who felt that ACE was vague and gave voters the impression that a tax hike would follow on its heels.
Goddard himself had serious misgivings about supporting ACE. A friend remembers that Goddard phoned her at home and agonized about the pros and cons; Goddard describes the decision as "tortured." But in the final analysis, his misgivings about not supporting ACE were the stronger ones. "I didn't think it was good legislation, but if I was going to say that education was the most important issue facing Arizona, I couldn't not support the one proposition that supported it," he says. "It was a very nonpolitical decision."
And a portentous one. Goddard's campaign manager, Jim Howard, says that on the day the press release about ACE was mailed, he phoned another Goddard supporter and said, "We've just made the move that may cost us the election."
Although Goddard hesitates to blame ACE, many observers agree with Howard. They say that Goddard's support for ACE played right into Symington's hands as, beginning with the first words out of the developer's mouth on the night he won the Republican primary, he relentlessly sought to label Goddard a "tax-and-spend liberal." They say that Goddard never recovered from the picture Symington painted of a spendthrift who would squander money on other proposals as carelessly constructed as ACE.
Instead of wondering whether he could have shown support for education another way and still preserved his chances of becoming governor, Goddard is the sort of starry-eyed fellow who may believe that, if he lost because of ACE, it was worth it. He doesn't lament his decision; he just lumps it in with another unpopular idea that he marched right out in front of: the cumbersome ValTrans initiative that went down the toilet in '89, while he was still mayor. He considers all that is glorious about both these measures. "I took my licks on ACE and ValTrans because I thought those were important leadership positions," he says. "They were not successful, but I think a lot more people have their eyes opened to education and public transit than if we had not had that discussion."
It is the attitude of a true advocate. It ignores entirely that the causes of neither education nor transit have been visibly aided by Goddard's idealism, and sidesteps the question of how Goddard will empower his vision if he doesn't attain public office. It loves issues for issues' sake.
It also underlines a quality that continues to endear Goddard to some of his supporters. Says attorney Lucia Fakonas-Howard, a longtime adviser, "ACE did cause Terry a major loss, but it made me feel more strongly that he was a candidate of conviction." And Democratic organizer Rick DeGraw reflects on other "unpolitical" decisions that Goddard made while mayor and points out, "I honestly believe that he made decisions that he thought were best for the city and not necessarily best for him."
But if his idealism can be admirable, it also amounts only to stubbornness sometimes, to an insistence on having his own way. That is something that observers say was true clear through to the bottom of his campaign organization, which he staffed with complete unknowns for reasons that no one understands completely, but that resulted in Goddard maintaining an unusual amount of control. Only Mike Sophy, who is a former campaign manager for Bruce Babbitt, was a key staff member who was also a veteran. "The problem with the November election is that there were no people who knew what a campaign looked like and felt like," says an observer.
Goddard himself says he hired attorney Jim Howard to be his campaign manager, and press aide Pam Stevenson, because they are "some of the most competent people around," despite the fact that neither of them had been involved in a major campaign before.
Howard--a mild, bespectacled, easily spooked attorney who had served on a citizen committee while Goddard was mayor--is someone who never gives a straight answer during an interview that spans nearly two hours, even when the information being sought is sheer arithmetic. Sophy says such vagueness is "pure Howard" and translated into a difficulty with decision-making, a campaign manager's primary task. Sophy says that often no one at all seemed to be in charge of Goddard's campaign: "I don't think we spent nearly as much time in planning things as we did just having them happen."
Stevenson, who worked in television before coming to Goddard, is a capable woman who lacked so much in the way of campaign savvy that she didn't even know what was missing. "To be a press secretary is not doing press releases. It is shaping a message, controlling a calendar to reflect the message," says an observer. "Pam Stevenson was capable of learning all that, but you do not learn that in a gubernatorial campaign."
Maybe Goddard structured his campaign this way because he felt secure, going into the general election as he did with a fifteen-point lead over Symington. Goddard denies it, but insiders suggest that he may have believed he could coast to victory on the strength of his popularity as one of the most well-liked mayors in the history of Phoenix. "He fought like an incumbent, and you shouldn't fight like an incumbent unless you are one," says Paul Johnson, who watched Goddard's campaign closely. "I think he didn't accept that he was going to lose until after he lost."
If Goddard was confident, his confidence was misplaced: No matter what has been said about how surprising his loss was, victory was never a shoo-in. Democrats are not elected as a matter of course in Arizona, where a Democratic candidate hasn't taken the state during a presidential election since '48. Not only are nearly 92,000 more Republicans than Democrats registered to vote here, but a greater percentage of Republicans typically goes to the polls.
Nor was Goddard's popularity as mayor much help to him. The majority of Arizona doesn't live in Phoenix and wasn't greatly familiar with Goddard. And that wasn't even the worst of it: Insiders say that focus groups held about three weeks before the general election revealed that even Phoenicians didn't remember much about Goddard's accomplishments as mayor. "Terry was devastated," says adviser Chris Hamel. By that time, a great deal of time had been lost on a campaign strategy that, to the extent it had a focus, was focused on Goddard's record.
Whatever it was that inspired Goddard to put together a staff that floundered, the disorganization immediately began to make the Symington camp look very good.
If Jay Smith, the Washington, D.C., consultant who shaped it, is to be believed, the Symington campaign was pretty good anyway. It sprang out of the gate after the primary in a state of dazzling preparedness, knowing itself to be the underdog and having honed its message and campaigning techniques against an array of fairly able primary challengers, including the indefatigable Evan Mecham. (Goddard's complacency had only been fed during the primary by his largely symbolic race with Dave Moss, a Democratic gnat with an unrelievedly bitter attitude and little funding whom no one could take seriously.)
Even if Arizona's blondest developer hadn't been filled with zeal, though, he would have appeared to have a great deal to say because of Goddard's silence. "Terry Goddard, a professional politician with no family of his own and no real grip on life, is deadset on spending your money," Symington intoned again and again, in many different forms, and the charge roared into a campaign message vacuum. Goddard not only didn't manage to defend himself well, but he never scored any retaliatory points against Symington.
Says Hamel, "What Terry needed to do was put forth a positive program that would have cut in the voter's mind in favor against Fife Symington. Terry came out with this sixty-page action plan, but that is not what I mean as a message. That is just an issues paper. A message is, What three words mean `Terry Goddard'? What do you want to be remembered for?"
Sophy largely agrees, although he says it differently: "We did not succeed in giving the electorate, many of whom had never had the opportunity to vote for this man, reason to vote for him. The fact of the matter is that we did not spark the imagination of the public."
The campaign of Goddard the visionary, organized and overseen primarily by the visionary himself, rarely talked about vision.
And by the time the tragedy of the omission became clear to everyone, it was too late. Observers agree that, once Goddard came in behind Symington in the general election, he was fighting public perception that he was a loser. He brought in Hamel, a principal strategist for Babbitt during many campaigns, to analyze past mistakes and propose new ways for the run-off.
Hamel says that, based on Goddard's public opinion polls, he quickly saw that whatever new message was adopted would have to sidestep the issue of taxes and finance altogether. Somehow Symington, who had never revealed a single fact about his business dealings to back up his statement that he was a "successful businessman," had nonetheless succeeded in convincing Arizona that only he could handle its money. "There was nothing that could be said on the issue of taxes where Fife Symington didn't have the electoral advantage," remembers Hamel. "So we decided to run a negative campaign."
It was not the first time mudslinging had been proposed, but by all accounts it's the only time Goddard agreed to go with it. Goddard admits that negative campaigning stuck in his craw, philosophically speaking, but then he makes clearer exactly what he had been holding out against: "I thought those negative things should come out through the press," he says. Which is to say, he didn't loathe the idea of attack so much as he loathed being directly associated with it.
He explains that staffers had been conducting "opposition research" on Symington throughout the campaign, and had been leaking findings to the media, including potentially damaging information about Symington's business dealings that did finally surface late in the run-off. He is dismayed that the press didn't better pick up on this info. He says with a touch of bitterness that the way the media ignored the details about Symington's business record amounted to "journalistic malpractice."
Hamel thinks Goddard is sidestepping his own responsibility by blaming the press, though. He says, "It takes a candidate elevating something to a campaign issue to get it into the press. I think the press has the right to say, `If this is a real issue, why don't you stand up publicly and say it?'"
The attempt to focus attention on Symington's business record became the message of the run-off. Goddard began firing such constant attacks at his opponent that Smith says he began to refer to Goddard's statements as the "negative du jour." But it didn't quite work.
"We failed to connect the negative message about Fife's business record and practice to how it would affect the average voter," says Hamel. "That's why we lost." As a result, speculations that Symington had failed to pay his income taxes and revelations about his participation on the board of a failed savings and loan association seemed troubling but irrelevant, rather like the charge that surfaced against Goddard that the property-tax assessment on his house was low.
The reason voters failed to connect the dots, according to Hamel and others, had to do with the lack of funds that outlawed taking their new, blacker strategy to the airwaves with force. "The severity of many of the charges Terry raised didn't get beyond a charge," says Jim West, another veteran of the Babbitt campaigns who was brought in as an additional press aide during the run-off.
Throughout these tribulations of error and fate, Goddard was apparently about as cooperative as a cat.
An ability to be a team player is highly prized by campaign managers, who want to move candidates from rallies to luncheons to debates and encounter no more resistance than if their charges were mannequins. Managers would tell you that, aside from early in the campaign telling their staffs what they do and do not stand for, the candidates' major responsibility is to follow directions.
The ability to follow directions is not something Goddard seems immediately destined to acquire. "He is the worst candidate in the world to manage," says a consultant who has tried. "He is stubborn."
He did, for example, nearly drive himself to death during the run-off against the advice of his staff--again. By the day of the final debate with Symington, he was staggering with punch-drunkenness and more.
"He needed to have slept more that last week, and spent time in the sun getting a decent tan and clearing his head so that he could walk in rested and with confidence," says Hamel. "Instead he had pushed himself too hard and gotten sick. He walked in off-balance. We needed another push in that debate and we didn't get it."
Hamel blames Goddard, but that is no more than the candidate himself does. Goddard acknowledges that the main thing he learned from his loss for governor is that he should function more as a part of a team. But in the next breath he is back in the role of activist, the zealot who is happy even about failing if he gets to make a point. He says, "I see my job as a candidate as being frank about what I believe in and motivating other people to come to the polls who agree with me. This push-button campaigning, where you package somebody into something they aren't, I am not comfortable with. If that's the only way to get elected, I guess I never will be again.
"What we have today, what I really deplore, is a group of leaders who are doing nothing more than acting as mirrors. They are trying to articulate the consensus instead of frame it. Why be in office if your only purpose is to stay in office?
"I guess the bottom line is that the mistakes I made in the campaign are mine. I am responsible for what happens. And I wouldn't have it any other way."
GODDARD'S BULLHEADEDNESS has not always defeated him. History coughs up a certain number of crises that allow contrariness to take on the appearance of strength, and it calls them revolutions. Goddard was lucky when he took over as mayor, because he plunged headlong into a revolution and didn't need a great ability to get along with people. He was a seasoned activist by then, although he'd gotten a late start for a man with his particular heritage. As the son of Sam Goddard, longtime chair of the state's Democratic party and one-term governor, he'd grown up in a household where the discussion of public policy was as basic to the dinner table as the silverware. All that exposure didn't immediately transform him into the visionary many supporters believe he has now become, however. Goddard attended Harvard during the tumultuous Sixties, but despite his professed liberalism he didn't embrace the political foment of his age, and he particularly avoided scenes of campus unrest. As a member of Harvard's crew team, he threw his energies into athletics.
Once returned to his native state, however, he surfaced as a community leader. First he was the spearhead of the citizen gas-tax initiative that was expected to fail but didn't. Later he was a spokesman for the district system, the most radical political reform to have occurred in the Valley during his lifetime.
By the Eighties, the tradition of government by the well-heeled that was known as Charter Government had held sway in Phoenix for more than thirty years, ushered in by city leaders fed up with the vice and corruption that plagued the city during the Forties. In order to calm things down, these leaders handed the reins to a hired professional, a city manager, who was in turn advised by a slate of Charter Government councilmembers known to have the exactly proper ideas--councilmembers who were elected at-large and mostly lived in central Phoenix, within a mile of one another.
When the idea of districting came along, it was because Phoenix had grown too large to be represented by a handful of business people who were neighbors. The promise of the district system, which passed in '82 in a referendum election, was that for the first time councilmembers would run for office from separate areas in the city and would represent the interests of the constituents who elected them.
And so, when Goddard steamrolled his way to personal victory on the strength of his success with the district system, he strode into city offices stripped so bare by Charter Government's last mayor, Margaret Hance, that even the files and the furniture had been shoved into storage. City government as Phoenix had nearly always known it had been dismantled. It fell to Goddard to begin anew. Some of the decisions he made in the name of starting over were more symbolic than anything. He gave every city councilmember a separate office, to encourage meeting with constituents. (They had worked out of cubicles before.)
He ripped the doors off the municipal building entryways that led to these offices, so that for the first time Phoenicians could march in to confront the mayor and his minions without being announced. He began providing time for citizens to voice their concerns at the beginning of city council meetings instead of the end.
Other changes cut more to the true heart of districting. In particular, Goddard appointed endless citizen advisory committees to examine the most pressing issues of the day--economic growth, environmental quality, cultural development, the budget. Although some critics have charged that he tended to appoint too many of the same yuppies to these committees, he did at least wrest control of city affairs away from the establishment that had jealously guarded it for decades, and he included many minorities on his master lists. For the first time, the city percolated with average citizens taking a hand in running it.
Implementing all these untried measures took a leader who was willing to go with the consequences. Says Kathleen Eaton, the president of the Neighborhood Coalition that participates in zoning matters, "He put people together and let them work it out rather than putting people together whom he thought would come up with the results he wanted."
It apparently didn't even bother Goddard to pit himself against a host of other views, perhaps because his belief in the correctness of his own views was so strong. "Terry was willing to be on the losing end of a 5-4 vote," remembers Craig Tribken, formerly a commercial real estate broker and member of the Neighborhood Coalition, and now a member of the city council. "He was willing to push an idea and push it hard instead of trying to massage the proposal. That is part of daring to do things, but he also was divisive.
"Now Paul Johnson is a very consensus sort of council person. He is determined not to have the council split on votes. That is one of Terry's legacies."
Goddard's critics speak of his argumentativeness as though he simply doesn't bother to control himself, but those who've been close to him through the years say any impatience he exhibits has a root more profound than immaturity: They say he has difficulty forcing his eyes away from the bigger picture. "He very often ignored collegiality with the councilmembers because he was involved in new ideas," says Mike Sophy, who has known Goddard for twenty years. "He did not put the practical communications links in place--didn't always make time on his calendar to go and have the discussion with someone who disagreed. Plus he couldn't believe that anyone would disagree with his good ideas."
Sometimes the results of Goddard's contentiousness and zeal were actually the ones he wanted, almost in spite of himself. This is to say they were probably not the ones the business community wanted. The way the Neighborhood Coalition grew in prominence was a case in point. Designed to bring homeowners together to influence city policy and fight for their interests in zoning battles, the coalition gained teeth for the first time under Goddard, who was not its organizer but may have been its spiritual head. "His support gave us a lot of ground to stand on," says Kay Jeffries of the coalition's board.
She points out that Goddard organized a committee to formulate the first general zoning plan for the city and peopled it not only with developers and zoning attorneys, but with landscape architects and Neighborhood Coalition members. She believes it wouldn't have been the case with any previous administration. "We have based everything we do here on the ability to buy and sell a piece of property again and again and again at an inflated price, and everything that has gotten passed by the city council has furthered that," she says. "I think Goddard took business's concerns into account but balanced them."
She may be right, and it may be a reason so much of Goddard's public came to adore him. Goddard amassed an enormous amount of power by becoming popular with the voters, eventually gaining one of the highest public-opinion ratings of any politician in Phoenix history. Observers say his influence grew primarily because he was highly visible on television, and because he articulated so well his vision for a changing Phoenix--a Phoenix with a thriving downtown, a well-defined zoning plan, an "urban identity" and increased cultural awareness.
His presence became so overwhelming that, when he pressured for the fulfillment of these views, his councilmembers gave in to him more often than they didn't, probably out of fear. He was a force to be reckoned with, even though, like the councilmembers themselves, he had only one vote on issues. "There were no great big concerted challenges on his views," remembers Sophy. "His name was much better known than the councilmembers', his vote precinct-by-precinct on election days was larger than theirs. Those are realities that political people ignore at their peril.
"What Terry did was make everyone aware of the fact that the mayor of Phoenix is the second most powerful elected official in the state."
What he also did was make the citizenry aware that Phoenix didn't have to remain a soulless hole forever. "The Phoenix system of government had brought up a group of people who were worried about the bus arriving on time, but Goddard built excitement," says political consultant Alfredo Gutierrez. "He was talking about what a city should be about, what it should look like down to the shrubbery."
He was not, certainly, the most unerring visionary in the history of city government. He allowed the eyesore called Patriots Square to be built, and he voted in favor of that effete Grand Prix, and he didn't notice for nearly two years that the ongoing renovation of Central Avenue was ruining the city's main street. It was also Goddard who spearheaded a highly publicized, international design competition for a new city-hall complex, spent millions on the winning plans, and then had to abandon the whole idea when he couldn't hold together the support of his council.
But if he marched out in front of some failures and clunkers, he was also the first mayor to ponder a "sense of community," and to foster cultural boons that will enhance life here far into the future.
He four times returned chagrined to the city council and bullied for more money to build the Herberger Theater Center complex, a blocklong home for the performing arts downtown that he believed in, despite the budgetary figures that kept getting revised upward by the private interests in charge.
He helped close the deal with the Rouse Corporation, which in turn built the fabulous Arizona Center. He arranged to buy the Palace West Theatre. He--for better or worse--pitched in to help Fife Symington find funding for the now-desolate Mercado.
Most impressive of all was the way he conceived and organized the bond election of '88, appointing citizen committees to hash out the details of dollars for everything from class-act museums to storm sewers. When the votes were in, the citizens of Phoenix had gotten behind the largest single allocation of money for culture--parks, museums, downtown streetscapes and the like--than had passed anywhere in America ever before. It was astonishing in a city that again and again had voted down any measure designed to enhance lifestyle, particularly downtown.
He was, in short, a builder when Phoenix needed one, whose ideas resulted in enormous physical changes at a time the city could largely afford them. It was a marvelous contribution then, but it probably worked against him as he fought to become governor. Perhaps it was inconceivable to this year's voters that he could transform himself into the ideal leader for tough economic times.
"During this last campaign, we were in the middle of a war, in a recession, and unemployment was rising," says adviser Hamel. "There was a sense that government spending was out of control. Every time Terry would stand up and say, `I did the Arizona Center,' the voters would say, `Yeah, but it took money to do that.' There was a sense that the things Terry Goddard wanted to do and had done all required money."
The revolution was over. And here is what the leader of the revolution, when asked, is still saying constitutes leadership today: "I think leadership is setting the standard. It is moving out ahead of where everybody is."
Musing upon leadership, Terry Goddard makes no mention of the other abilities that will hold things together when the revolution ends, and that all leaders must possess if they are ever to be more than revolutionaries.
Perhaps positions of undiluted idealism are the only ones he is able to take. Maybe he is Arizona's Jimmy Carter, a man of heart and soul who is so impractical that he's of little earthly use as a politician. There are fresh signs of it, right down to Goddard's current interest in housing for the poor.
He is faced with repaying an enormous debt to his law firm--the nonpolitical, national group called Bryan, Cave--which kept him on salary while he was campaigning full-time and couldn't work for them. This arrangement was subjected to much scrutiny before the election, and the charge was levied that Goddard and the law firm were violating contribution laws if the "salary" was never repaid and turned out to be nothing more than campaign funding. Bryan, Cave even underwent an investigation, which by all accounts pushed the senior partners in St. Louis into an advanced state of apoplexy.
Since he has returned to a lawyer's life, Goddard has been under the gun to rack up billable hours. He says that he has--that his debt has been reduced from $35,000 to about $10,000 already. And yet his recent major proposal to the firm that has shown so much faith in him concerned the affordable housing project that excites him radically but probably won't make the firm any money.
Goddard admits with a laugh that the honchos who considered his proposal--the same honchos who were terrified that the "salary" scandal would taint their firm's good name--responded to Goddard's newest dream by pointing out that it doesn't represent the sort of billable hours that will enable him to prove that all those election rumors were wrong.
"The firm is right--I am not sure it is remunerative," he says of his desire to provide affordable housing. "But I am interested in continuing to represent local communities, and represent these public-private partnerships within communities. I am still working on this in terms of convincing them."
Maybe Terry Goddard is a man of such unbending purity that he never could have held public office except as a fluke.
Maybe Terry Goddard is simply not a versatile leader, and his time has come and gone.
Goddard is the sort of starry-eyed fellow who may believe that, if he lost because of ACE, it was worth it.
Goddard "fought like an incumbent, and you shouldn't fight like an incumbent unless you are one," says Paul Johnson.
The campaign of Goddard the visionary, organized and overseen primarily by the visionary himself, rarely talked about vision.
In the next breath, Goddard is back in the role of activist, the zealot who is happy even about failing if he gets to make a point.
Goddard was a builder when Phoenix needed one, whose ideas resulted in enormous physical changes at a time the city could largely afford them.
"Every time Terry would stand up and say, `I did the Arizona Center,' the voters would say, `Yeah, but it took money to do that.'
