Saving Graces (26 page)

The result was long Saturdays when Bruce might bring a six-pack of beer and Gene and Tom would find comfortable chairs. I would sit at my desk, Robert would be at the table with his laptop open in front of him, Jonathan would come in late but get the last chair, and John and Miles, as the last ones into the room, would be left with the ottomans, and John’s speech on the economy would take shape. Nearly the same group reassembled on each subject, with Derek taking the lead when the discussion was foreign policy, and Robert again in charge on education. The emphasis in the domestic policy discussions was always the same: close the gaps in the country.

There were counterparts in John’s Senate office. John was on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and he was working on developing public service programs in high schools. Wade and Cate’s high school had a public service requirement: students had to complete one hundred hours of public service—twenty-five hours a year—or they would not graduate. I was really interested in the policy, and I kept asking Robert, John’s brilliant legislative director, about it. Robert would talk to people who were providing volunteer programs in different places, in order to figure out the parameters of the programs and how much it would cost. One day, when I was in the office, I went by to see Robert and ask how it was going. Robert answered that it turned out to cost about $2,000 a child to have a public service program. Whoa. I told him how the public service program works in our high school. One woman, a neighbor, Jane VanGraafeiland, runs the volunteer office. The PTA helps her out; I think she has even had paid assistance now and again. But the office really is Jane. Students who find it hard to schedule community service can do their volunteer work in Jane’s office, taking telephone calls from people who have public service opportunities, making cards about the opportunities and posting them on the boards for other students, and making the confirmation calls when students turn in the hours they have volunteered. Jane found opportunities around the school for kids who had a job after school and couldn’t manage volunteering except during study periods. The WELL offered lots of opportunities, from tutoring to planting to painting at the Learning Lab. The Senior Center across the street. The child care center in the nearby projects. There was plenty of need. And managing it all, one full-time employee for a school of two thousand students. I am reasonably certain Jane doesn’t make $4 million a year, which is what she would be making if the federal government were paying $2,000 for each child. We needed to go back to the drawing board. This was Robert’s baby and John’s, not mine, so I left him with that. As positive an idea as it is—instilling in young people the habit of community service—I am pretty sure it never became legislation, probably for more than one reason. One is politics. The well-meaning interest groups that have a vested interest in the $2,000-a-student programs are powerful. The second is politics. No potential Democratic presidential candidate would be allowed by a Republican-controlled Senate to have a significant legislative accomplishment while running. And, honestly, the opposite would have been true if Democrats controlled the Senate.

This was my role in the Senate office and in the campaign. We hadn’t been in Washington for long, so we knew what public schools were like, we knew how crowded the emergency room is in a small city, we knew about bridges that needed repair and response to hurricanes and the elimination of coastal wetlands. And we brought those experiences to the table when policies were being discussed. When Michael suggested a College for Everyone program, John insisted on a work requirement, not because of something he’d read, but because of what he himself had learned. “I unloaded UPS trucks. It was the hardest work I ever did. I swept the mill, cleaning around men who stood at looms for six, seven, eight hours straight. The easier jobs in the cushioned chairs in the offices? Those, I learned, were for college graduates. Work is good, it made me do my homework.” And the decision was made. It was all collaborative: policy and real life and all these voices, young and earnest, older, wiser. No one was ever ridiculed—I think I would have been first on the chopping block if that had been the practice. No one was ever out of order. So we got the best people had to offer, unfiltered.

As 2003 approached, there was a deadline of sorts: money raised in 2003 could be matched by federal funds, and if he wanted to run, an early 2003 announcement made the most economic sense. Andrew Young in Raleigh arranged for office space, should it be needed, and phone service, should it be needed, and a website, should it be needed, all to be available at the first of the year. Prospective staff, John Robinson for example, did not take other jobs, waiting to see what John would decide. Over Christmas, the staff called our house at least hourly. No, no decision yet. After Christmas, John and I talked. He had what he needed from other people. He needed now to consult himself, away from them, away from me, away from the children. He went to the beach for three days. Still the staff called hourly. Still my answer was the same. I wanted to end their misery, but I honestly didn’t know. This was the presidency; I wanted him to ask himself every question he needed to about whether he was doing this for the right reasons, about whether he knew he could do this, because in the end it would be a solitary job. And I had told him I was with him whatever he decided.

CHAPTER 11

AMERICA, THE PRIMARIES

The Pitch

T
HERE CAN’T BE
that much suspense in this: John decided to run. The announcement was January 2nd, so that January 1st we could first tell our friends, who gathered that day in our backyard. The press assembled on the street surely knew what John had decided when the cheer went up, but the public announcement was the next morning on the
Today
show. Our dining room became a television studio so that John could announce his decision and I could sit by him in support. After the show, John spoke to the press. I looked around the kitchen, and the staff had done what Wade’s friends had always done: they had eaten everything remotely edible. My car was parked next door, so I slipped out and drove to Panera to get more breakfast food. As I walked out with two large bags, a woman nicely helped me with the door. When I turned around to thank her, she had this look on her face:
Didn’t I just see you on
…
?
Yes, I smiled back.

I made rules for the campaign. I didn’t want the staff to ask John to do what he wouldn’t normally do. Yes, he could walk to the creek with the children—he did that all the time. He could make pancakes, his Saturday-morning specialty, but he couldn’t flip them on a stage. He doesn’t wear hats much, so no hats. And—there was never any argument about this one—no costumes. Win as John or lose as John. That was sometimes easier said than done. Preparation for candidate debates was the worst, as some smart someone would come up with a line they particularly liked—and usually John liked it, too. Bruce Reed and Harrison Hickman were particularly clever. But then the whole debate preparation would be about how to get that line in. The experienced voices said that the after-debate analysis would turn on a sound bite, so John tried to use the chosen line. It wasn’t until he stopped trying and was just John that he finally saw his support grow. It was a lesson he would not forget. Politics is not so different from other interaction; we sense the genuine and reject the manufactured, even when the manufactured is cleverly packaged.

The calendar was simple. In 2003, John would raise money and campaign in Iowa, where the first caucuses would be held, New Hampshire, where the first primaries would be held, and a collection of states—South Carolina, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona—that would follow. At first he did most of it on his own; I stayed home with the children. Soon enough it would be my turn.

From the pieces I picked up listening to John and sitting in the policy meetings in our library, I wrote my first stump speech. My baptism would be at the Concord, New Hampshire, home of Tenley and Peter Callahan and their precious, athletic children, who would come in and out as I spoke—children were the only things for which I was prepared. It was an inauspicious start—David Ginsberg spilled coffee all over my fortunately dark-colored pants suit on the plane. C-SPAN, unable to get permission from the campaigns to cover the candidates’ fund-raising events, covered the Callahan house party. My very first campaign event, and I had a camera on me as I spoke, and a huge microphone on a long boom followed me as I moved around the room meeting Tenley’s friends. My conversation about the Teletubbies? Caught on tape. And I am caught on tape again wishing that I had a Noo-noo, a vacuum-cleaner-shaped robot that would clean Teletubby spills and make Teletubby beds. When I gave my speech, I stood with my back literally against the wall of the Callahan kitchen and rattled through it at breakneck speed, all the while twisting the notecard on which I had written an outline around my index finger until, forming a perfect tube, it was useless as a speech aid. There was a woman there with whom I had gone to high school, and I could not convince even her to support John. It was two years away, she said. She would think about it.

The thing about terrible is that there is only one direction to go from there. And lovely Tenley did not jettison me or, more importantly, John. Each time I did a house party, or later a town hall, I learned something about myself—and I learned something about the people with whom I was speaking. There are a lot of ways to have this experience, but I only knew one, the one I had learned growing up—open up, let them in, and find out what we share. You didn’t have to be perfect, but you had to be open. But that made something political into something personal. I wanted Chris Black or Rob Nordgren or Deb Nelson to support John because I liked them and I knew they shared something important with John and with me. As with Paul Robitaille in Gorham, who grew up like John did, in a mill town in which the mills were closing, I fought for the connections and then I fought for the support, and I was disappointed when one did not lead to the other.

I made friends in New Hampshire: Kristin, Tenley, Lucy Hodder—at whose house I had my very worst house party—and Pam Yorkin, women who were simply fun to be with. And it wasn’t just voters, it was staff, too. Meghan Scott, young enough to be my daughter, became a friend, as did our state director, Caroline McCarley—you have to like anyone who, as a child, would name her dog Hugo Black. And it was at a luncheon honoring Caroline that I met Colin Van Ostern. We would eventually convince Colin to be John’s press secretary in New Hampshire. I knew immediately on meeting him that this was a young man to whom I could feel close. I was right. After all the primaries were nearly over, as Colin and I walked different directions to get to our respective gates at the Buffalo airport, knowing that this was likely the last time we would do this, I was simply sad. Not sad for the coming end of the campaign, but sad that there was no excuse now for Colin to be a part of our lives. I was wrong, though: Colin is still a part of our lives. I still see him at reunion parties—yes, we have them—and talk to him on the phone. And Meghan and Jay Heidbrink. And Pete Cavanaugh, who returned to Georgetown University after the election. Pete would stop by our house or, if we weren’t home, leave notes on our car. I was used to a house full of young people, and in a sense that’s what I still had.

As much as I liked the people, New Hampshire was always a struggle politically. It made sense that it would be. Howard Dean was from Vermont, John Kerry was from Massachusetts. There wasn’t much oxygen left for other candidates. John was Sisyphus—everything we did was uphill. And sometimes it was a struggle because the campaign hadn’t done what we needed, which led to some frustrating visits. There was one ill-planned trip when more thought had been given to the press than to the event. I was to meet voters at Dusty’s, a diner in Claremont. We got there, and I met one supporter who wanted to say hello before he ran to an appointment. That was fine, I thought, until I moved into the room where I would “meet voters.” My schedule should have said “meet voter.” One elderly man, not always clear in what he said, was sitting at the table we’d reserved. And there were one television and two print reporters to capture this campaign low—or what I thought was a low until we left there and drove to a senior center to meet people during lunch, only to learn that we had mistimed it—it certainly wasn’t because I had dawdled at Dusty’s—and gotten there after lunch. With a print reporter still in tow, I spoke to the lone man there, who was sweeping the lunchroom.

The primary season was punctuated by candidate debates, and the first one was May 3rd in South Carolina. George Stephanopoulos, who moderated, immediately got John Kerry and Howard Dean to do what we knew their staffs had spent all week telling them not to do: they got in a spat. Dick Gephardt got in a plug for his health care plan. John got in his line in response—something about Enron. And in what seemed like minutes, it was over.

John and I left immediately after the debate. John was to speak the next day at the Kennedy Library in Boston, so the two of us took a chartered plane from Columbia to Logan Airport. As the pilots flew around a storm off the coast, we could see the skies light up. And in that vastness where the sky seemed alive and the heavens seemed open for a glimpse, we fell apart. It was Wade. It was how much he would have enjoyed all of this. It was how much we missed him. And it was the pressure of the moment, even with a decent performance behind him, that all came crashing in at once—and the illuminated sky was the perfect backdrop. We recovered, we always did. But the difficulty of talking to George Stephanopoulos or Tim Russert or Bob Schieffer will never compare with the difficulty of not talking to Wade.

In May 2003, I made my first solo trip to Iowa. We would always say that the people of Iowa were, at their core, so much like the people of North Carolina, and everyone assumed it was political rhetoric. It wasn’t. We felt at home in Iowa. Brad Anderson, Aaron Pickrell, and Kim Rubey, John’s Iowa press secretary, were with me when in Jim Larew’s packed office in Iowa City, I just talked, like talking to friends from home, except that I gave Kim a start when I said, in the intimate way you would say such a thing, “Can we go off the record for just a minute?” In politics there is no such thing as off the record. When you say it in front of press, you might as well be shining klieg lights on yourself and announcing,
Listen up, this could be good.
I don’t remember what I wanted to be off the record—maybe my comparison of John and George Bush’s athletic history. All I remember is that it wasn’t worthy of the newspaper, which made Kim very happy.

The summer of 2003, after countless Democratic dinners, forums, and debates, after dozens of polls in which John did not make the top one or two or three, our family took a two-week bus tour of Iowa and New Hampshire. In preparation, I bought the children a new round of play clothes to replace the ones with holes and stains, and myself something that was casual but—there is no other way to say this—First Lady–like. Needless to say, I had nothing like that in my closet. And I made copies of The Song Book.

Since I was in college I have been writing down the lyrics to songs. Before computers, I would take the lyrics down in shorthand, transcribe and type them onto notebook paper, and alphabetize them. Word processors made corrections easier, and then the Internet made the process almost effortless. The only qualification to get into the songbook is that I have to be able to sing it. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly is not, for example, included. Children’s songs, old rock-and-roll, folk songs, country, bluegrass, and swing-era songs—my favorites—are all included. The songbook now includes the lyrics to well over five thousand songs. It takes more than one large notebook to hold them, so the day before the trip, I sat in my study and, with the help of Marc Adelman and Elizabeth Nicholas—who were young enough to keep me from including every song Jo Stafford ever sang—I made an abridged version for the bus tour. Marc made a cover—which included a mock bus with all our photographs in the windows, the last window filled with his cat, Bootsy—and we made enough copies to pass it out on the bus. I was ready.

I would like to say that I made everyone sing. But you can’t actually make people sing, just like you can’t actually make children sleep. You can put the children in bed, and you can hand the staff member, supporter, reporter, or whomever a copy of the songbook and hope you will get cooperation. So that’s what I did. And we sang our way across Iowa, and then across New Hampshire. When Cate joined the bus trip a few days late, she looked at the stack of songbooks and said, “Oh my goodness, she’s doing it to you, too.” On family trips I was always the last one in the car. I would step in and then reach down and pull the songbook to my lap. “Not the songbook,” Wade and Cate would wail, and I would always say, “It’ll be fun. Where shall we start?” It was alphabetized. “How about J for John?”

And that’s what I did on the bus. I handed staffer Josh Brumberger the songbook, and good-naturedly—he is monumentally good-natured—he sang “How’d You Like To Spoon with Me?” though the boy was born in 1979 and the song was written in 1905. Hunter Pruette, who traveled with John, recording his speeches and getting his sodas, used his cell phone’s camera to secretly record Josh crooning, “Sit beneath an oak tree large and shady, call me little tootsy-wootsy baby.” Miles Lackey, who plays concert piano and reads three biographies of historical figures rather than one so his opinion will not be skewed by a single biographer’s point of view, could usually be convinced to sing only if we sang “Lemon Tree,” the old folk song. He had held the songbook in his lap through dozens of songs, but after we sang “Lemon Tree,” which has a limited range, he decided that would be the one we would sing. I couldn’t complain; I couldn’t get David Ginsberg to relent for even a single song. David, who had been with us longer than anyone, would simply sit there, his laptop propped on his knees, studying whatever it is that campaign staff study. John would constantly pick at him, teasing him, saying David’s strategies were the reason that John hadn’t surged in Iowa, and John gave him the nickname “Surge Protector,” which we use still whenever David is taking things too seriously.

John Wagner and Robert Willett, from our hometown paper, were the most agreeable members of the press when handed a songbook—although I think John mouthed more than he sang. Even mouthing, I gave him credit. Adam Nagourney of the
New York Times
wouldn’t even take the book. His interview with John was over; was “Good Night, Sweetheart, Well, It’s Time To Go” going to ruin his journalistic impartiality? A little aside here about the press. I liked the journalists. I admired what they did. They seemed to be a lot like me, so I did what I always do when I like someone—I would seek them out. Once in Des Moines, Jennifer Palmieri, our press secretary, organized a casual get-together. I sat at a table lined with reporters from television and newspapers and wire services. When the conversation died for a minute or two, I asked everyone what they would do if they had to do something other than what they were presently doing. It sounds like a Miss America question, right? Well, no one balked. Ron Fournier would be a policeman like his father. Dan Balz would be an architect. So, by the way, would I. I remember that late afternoon as one of the most pleasant—and normal—in the entire campaign. The next day, one of them asked John what he would be. A sports reporter, he said.