David Kochel battles cancer, Trump and a divided GOP

Before he cast his first vote, let alone began ushering presidential candidates along the road to the White House, David Kochel grew up a scrawny, asthmatic kid in small-town Iowa.

But he was feisty from the start.

He stood all of 5 feet tall and weighed 92 pounds sopping wet as a high school freshman but wrestled up in the 98-pound bracket. He was too slight to plow through brick-solid football linebackers, too short to soar to the hoop for a slam dunk. He wouldn’t reach his adult height of 6 feet for another few years. Yet he crouched, braced himself and stepped onto the wrestling mat.

Today, Kochel, 52, is one of Iowa’s best known, most respected and often feared Republican political operatives. He worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential bids in 2008 and 2012 and helped Joni Ernst become the first Iowa woman elected to the Senate, part of a political resume that stretches back to 1984.

His scrappy, competitive nature has served him well throughout his career, especially in the last year, when he was hired as chief strategist for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s national presidential campaign, only to see a famous political pedigree and a man he admired get steamrolled by the Donald Trump train. And amid that professional debacle, he weathered his second divorce and a fight for his life against the big C — cancer.

“It’s just like everything decided to come at one time,” Duncan, Kochel’s oldest son, said of his dad’s harsh year. “There was no preparing for it. It just kind of all piled on.”

Most of Kochel’s life has been defined by rhetorical battle, one piece of partisan mail or TV sound bite at a time.

“It does sort of teach you to just stick with it,” Kochel said, “and keep driving toward the goal.”

He has learned to persevere, hit back, push forward.

So in the wake of his cancer diagnosis last fall, Kochel wrote an opening salvo on the Caring Bridge blog where he chronicles his treatment. The paragraph was juiced with all the venom of a seasoned strategist eager to crush his opponent.

"As for you, Leukemia, here is my message to you: I'm not just going to beat you, I'm going utterly humiliate you. You're going to be sorry. I'll burn your villages and your towns, and I'll embarrass you in front of everyone you care about. I'll smash you into pieces, and me and my friends will bury your dead parts across the seven continents. You'll never want to try me again. I promise. And when I'm bombing down the mountain at Vail next year on my new Burton snowboard — I'll let out a war whoop you'll hear from your graves."

Decades of political struggle by some measure helped vulcanize him when it came time to face cancer.

“Some people might feel defeated by it,” Kochel said of his reaction to the diagnosis. “I didn’t. I felt energized to just go into the fight. And maybe politics prepares you a little bit for that because you're used to bare-knuckled brawling."

As Kochel's body continues to stave off leukemia, he's watching with dismay as Trump careens toward Election Day and along the way bitterly divides the party to which Kochel has devoted his career.

Yet Kochel is healthy enough to spend the fall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. There, he will help dissect a 2016 campaign that, had it been a Hollywood script, might fit among the oeuvre of Mel Brooks or Seth Rogen.

“I think this election will be one of the most studied in my lifetime,” Kochel said. “There is so much going on in both parties.”

Prefers to campaign, not govern

Kochel grew up the youngest of three kids. His parents divorced when he was 8, and he followed his mother’s job from his native Story City to nearby Boone.

He paid his way through college at Iowa State University in fits and starts, taking time off to work on campaigns and effectively earn a real-world master’s in politics before he finished his undergraduate degree.

He served as executive director of the Republican parties in Iowa and Michigan before drifting into corporate work with a public relations and lobbying firm based in Washington, D.C.

But campaigns are where his heart is. At the start of 2002, he launched Redwave Communications, a company that represented his “recommitment” to working in politics.

He loves language and persuasion and the fast-paced churn of technological innovation amid the tidy narrative arc of a contest capped with a vote.

“He can chisel the finest points of a message” to perfection, said Tim Albrecht, a fellow Republican operative in Iowa and former spokesman for Gov. Terry Branstad. Albrecht has worked for and alongside Kochel and also enlisted him as a groomsman in his wedding seven years ago.

Even someone who arguably is Kochel’s polar opposite in Iowa, Democratic strategist Jeff Link, agrees.

“He does not just sort of repeat the trite expressions and talking points,” Link said of the man he jokingly calls his “frenemy.” “He’s really thoughtful and quick. And, you know, just puts a little more craft into it than a lot of people in the business.”

Kochel never has wanted to be the candidate or a politician himself, although he admires the public servants for whom he works. He would rather comb through poll data to find a path to victory than struggle to push bills through a legislature or Congress.

He’s also a lifelong musician who has played drums off and on in the Sonny Humbucker band — the guy behind the kit who keeps the rest of the crew firmly locked in the groove.

“I don’t have much interest in policy in terms of the sausage making of it all,” he said.

But then cancer doesn’t care what Kochel or anybody else prefers.

Life shifts with breathtaking quickness

Kochel announced in January 2015 that after much “soul searching and election forecasting” he had joined the Bush team. He signed on as a senior adviser with the Right to Rise political action committee pending the official campaign launch.

It was a shock to the Beltway at the time due to Kochel’s deep history with Romney — seen as one more sign that the former Massachusetts governor was unlikely to pursue a third presidential bid.

By fall the tea leaves of the crowded Republican field were murky but increasingly troubling for establishment candidates. Trump had risen in the polls, and Ben Carson was enjoying a brief surge.

The New York Times reported in September that Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker “have lost the most support by far since delivering what many analysts called lackluster performances in the August debate.”

Kochel and his colleagues at the time still believed that whatever anti-establishment sentiment they faced could be countered by Bush’s superior organization, thorough and thoughtful policy positions, and the sheer firepower of the well-funded PAC.

Meanwhile, Kochel’s own flagging energy seemed to be a physical manifestation of the campaign's doldrums.

Kochel’s swollen lymph nodes led to an initial misdiagnosis of tonsillitis. He was treated with antibiotics. Doctors ruled out mono and other viruses. By early October, he was scheduled for a biopsy in Des Moines.

Bush and the campaign staff spent a week in Iowa, and staffers gathered for a reception at Star Bar on the night of Thursday, Oct. 8.

Uncharacteristically, Kochel left early after a glass of wine.

He had trouble sleeping. His stomach was distended. He was short of breath.

The next morning when he glanced in the mirror, he was horrified to see that his tongue was black.

He phoned his doctor’s office, and the assistant told him to go directly to the hospital.

His blood pressure was 220 over 125. He was bloated with an extra 10 pounds of water weight. His kidneys were failing.

He didn’t realize it at the time, but what Kochel felt was his body “coming to a grinding halt.”

A bone marrow aspiration Oct. 10 led to the diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Kochel said that it was “breathtaking the quickness with which my life shifted gears.”

In an instant, concerns over poll numbers evaporated.

“The first thing I thought of was my kids,” he said.

Kochel is father to three boys from his first marriage: Duncan, 23, in the middle of his college career at Iowa State; Sawyer, 21, in the Marines; and Mason, 15, a sophomore at Roosevelt High School.

“Knowing my dad,” Duncan said, “he was really reassuring from the get-go that cancer picked the wrong person.”

Kochel’s spirits also were buoyed by the outpouring of goodwill from friends and acquaintances of every political persuasion who visited him in the hospital, including the governor and lieutenant governor.

By Monday morning, Kochel already was in a familiar routine: providing insight, analysis and up-to-the-minute reporting — this time on his medical condition rather than campaign diagnostics.

Among the readers was one of Kochel’s childhood friends, Tim Rasmussen of Ames, a member of the city’s school board who also runs a carpet store. He and Kochel have known each other since their high school days at the roller rink and freshman math class at ISU.

Even then, as the college friends argued issues, Kochel was “good at spinning the conversation to represent an ideology or a candidate in the best light possible,” Rasmussen said.

Although a runner, Rasmussen hadn't planned to join the IMT Des Moines Marathon that October. Without training, he took to the road on behalf of Kochel.

This was when Kochel had been laid low by his initial round of chemotherapy. That Sunday, Oct. 18, he wrapped himself in a blanket and shuffled several blocks north of his home to the corner of Grand Avenue and 37th Street to watch the runners stream by.

“I was glad that I could even just walk up there,” Kochel said.

Rasmussen rounded a corner, spotted his friend and veered to the side of the road to wrap him in a big hug.

'This was a grievance market'

A weaker Kochel continued to work a “light” schedule over phone and email of 30 or 40 hours per week. He sometimes conducted conference calls while tethered to a chemo drip.

He remained a restless political animal, but his orbit was restrained largely to hospital rooms in Des Moines and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. He hasn’t returned to Miami, the base of Bush's operations, since his diagnosis.

At a certain point, he felt like a mascot to the campaign. He was “someone who could come in and make people feel good about things because of what I was going through,” and serve as a reminder of stakes more serious than the outcome of an election.

Keep in mind that this is a guy who had built a political brand of shrewd ruthlessness, with shouting matches and angry critics strewn along his path. I once heard him growl when merely shown the photo of a former rival candidate.

At a Bush donor meeting in Houston in November — with his hair thinning and Bushes No. 41 and 43 both in attendance — a mellowed Kochel received a standing ovation when introduced, a moment that brought tears to his eyes.

But such sweet, reassuring interludes were sparse in an increasingly tough campaign.

"You can say we should’ve been pounding the table and more Trump-like in the heat of the rhetoric," Kochel said of his candidate, whom Trump needled as "low energy." "But that's not who Jeb was."

Kochel acknowledges that the campaign faced other challenges: Bush struggled to connect with voters, he had no natural base to rely on, and the centrist lane was clogged with Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Chris Christie.

But ultimately, Kochel said, “This was a grievance market, and (Bush is) not a grievance candidate.”

Yet, after Bush finished sixth in Iowa, there was a “sliver of light in New Hampshire.”

At a rally in Bedford, just before the primary vote there, Bush spoke to an overflow crowd. His mother, former first lady Barbara Bush, made a campaign swing to a rapturous reception. That weekend felt like an uplift.

Kochel, on a temporary reprieve from chemo, made the trip to New Hampshire and still remembers a particular cable TV interview.

"Somebody shot a picture of me from the side," he said. "I see this sort of white hair coming in — the first time I had seen hair since I started chemo in October."

But Bush would manage only fourth place in the Granite State. He dropped out of the race in South Carolina while Kochel was back in the cancer ward in Houston.

“I was unable to do anything," he said. "I couldn’t even be in the room to hug it out with other members of the staff. That felt pretty isolated.”

'A cancer on conservatism'

A Trump defeat wouldn't feel like vindication for him, Kochel said, even though since the end of the Bush campaign, he with characteristic glee has taken to Twitter as a frequent Trump critic, while also penning regular commentary for The Wall Street Journal.

“Rick Perry did call him a cancer on conservatism,” Kochel said of Trump.

Kochel himself has compared Trump's shifting stances to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Kochel was criticized for body shaming in a particularly snarky tweet that he fired off Feb. 26 in the wake of Christie's endorsement of Trump: "New lesson kids: sometimes, the best option for the fat kid is to just hand his lunch money over to the bully! #TrumpChristie2016"

But how can he be happy, Kochel said, to see his party in such disarray? The Republican schism is not being resolved by this election, he said. The evangelical, Ted Cruz wing of the party can continue to insist that only a staunchly principled social conservative will rally voters, while fiscal moderates maintain that only a more centrist candidate can win the White House in an increasingly multicultural America.

But with Trump as the nominee, Kochel said, “The two sides of the party that have been having somewhat of a binary argument don’t get either one of their questions solved.”

Kochel admits that he gets criticized for too often agreeing with Democrats. He has almost more nemeses among Republicans.

In recent years, he has been increasingly willing to stake out a more liberal stance on social issues. Three years ago, for instance, he penned an op-ed for The Des Moines Register that implored his fellow conservatives to embrace same-sex marriage.

“Young people are not going to roll back social progress on things like marriage," Kochel said.

Yet cancer has shown him, Kochel said, that even in the vicious arena of politics, friendships endure the ideological disputes.

While in the hospital he received good wishes from Bob Vander Plaats, the social conservative icon and Cruz supporter.

Earlier this year Kochel co-founded RABA (Red America Blue America) Research with a bipartisan team that includes Albrecht but also Brad Anderson, former state director for Barack Obama, and John Davis, who was Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley's chief of staff, whom Kochel fought in the bitter Senate race won by Ernst.

Getting revenge on the 'Red Devil'

Kochel has endured the worst of the 28-day cycles of maintenance chemo (30 months’ worth) that he consumes mostly in pill form. He will return to Houston briefly in November for another intravenous treatment.

But for now he's already at Harvard to prepare to lead weekly sessions in which undergraduate and graduate students and faculty will benefit from his experience in "operational politics and what it was like to live through 2016."

Before he left Iowa, he took time to enjoy Ernst's second annual Roast & Ride summer motorcycle rally. Kochel had neglected his Iowa-made 2006 Victory Kingpin motorcycle for a couple of years. The hunk of black metal and chrome had languished in his garage. So he had it rebuilt and repainted a deep red. He ordered a new license plate: REDDVL.

The refurbished bike is a tribute to Kochel's least favorite and most draining chemo drug, Doxorubicin, commonly known among cancer patients as "the red devil."

“For about eight months, the red devil, the chemo drug, was riding me,” he said. “And now I’m riding it. So it’s a way to turn the tables and to feel empowered.”

Kochel is considered in remission, but he won't be considered cured until he's cancer-free for five years.

Kochel didn't have to think twice when he chose to fight cancer with every fiber of his being. But who will he vote for Nov. 8, confronted by what he deems “two bad choices”?

He’s unsure.

“I could write in a Republican,” he said. “I could vote for (Libertarian Party nominee) Gary Johnson, I suppose. I haven’t really made a decision.”

Regardless of the general election result, Kochel could finish the year having kept cancer at bay. He might even see his beloved Chicago Cubs win the World Series.

If that comes to pass I daresay he’ll look back and say that, on balance, 2016 turned out just fine.

One day soon, we may hear a war whoop echoing from the Rocky Mountains as he is bombing down on a snowboard.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson) and on Snapchat (@kylemunsoniowa).