It’s a blazing hot Memorial Day weekend in Hermosa Beach, seven miles south of LAX, and the holiday festival has drawn thousands of people. It’s the kind of crowd a candidate craves in the closing days of a campaign. There are hands to shake, and the veteran pols have all told me the same thing: Every hand you shake is a likely vote. With nine days until the primary—and our new poll showing me just three points behind my most prominent Democratic rival—I’m trying to touch as many voters as I can. Trouble is, a lot of voters don’t seem to want to touch me.

“Hi, I’m Matt Miller, and I’m running for the congressional seat Henry Waxman is vacating,” I say as I close in, hand extended, on a middle-aged couple. “Do you live in the area?” They avert their eyes and scurry past.

“Hi, I’m Matt Miller, and I’m running for the congressional seat Henry Waxman is … ” Another couple waves me off.

“Hi, I’m Matt Miller and … ”

“I hate all you politicians,” snaps a man who hadn’t looked angry at all until I mentioned Congress.

This happens over and over. Some folks even speed up to avoid me once they hear what I’m after. I try not to take it personally, but the truth is people are responding as if I’d reached for them and said, “Hi, I’m Matt Miller and I have a highly contagious disease—do you mind if I approach more closely?”

“It’ll only take 30 seconds,” I take to pleading. “I promise—it’s painless.” Often it works. People might hate politicians, but they can still take pity on a fellow human being who’s trying to make a sale. Like Willy Loman, I’m way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.

I deliver my pitch. Running for office for the first time. Host of a talk show on public radio, “Left, Right & Center.” Worked on the Clinton White House economic team. Endorsed by the Los Angeles Times. Can I give you a piece of propaganda on that? “It’s high-quality propaganda,” I always add, “not like the mediocre propaganda those other campaigns are peddling.” Winking smile. See how easy democracy can be?

A score! A man in a bright yellow tank top takes my flier as I tell him I’d be honored to have his vote on June 3. Even if my batting average isn’t high, I think, at least I’m getting somewhere.

Or not.

About 10 paces off, Tank Top Man tosses my handout on the ground. My smile fades as I make the decision; it feels like an affront to let it lie there. In my mind’s eye, the camera cranes upward, and from high above the rooftops we see a speck of a candidate down on one knee, in the midst of hordes of indifferent passersby, rescuing his glossy little placard. The pavement is hot. I feel the sweat on my face. I wipe some grit off the piece with my thumb. Still usable, I think.

I.

My metamorphosis from normal civilian to retriever of discarded propaganda—a journey into the maddening, depressing, exhilarating, surreal and even occasionally inspiring world of a modern congressional campaign—had begun on a freezing day in Manhattan four months earlier. I was walking near Columbus Circle on January 30, when I felt my phone vibrate. It was a Politico Breaking News alert. The legendary Californian congressman Henry Waxman had announced he would not be running for reelection. I stopped in my tracks.

The bell had sounded.

The Candidate | After serving as a top budget aide in the Clinton White House, Miller and his wife, Jody, moved to Los Angeles. When he decided to run for Congress two decades later, consultants told him to play up his Jewish faith and the name recognition he had earned as a public radio host. | Photos courtesy of Matt Miller

I’d lived in Waxman’s district on the west side of Los Angeles for 18 years, and I always thought that when he stepped down, I would consider running for his seat. I had worked in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1995, on the wonk side of things, and had flirted with the idea of jumping into electoral politics even back then. When we left the administration, my then-girlfriend, Jody, and I were about to get engaged. She worked for Clinton, too. She served as Clinton counselor David Gergen’s deputy and special assistant to the president when I was Alice Rivlin’s top aide in the budget office. We were a White House romance before White House romance got a bad name.

Back then, I had told Jody that I was thinking about going home to Connecticut and running for Congress.

“You can do that,” she had said. “Or you can marry me. You can’t do both.”

So I didn’t. It was the right choice. We got hitched and moved to Los Angeles and built a life in a small enclave called Pacific Palisades. I grew comfortable with the idea that I could contribute to public life through books and journalism, and by hosting what eventually became a popular week-in-review program on public radio.

Still, the idea of elected office stayed in the back of my mind. It’s an occupational hazard, I suppose: When you spend years writing about national policy, you can’t help but wonder if you’d be able to nudge Washington in a better direction. But like everyone else in L.A., I had assumed right up until that January morning that Waxman wouldn’t retire for another five or six years.

Now it had happened. Waxman had held the seat, the capital of Tinseltown liberalism and Beverly Hills fundraising clout, for the past four decades. Given the power of incumbency and the district’s deep-blue tinge, it seemed likely that whoever won the Democratic primary would be able to keep the seat for as long as he or she wished to serve. Which meant that if I was ever going to give Congress a shot, it was now or never.

The timing seemed fated to test my values. The reason I was in New York when the phone buzzed was to meet with a publisher about a new book proposal—the next installment in what Jody lovingly mocked as my “one man government-in-exile” series. The premise was that after two terms of a president seen by much of the country as a virtual socialist, not only have we not achieved Democratic utopia, but virtually every measure of a good society that progressives care about (save for expanded health coverage) will be going in the wrong direction. For all the party’s rhetorical commitment to “equal opportunity,” “economic security” and “upward mobility,” voters are actually getting from Democrats nothing more than a kinder, gentler decline.

All of which was running through my head as I stood in the cold that morning on 58th Street. I could write another book. Or, with Waxman leaving, I could do more than just comment from the sidelines. I had always been a fan of Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” quote—you know, the one about why you have to be in the game to change it. And Paul Ryan’s model had been paradoxically inspiring: Watching the Wisconsin Republican move a hollow, regressive budget plan to the center of the national conversation in recent years suggested what a void there was for anything resembling “ideas” in Washington.

I knew in that instant I wanted to do it. There were only two problems. I had no idea how to mount a political campaign. And running could cause huge problems at home. It would mean dropping the business consulting through which I earned most of my living. A plunge in income and the prospect of a husband commuting to Washington, D.C., wasn’t Jody’s idea of nirvana. Who could blame her? I forwarded Jody the Politico alert with a sheepish “Oh boy” typed atop it and started making calls to get the lay of the land.

The most prominent likely Democratic contender was Wendy Greuel, a former city controller who had lost the recent Los Angeles mayoral race to Eric Garcetti. The millions of dollars she and outside groups had spent on TV during the campaign gave her high name recognition, a huge asset. Then again, she did live outside the congressional district, so at least she would face carpetbagger charges. An author and lecturer named Marianne Williamson had announced the previous fall that she was running as an independent against Waxman—she was decidedly unconventional, a kind of “spiritual guru,” but her devoted following could make her a factor. Then there was Democratic state Senator Ted Lieu, whose district overlapped with Waxman’s. And who knew who else might jump in?

Like Willy Loman, I’m way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.

The filing deadline wasn’t until March 7, but if I was going to run, people I trusted told me, I would need to move fast, because donors would coalesce around the serious contenders who got in early. The primary was June 3. Under California’s open primary system, the top two finishers, regardless of party, would go on to the general election in November. Oh, and there was one more thing.

“You’ll need to raise around a million dollars,” Sean Clegg, one of the state’s top political consultants, told me. To be spent mostly on cable TV ads and direct mail.

A million dollars? I tried to process what this meant. It was almost February 1. I counted off February, March, April and May on my fingers. Four months until June 3. About 120 days. More than $8,000 a day, more than $11,000 if you didn’t count weekends. I had never raised a political penny in my life. My likely opponents had been doing this for years.

I walked over to Eliot Spitzer’s office on Fifth Avenue. Spitzer and I had been friendly since he had read one of my books in 2003 and had reached out to talk policy. Whatever mistakes he had made, he was still one of the savviest pols of his generation—and he had a lot to teach me. Over the years, he had urged me to run for office. Now I was at his door to ask him how to dive in.

I briefed Eliot on what I knew, and nodded in the affirmative to his booming inquiry, “So, are you going to do this?” (By then, Jody’s email had come in—“U can run if you want”—six syllables masking a whorl of emotion we would surely be dealing with later.) Then Spitzer leaned back in his chair, scrutinized me across the coffee and Danishes spread out on the table before us, and said, “What will your ballot designation be?”

My what?

The Fundraiser | On a typical day, Miller might wake up at 6:30 to call donors on the East Coast before filing away names of potential patrons on a list called "The Tracker." | Photos courtesy of Matt Miller

The ballot designation is the first thing every working politician and political pro raised within moments of considering my case. Of course I’d never thought about it before. It’s just a few words—three, under California law—that describe your background or job. Besides your name and party affiliation, it’s the only thing voters see on the ballot. It’s considered vital because the fraction of us who are sufficiently civic-minded to show up for elections nonetheless often arrive in the voting booth knowing nothing about the candidates, and so seeing that one is a “prosecutor” or “military officer” or “assemblyman” can be decisive.

Eliot wasn’t sure what to suggest for mine. In the end, we went with “Public Radio Host,” though I was sort of partial to the advice of one of my Twitter followers: “Excellent Waxman Replacement.”

Eliot then peppered me with more questions, most of which I didn’t know how to answer. How will you model turnout? How do you communicate in this district? What’s your name ID from your radio show? Will Waxman endorse? Are there self-funded people in the race? Can you raise the money?

Then he rendered his verdict.

“If you’re in a short race against two career politicians with high name ID, you have to go in clear-eyed,” he said. “You have to assume there’s a low probability of victory. But you can raise the issues you’ve written about for years and make the debate about something real. And once you’re in, you never know. Things can happen and it could break your way. If you don’t get in, you’ll always wonder if you should have.”

That felt about right.

***

Back in L.A., the spewing of bromides and pabulum in the service of ambition had begun. Wendy Greuel told reporters that she “knew instantly in my gut” that she wanted “to serve the people of the 33rd district and … fight for the families here,” a passion so fierce she was moving her family into the district to do just that. Ted Lieu declared, “I am running because I love America,” leaving a dangerous opening for potential rivals who hated it.

In New York, meanwhile, I was in the midst of a whirlwind round of calls to sound out potential donors and assemble a campaign team. It was in these first hours that I realized what a supercharged metabolism is required to run for office. I had always thought of myself as hardworking and productive. But I had never been a guy with a “call list” of hundreds of people to reach out to. Suddenly I was. Very quickly it became clear that this was a big part of what a politician’s life entailed. It seemed endless, and overwhelming.

For starters, I was told, I would need a media strategist, a direct mail consultant, a fundraising consultant, an election lawyer, a campaign treasurer and some day-to-day campaign staff. The career politicians I would be facing just had to flip a switch—they had such teams on tap and ready to go. That left me hunting for advisers who weren’t already spoken for, and who were prepared to resist pressure from rival camps not to take me on. One fundraising consultant on my list took a meeting, for example, and said she would be available if a longtime client decided against entering the race himself. Yet when he stayed out, she wouldn’t even return my calls.

From the get-go, it was clear this was a party I was crashing, and the insiders weren’t all that happy about it. One L.A. potentate I sounded out for potential support bellowed at me over the phone: “It’s a BIG MISTAKE! A BIG MISTAKE!”

“Why?” I asked, dumbfounded. There were people who thought I was foolish to want the job, but none who were angry about it.

“WHAT CAN YOU SAY THAT WENDY AND TED CAN’T SAY?” she yelled. “WHAT CAN YOU OFFER THAT WENDY AND TED CAN’T OFFER?”

Another Democratic power couple took Jody to dinner for the first time in years to suss out my intentions, telling her I was crazy to run—before publicly announcing the next day that they were in Ted’s camp, a fact they somehow failed to mention over dinner.

I had observed this trait in politicians I knew, but it still felt odd to be pulled so quickly into the undertow of self-absorption.

Others were more welcoming, if concerned for my sanity. A law school friend said he would happily support me, but added, “It sounds like a pretty extreme way to deal with empty nest syndrome.” One business leader in L.A. thought I had lost my mind. “Why do you want this job?” he said. “You have more impact and a much better life doing what you’re doing.” Former Senator Bob Kerrey was ready to endorse me if that was useful; his one word of caution was, “Do NOT spend your own money—no matter what the consultants tell you in the last week of the campaign—it’s not fair to your family.” A consultant who hadn’t known I am Jewish said that was important in my district. “You may need to change your name to Millerstein,” he joked. (That seemed a bit much, but pictures of our daughter’s bat mitzvah became the dog whistle in our materials.)

Jay Carson, a former Hillary Clinton aide and deputy mayor in L.A. who was now running Mike Bloomberg’s climate change initiative, said I should figure 85 to 90 percent of my time would be spent fundraising.

“Eighty-five percent?” I said. “Jesus, Jay. This is crazy.”

“There’s one other thing,” he said. “You really want to have at least 50 percent spousal support. You’ll never get close to a hundred—it’s just not in the cards for something like this. But if you’re below 50, it’s really tough. You’re out there getting beat up all day, and if you come home and feel like you’re getting beat up all night, it’s a pretty miserable existence. I’ve seen what that looks like. You really want to be at 51.”

A few days later, Jody and I were in Colorado on a long-planned weekend getaway that had become the venue for a final 51 percent gut check before announcing.

By coincidence, Eliot was in Colorado that weekend with his sister. We had a drink and mulled the final pros and cons. I told them I was struck already by the narcissism of being a candidate; virtually every waking moment and encounter was now about me and how to advance my cause. It was all-consuming and transactional. I had observed this trait in politicians I knew, but it still felt odd to be pulled so quickly into the undertow of self-absorption.

The Hustler | Miller hit the trail in L.A. to peddle campaign literature to a voter pool he describes as “depressing”—with just 25 percent of registered voters projected to turn out, half of them age 65 and older. | Courtesy of Matt Miller

“At least I’m self-aware,” I said to Eliot’s sister, hopefully.

“They all start out that way,” she replied.

II.

“If you want to run a 1950s campaign in the 21st century,” my newly anointed lead consultant, media strategist Mattis Goldman, barked one morning, “suit yourself.” Our team was on the phone not long after I’d announced my bid on February 14, and it was a more than credible group we’d managed to pull together despite my outsider status: Mattis as top strategist, partnering with direct-mail guru Andrew Acosta; my friend Stan Greenberg and his partner Drew Lieberman on the polling; Tracy Austin, one of California’s top Democratic fundraisers; and Lyn Utrecht, a Washington fixture, as counsel. But already it was clear I would need to wage a different kind of race. I couldn’t compete for endorsements from the local Democratic clubs and interest groups; Wendy and Ted had been mining those fields for years. And we knew I would start way behind in name recognition and that only money could close the gap. The basic plan was straightforward: Raise the money, hope to be competitive for the L.A. Times endorsement and build on the Westside NPR listeners who would be my base. A threshold strategic question was whether there was any good use of my time besides raising money, since cable TV and direct mail were the only way to reach enough voters in a district that end to end spans more than 50 traffic-snarled miles.

I’d gotten advice to the contrary from some experienced pols. Roy Romer told me what he had done in one race in Colorado, when every morning he booked three breakfasts in a row at different diners—at 5:30, 6:30 and 7:30 a.m.—so voters could take his measure. “You need your version of that,” Romer said. I was excited about the idea.

But Mattis, who generally had one operating mode—in your face and painfully blunt—snorted dismissively. Think about it, he said. You’ll be lucky to get eight people at these breakfasts. Twenty-four each morning. Maybe a thousand if we’re lucky by primary day. How many will even live in the district and be registered? Of those, how many will bother to vote? And of those, how many are possible Matt Miller voters? “You’ll run yourself into the ground and accomplish nothing,” he concluded. By that logic I might as well chain myself to the phone and dial for dollars. (Mattis was OK with me working farmers’ markets and the like on Sundays, however. “He needs to feel like a candidate,” my new boss conceded.)

The voter pool was even more depressing. Our team projected there would be about 110,000 voters on June 3 (out of 462,000 registered, or less than 25 percent). And here was the kicker: Fully half would be age 65 and older. Roughly three-quarters would be age 50 and older. Millennials were a rounding error. If you want to know why politicians pay only lip service to the outrageous cost of college, soaring student loan debt and the fact that degrees don’t translate into decent jobs anymore, here’s your answer, I thought. But there was no way to start some youth crusade in the time we had.

Truth is, by the end of the campaign, I wouldn’t stop to talk to young people at all—the odds that they would show up on June 3 were practically nil. Seniors—and the direct mail we would send them—were pretty much all that mattered. (This truth was driven home by the little old lady at a market who punctuated her list of to-dos for me with eerie intensity. “You’d better listen to me, young man,” she said. “We’re the ones who vote!”)

So money was the main mission. The first order of business was to hit it out of the park by the Federal Election Commission first-quarter deadline on March 31. I had written before about how crazy it is that we expect politicians to spend four hours a day (or more) on the money chase. But nothing prepares you for what it’s like to be in the candidate’s chair.

First order of business is introducing you to the bizarre rites and rituals associated with reaching out to the 1/20th of 1 percent of Americans who fund campaigns, and I soon learned consultants have studied dialing for dollars with anthropological precision. One consultant’s motto is, “Shorter calls means more calls!”—i.e., more money. So stop all the chitchat. When you make the “ask,” another told me—and that’s typically for the max of $2,600 per person, $5,200 per couple—just say the number and pause: Don’t keep talking. And above all, don’t leave L.A. for an out-of-town fundraiser unless you’re guaranteed to rake in at least $50,000, and preferably 100 large. Anything less and it’s not worth the hassle.

The pros told me the process would be emotional. People you never imagined will be there for you with incredible generosity, and folks you’re certain will step up won’t even return your calls. It all turned out to be true. I raised $130,000 in the first four days, thanks to a moving response from friends, family, business colleagues, college and law school classmates, and more. (Our campaign team was elated. “We’ll all get paid,” I knew they were thinking.) That first weekend, two names I didn’t recognize popped up online as givers as I was obsessively tracking the returns; each had donated $2,600. “Who’s Kenny Wyland? Who’s Ira Wagner? Do we know them?” I called to Jody. The answer was no. Thanks to Google, it was easy to find them to say thanks. One turned out to be a radio fan in Long Beach, another a Bethesda reader of my Washington Post columns who felt he should “put his money where my mouth was.” Truly humbling. On the other hand, when a well-to-do friend gave just $200, I stupidly let my disappointment show. It was a shameful misstep—who was I to think I was entitled to anyone’s money at all? I learned to be grateful and take nothing for granted.

The Pitch Man | Although "money was the main mission," Miller's lead consultant let him make occasional public appearances so he could "feel like a candidate." | Photos courtesy of Matt Miller

Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed “The Tracker”) and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy … and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day … and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can … ask for money.

***

A typical day in February and March: I wake up at 6:30 a.m. and start calling and emailing East Coast prospects. At 8, my chief of staff, Ben Sherman, a political prodigy fresh out of the University of Texas, arrives and reminds me that I need to raise $8,000 today. It’s his way of saying, “Good morning.” I connect with a millionaire on the East Coast who’s been a fan of my work. “Why don’t you just take my credit card now?” she says, and, with my headset on, I tap her $2,600 contribution into the site. “I feel like I’ve become a telemarketer,” I tell her, “but a telemarketer with a vision for America!”

Then I race out to have coffee with a wealthy environmental activist. He quizzes me on my global warming agenda and concludes that my call for a big carbon fee and dividend plan doesn’t suffice. He lectures me on the need to think more about incremental steps I would support. He’ll give $500 for now. I thank him and head back to the phones. A college friend who’s now an executive at a health-care company says he’s in. But first he would like to know if I can support changes to Obamacare his industry is seeking. He hopes I can join some prominent Democrats who’ve signed on. This is how it works, I think. I ask him to send me his materials. We agree to talk again soon. I call Ben in. If I can get a comfort level with the policy, I tell him, we can make inroads with other industry players. Part of me seizes on what looks like a real fundraising opportunity. Another part marvels at how quickly I’ve slipped into a new skin. Ben’s too young to know the film The Seduction of Joe Tynan, but I start bleating on about “the seduction of Matt Miller.”

Tracy Austin, my fundraising guru, shows up midday for three hours of supervised “call time.” She’s a smiling drill sergeant. She forces me to go faster. She listens to my patter and suggests tweaks. When folks agree to give, I hand her the phone to take their information while I pick up another line and dial the next victim. I leave my third or even fifth message with assistants—“you’re not doing yourself any good by this drumbeat of messages,” one of those I’m stalking emails, saying they’re “the surest way to turn me off.” But I remain persistent, always telling folks who come through generously that I’d be happy to make the case to their wife or husband as well. “Take no spouse for granted … and leave no spouse behind!” has become my motto, I explain.

One donor asks if I’m taking PAC money. I say I’d love to: Wendy and Ted have long funded their campaigns with cash from the business and labor groups that have a stake in City Hall or Sacramento business. It’s an obvious conflict of interest, but it’s how American politics works. As a newbie, however, I don’t get PAC overtures. I end up with just a handful. Senator Michael Bennet’s leadership PAC gives us $5,000; a local law firm does $1,000; also, a friend of a friend is the CEO of Avis, so I get $2,600 from Avis’s PAC. (“I just want to put my cards on the table,” I tell audiences when they ask where my funding comes from. “You send me to Washington, I’m under the thumb of the rental car industry. I’m not sure what that means, but there it is.”)

I talk to everyone about the need to fix this crazy system and put out a plan to reduce the role of money in politics that Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor turned campaign-finance crusader, endorses. Then—“embracing the irony,” as Lessig urges—I use my campaign reform plan to raise money from donors who have an interest in the issue.

In the evenings, I invariably head to a house party hosted by friends to meet potential supporters. This is the exciting part of the fundraising imperative—though these events are still about money, at least I get a chance to stand before the community, learn what’s on people’s minds. That’s the upside. The downside is subsisting on dinners of cheese and crackers. The first month of the campaign, before these events began, I lost 8 pounds without trying because I was too busy to eat—the Run for Congress Diet. The brie regimen reverses all that. When I get home, I work on a policy paper. I’m the policy shop in our campaign, and it feels like a wonderful luxury to spend a little time on the issues that motivated me to run in the first place. Afterward, until midnight, I write tailored emails to East Coast funding prospects, so they’ll have my note in their inbox in the morning. I go to bed exhausted. Then I do it again the next day.

The Actor | For his first TV spot, Miller rode in a backhoe—he would "get the economy moving"—and did yoga on the beach while talking schools. | Photos courtesy of Matt Miller

As the filing deadline approaches, I feel like I’ve become a machine designed to collect cash from high net worth Americans and turn it into cheesy mailers that will stuff voters’ mailboxes in May. March 31 itself marks the apotheosis of my transformation. With everything riding on the numbers we have to report by midnight, I find myself in a fever, a hustler in full, a caffeinated candidate who will not be denied. I make call after call at a frantic clip, coaxing and cajoling prospects with the power only a deadline can provide. I’ve learned my lessons well: I hear myself thanking 20 people sincerely for being “the one” who puts us over our half-a-million-dollar goal. Tracy looks at me like I’m a different person. She’s seen this wild-eyed species before. She wasn’t sure I’d get there. “It’s a little scary,” she admits. But she approves.

When the dust clears, we’ve raised more than $517,000 in 46 days. That’s $11,257 a day—as fast a daily rate as Wendy and Ted. We put out a press release. Politicos around town are buzzing about the size of our haul. It’s the only metric that matters—the equivalent of plopping your political manhood on the table for all to admire. Antonio Villaraigosa, the former L.A. mayor, leaves me a voicemail. “That’s a BIG NUMBER, man!” he says. It’s a weird thing to feel proud of. But I do.

III.

A day later, an unknown thirtysomething lawyer in the race announced that he had raised $800,000 in the first quarter, more than any of us. Talk about having your parade rained on! (He ended up with 1 percent of the vote, though this was no consolation at the time.)

This news came as I was learning just how steep a hill I needed to climb with the voters. Eighteen candidates (!) had ended up on the ballot. In our internal poll, which cost about $38,000 in hard-earned campaign cash, my name ID as “public radio host Matt Miller” was 27 percent, about the same as Marianne Williamson’s—and close to 50 percent among voters with incomes above $250,000, helping explain our fundraising success. Still: Wendy Greuel had nearly 70 percent ID, even if it came accompanied by high negatives; Ted Lieu had a daunting enough 49 percent. If the vote were held then, Wendy would have gotten 21 percent, Ted 20, Marianne 11 and me 8. Three Republicans were on the ballot, but only one, a prosecutor named Elan Carr, was running a serious campaign. In our poll, Carr came in at 19 percent, and rose as voters learned more about him.

I was struck already by the narcissism of being a candidate.

Bottom line? The scenario we had to hope for was that Wendy and Ted would see Carr as likely to finish on top, and turn on each other in a nasty zero-sum battle for No. 2. If things got ugly enough to hurt them both, we might slip up the middle as the fresh, positive voice of change with a Bill Clinton connection (our poll showed my Clinton administration background was a huge asset with the district’s surprisingly large number of struggling middle-class Democrats). A lot would have to break our way, though.

I drove from our strategy meeting about the poll that day right to the first of what would be 10 candidate forums, this one hosted by the Santa Monica Democratic Club. Wendy greeted me with a theatrical hug, as if we were long-lost family. “How’s Jody?” she effused. I cringed inside but made nice. I’d seen Wendy maybe 10 times over the preceding 15 years; we had never had a substantive conversation. I also knew she (or her allies) were already testing negative attacks on me. The other day I had answered a call that asked how I would feel about Matt Miller if I knew he’d called for “radical changes” in Social Security and Medicare. (“They’re polling my negatives!” I gushed to our daughter, Amelia, afterward. It seemed like a mark of progress.)

It was fascinating to watch the career pols do their thing. These forums were never real debates (to my great frustration), but simply chances for activists to hear serial talking points from whatever candidates were invited. By campaign’s end, each of us could have delivered the others’ three minutes by heart. But that night, it was fresh. Wendy was running as a Waxman groupie, and strongly playing the gender card. She went on and on about Waxman’s accomplishments, and said she was ready to fill his shoes, only “with high heels.” “I’m a fighter and doer!” was her mantra.

Ted was clearly the stronger candidate. “I thought I’d tell you my story,” he always began, before launching into the compelling saga of his immigrant family’s rise from poverty, a Taiwan-by-way-of-Ohio version of the American dream, complete with military stint and going into public service “to give back.” Listening that first time, I thought: This will be tough.

My pitch was wonkier: In an era of rapid change, I would tell audiences, we had to get serious about our biggest problems, instead of pretending to be serious about them, which is what both parties had been doing for years. That required leadership not likely to come from insiders who had plied their trade in the conventional precincts of City Hall or Sacramento. The activists at the Democratic clubs seemed torn—I might have made an appealing pitch and many liked my radio show, but my role as the “center” on it was suspicious, doubts I tried to assuage by reminding them that “the ‘center’ in L.A. is practically a Marxist in the rest of the country.”

Still, with a public record that topped a million published words over two decades, I was who I was. There was no scope for electoral reinvention. Heck, this primary might have been the only one in the country where a candidate got so beat up for daring to criticize National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. In forum after forum, my rivals gave the party activists what they wanted—Snowden was a hero, the NSA was evil, take it from there. Maybe they even believed that.

I tried anyway. I would start with my commitment to privacy. Mattis taught me always to lead with values before getting into policy, a key lesson in my evolution from commentator to candidate. It’s what Bill Clinton always did. “Don’t be a pundit in your own race,” Mattis coached. “People don’t want analysis—they want a leader.” You’d think that after years of doing so much of my work in public, I would know how to talk to people. But I didn’t; or not in this role, at least. With practice, I got better, but when I went into my NSA spiel about how I believe “we still live in a dangerous world,” I would often hear catcalls.

IV.

Days after that first candidate forum, I was on the beach in a tie doing yoga while talking schools. And standing in the shovel of a moving backhoe to show I would “do whatever it takes to get the economy moving.”

The Human Soundbite | "Being 'on message' with the press called on a similar pragmatic readiness to be dull," Miller writes—like giving a reporter a dozen versions of the same planned soundbite, even though "he was only going to use three seconds of a five-minute interview; I was trying to make it the three we wanted." | Photos courtesy of Matt Miller

It was April 18, and Mattis had me on a 10-hour shoot for our TV ad. Thirty-second ads, I realized, are like sonnets or haikus. Time is so tight—the script ran a mere 85 words—that every moment counts. Of all the ego-nourishing and ego-deflating experiences on the stump, only filming your own ad offers a taste of what it must feel like to be the star of a TV show. I loved every minute of it.

Once the ad was blanketing Westside cable TV systems, courtesy of our $250,000 buy, folks stopped me on the street daily to say how much they loved it—something I was warned by veteran pols would lead me to overestimate the impact of TV versus the targeted direct mail program that was the heart of our strategy. While I’ll confess it was a treat for a longtime radio guy to suddenly have total strangers recognize me from the ad, I managed to separate vanity from vote-getting; as we neared the home stretch, I even moved money budgeted for cable to squeeze out three extra mail pieces, convinced that they did more for the cause.

On April 27, all 18 candidates showed up for a forum at University Synagogue in Brentwood. It was the marquee encounter of the race. It also felt a little silly. With so many people onstage, there were no meaningful exchanges, only two hours of talking points punctuated by a lightning round of questions.

Carr, the GOP prosecutor, came across well, though he did his best to avoid mentioning he was a Republican. A fringe candidate mesmerized the crowd with an impassioned plea to stop the cellphone industry from irradiating us all. Then there was Marianne. Her raucous supporters packed the house; we’d heard her base was the yoga studios in Venice, and her folks looked both fit and spiritually elevated in white shirts bearing her campaign’s logo. She talked about the dismantling of democracy and the need for “a people’s interruption.”

When my turn came, I went for humor. “So a rabbi and 18 candidates walk into a bar,” I began, getting the laugh I had hoped for.

The next Thursday, May 1, I slept in, telling our team I needed the rest. At 8:30, I reached for my phone on the nightstand and saw the world had turned. I ran to get the paper in the driveway and rifled to the editorial page. It was real! “Matt Miller for Congress,” the headline read. The L.A. Times had endorsed me. “Either Greuel or Lieu would be a serviceable member of Congress,” the Times opined, “but Waxman’s legacy sets a higher bar.” Most of us had courted Waxman directly, of course, but he had decided not to weigh in. (I had to laugh, though, when the first thing he brought up in our meeting was a perceived diss I had apparently directed at him in a New Republic article I wrote … in 1996!). With Henry sitting the primary out, the Times mattered even more. I had felt my hour-long interview with the paper’s editorial board had gone well, but there was no way to know how they would come down. Now they were calling me the candidate of change.

Wow, I thought. They’d practically written the rest of our mail campaign. And the timing was a gift. By doing it May 1, they might actually influence the outcome. Our team was ecstatic. Congratulations poured in. “Your first $500,000 was from people who love you,” said Jack Weiss, a former city council member and a kitchen cabinet confidant. “Your next $500,000 will be from people who think you’re going to be their congressman.” The tectonic plates had shifted. But was it enough?

***

The next few weeks we pushed even harder. Stan joked that we ought to tattoo the paper’s endorsement on my forehead, and from then on, the L.A. Times was seldom far from my lips. The endorsement put our media and fundraising on steroids, work that increasingly required an epic appetite for repetition. One day, while sitting in traffic between meetings, I left 10 virtually identical voicemails for potential donors, each nearly two minutes in length, and each performed with the requisite conviction, spontaneity and touch of humor in just the same spots.

Being “on message” with the press called on a similar pragmatic readiness to be dull. The day after the endorsement, I gave a local CBS reporter a dozen versions of the same planned soundbite. We both knew what I was doing and why. He was only going to use three seconds of a five-minute interview; I was trying to make it the three we wanted. Soon we were sharing a complicit shrug that basically said, “Isn’t it weird that it has to be this way?”

In the campaign’s closing weeks, I ordered up a cheapie $4,000 survey to see if there was reason to tweak our plan. The progress we’d made was tangible. My ID among Democratic voters had risen to 61 percent, and that was before half our mail pushing the Times’ nod had hit. When we asked folks to factor in the paper’s endorsement, we showed Ted at 18, Elan at 17, Wendy down to 15, me at 12 and Marianne at 9. I was 3 points behind Wendy with 14 days to go and 17 percent of voters still undecided! Wendy and Ted could still take each other down further. And one fact leaped off the page: If you added Marianne and me together, the vote for “change” beat either of the status quo candidates.

There was only one thing to do. I had to try.

At 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 25, I walked into a restaurant in Brentwood where Marianne was finishing up lunch. We traded small talk about our daughters and how we had grown to respect each other. Then I got to the point.

“We just did a poll,” I said. I pulled out a page from our printout so she would know it was real. She took it in. She didn’t like the “9” next to her name.

“You’re here to ask me if I’ll drop out and endorse you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I had a feeling that’s what this was about. Why shouldn’t I be asking you the same thing?”

Stan joked that we ought to tattoo the paper’s endorsement on my forehead, and from then on, the L.A. Times was seldom far from my lips.

That’s fair, I said. We went back and forth civilly. I admired Marianne. Self-made. Smart. She was on her way to spending $1.9 million, including $400,000 of her own money. Between the two of us, I didn’t think she could win, though. My numbers were rising, and I thought I had a chance. But she was determined to see it through.

So was I. I had caught the bug, and I kept on raising money right up until the end, even with our cable TV and mail program fully paid up. One day, as I was sitting on our patio, it occurred to me why. We had stereo speakers high on the wall outside, and birds had built nests wedged between the speakers and the house. I had seen birds bringing twigs to the nests and wondered, “How do they know how to do that?” I supposed they were just hard-wired that way. I realized I knew the feeling. When I had a spare hour in those closing days, I instinctively pulled up The Tracker and called or emailed donors. It was second nature now. Like the birds. I raise money, I thought. It’s what I do.

On primary day in June, there was little to be done. Mattis said consultants favor military analogies in such moments: “The missiles are in the air.” Still, I ran around with Jody and Amelia trying to hustle votes, knowing elections can turn on a handful. All day, I had the strangest feeling. Either I would finish in the top two and be launched toward a different life; or I would lose, and find my way back to my old one. My fate was in the hands of 100,000 people I didn’t know.

There were hugs and toasts at the deli where our team gathered for dinner. But a congressional primary isn’t like a presidential race—CNN doesn’t call it when the polls close at 8. The final results wouldn’t come in until the wee hours. Around 3 a.m., I was home in bed in the dark with my computer, hitting refresh on the county registrar’s website every few minutes, as hope finally gave way to disappointment.

The Chosen One | As Miller and his 17 competitors faced off in 10 debate forums, he got a piece of good news: the L.A. Times endorsement. One aide joked that he should tattoo the paper's message on his forehead. On the campaign's final day, Miller and his wife, Jody, ran around the district drumming up votes. | Photos courtesy of Matt Miller

V.

As Ed Koch once quipped after a loss, “The people have spoken … and now they must be punished.”

I was kidding when I cited the former New York mayor in my note to supporters the next day, but it was a great line. All told, 108,646 votes were cast, a turnout of 23 percent, pathetic but pretty much as expected. Elan Carr and Ted Lieu were moving on to the general with 21.6 and 18.8 percent respectively. Wendy got 16.6 percent. Marianne beat me by 1,330 votes, coming in at 13.2 percent to my 12. In the end, there was too little time, too steep a hill and too crowded a field for a first-time candidate to make it through. Maybe if I’d had a year to work it. Maybe if I’d had $2 million of my own money to put in. Maybe, maybe, maybe. (Poor Wendy’s polls apparently had her winning—she had left me a cheery voicemail on Election Day at 5 p.m. saying what a great campaign I’d run, clearly a prelude to asking for my endorsement the next day.)

There were loose ends to tie up, and people to thank. It would be hard to do justice to the gratitude I felt for the hundreds of friends, family, donors, volunteers and other cheerleaders and helpers who stood with us. Politicians who reached out to say I had fought the good fight seemed to treat me differently now, because I knew. Jody and I were going away to decompress and get reacquainted; as she put it, “the marriage won.”

I went to the village in Pacific Palisades to run errands. I could tell from their glances that people recognized me; the name ID was definitely up, I thought, fruitlessly. Some folks came over and offered warm words or consolation. But otherwise, life felt oddly normal. I walked my grocery cart through the aisles without any angles or ambitions. I didn’t need to be “on.” I was no longer seeking my neighbors’ money, or smiles, or approval, or votes. I wondered how long it would be before I knew whether a taste like this whets the appetite—or kills it.