Saving Graces (28 page)

We’d just keep working. It would happen, or it wouldn’t.

We didn’t become panicked. In fact, the polls released a lot of pressure. To give you an idea of the relaxed mood, the morning after Jennifer’s birthday, Emma Claire kept interrupting John’s preparation for an interview. It might have been fine, except that C-SPAN was filming the preparation. Emma Claire wanted to know what Jennifer’s husband had gotten her for her birthday. “I don’t have a husband,” Jennifer said. “What did your boyfriend get you?” “I don’t have a boyfriend.” “Why,” Emma Claire wanted to know, “doesn’t anyone like you?” It was all caught by the C-SPAN camera, and Jennifer’s love life, or absence thereof, was shown nationwide on
Road to the White House
, like a very targeted personal ad: WFS—Democrat.

And it turned out that Dick Gephardt was right: things can change in Iowa quickly. After Christmas, the crowds at John’s events started to increase. We didn’t have any money for polling, but we would hear from other campaigns that John’s numbers were creeping up. John had tried to set a positive tone in his dialogue with other Democrats—no reason for them to stand in a circle and shoot at one another, he figured. And his decision had kept the other campaigns fairly positive. But as the caucus date—Monday, January 19th—approached, negative campaigning started. Dean was losing ground, and he struck out. Gephardt hit back. We would come into the hotel room, turn on the television in those last days, and shake our heads. If this works, John loses. But it didn’t seem like John was losing. The crowds were bigger and bigger for each event.

On January 6th, the
Des Moines Register
held a candidate debate. It was enormously important. Caucus-goers would be polled a little more than two weeks later, and more than three-quarters of them watched more than half the debate. It was a very good debate for John. Anyone could see his strength, his personality, his warmth. Everything came through. He had shut down his advisors thirty seconds after they began proposing sound bites for the
Register
debate.
I don’t want lines
, he said,
I just want to know facts. Give me the facts and I’ll go out there and be myself
. And he was great.

The following weekend I was back with the children in Washington when very late on Saturday night John called. “You are talking,” he said, the excitement in his voice unrestrained, “to the endorsee of the
Des Moines Register
!” The editorial in the most important newspaper in the state was titled “John Edwards—His Time Is Now.” We’d been telling ourselves for so long that John was the voice we needed, and finally—I’ll be honest with you—here it was, the first really objective positive thing that had happened. I am surprised I didn’t wake the children, I was so excited. And in New Hampshire the staff celebrated, too, Colin buying wine for the staffers of other campaigns who were at Cotton with them getting the news on their BlackBerrys as he and Meghan were cheering.

We weren’t doing polling but Kerry was, and he knew the race was no longer between Dean and Gephardt; it was between Kerry and Edwards. Dean didn’t do well in the debate, but it didn’t matter, really, as the tide had shifted. And though we had no polling that confirmed the shift, we could tell because of the crowds. The crowds that had been coming to John’s events on word of mouth about his message increased geometrically after the
Register
endorsement. The places Sam had selected weeks before for events were now too small. The crowds that in December had been thirty, forty, maybe fifty people, went to two and then three hundred. I was campaigning separately with a two-man staff, driver Tommy Vietor and navigator Brad Anderson. We would be in a library with thirty people and hear that John had five hundred. We were stuck outside the town hall in the snow in Centreville—Tommy having misplaced the car keys—hearing that there were seven hundred people at the next rally. No one had seen anything like it—three hundred to seven hundred, then one thousand, then fifteen hundred.

There would be overflow crowds, and John would give two speeches instead of one at each stop. I still had a separate schedule, and I was in Clinton, Iowa, a river city, at a Democratic hall, talking to about forty people, when Brad got a call about a new poll—John had passed Dean. We stood there in the muddy parking lot and the freezing cold, remembering all the events that had disappointed us for months and how incredible the moment was. We headed then to join John at the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, where he was to have a rally. I sat in the backseat, eating a tangerine, happy that people were finally seeing in John what I saw, when I noticed that the tangerine juice had made a huge stain on the front of my shirt. There was no way to cover it up. Can we find a place with Shout Wipes? Tommy pulled into a discount grocery store where items are sold in case lots. No Shout Wipes. Iowa is a beautiful state, but it is not the shopping capital of the country. We drove on, looking for a clothing store, a regular grocery, anything—no luck. We were getting close to the museum. Then I spotted a Goodwill retail store. Stop here, I said. Brad and Tommy looked at each other. Here? Yes, stop here. I went in the Goodwill and bought a sweater set for three dollars. I put it on in the dressing room and wore it to that event.

I am so glad I didn’t miss that event. It was in a square room with a platform for John. The room had very high ceilings, and Edwards signs covered the walls. The line outside the double doors at the hallway was backed up for twenty feet as people tried to get into an already full room. The press was crowded against the walls as more people poured in. At the far corner of the room open double doors led outdoors. There, people were standing in the snow, jumping up in the air periodically to see. I had been traveling in my own little polite and orderly world—I’d go to a library and people were nice to me and then I would go on to the next event. This was my first taste of what John was living through. After John spoke, people were tearing the signs off of the walls. They were handing up anything that could be signed—napkins, envelopes. Here’s the back of my deposit slip, sign that. They couldn’t get enough, and John couldn’t get out. As Dick Gephardt had predicted, lots had changed in Iowa.

The following Sunday when the
Des Moines Register
headline was “Kerry, Edwards Surge,” the world, which was already fireworks all the time, erupted further. John had a staff meeting to thank these incredible Iowa staff—young people who had stuck in there through months of single digits in the polls. The campaign office was a converted auto parts store with one working bathroom—on good days—right on a major thoroughfare. We could hardly get in because there were so many TV cameras. Every press person you’ve ever heard of was there. Tom Brokaw knocking over George Stephanopoulos, Kelly O’Donnell screaming for her cameraperson, Tim Russert waving at the children. I stepped back to look at the chaos, and a polite Japanese reporter came with his cameraman. “Why,” he said, “do you support Senator Edwards?” “Well, I have lots of reasons, but one of them is that I am married to him.” Surprised, he asked a question or two more, then ended by saying, “
Domo–arigato
.” To which I responded, “
Do–itashimashite
.” One word in Japanese generated another five minutes of questions.

The Iowa caucuses take place on a Monday evening. It makes the Monday important and useless at the same time. Basically, you have done all that you can do, and the day is often spent making certain your supporters will turn out that night. We had a morning of television scheduled in which we would do that reminding. John got up first, showered, and left for a series of interviews. My first appearance would be on the
Today
show, an interview with Campbell Brown. I showered and dressed. I had lost my hairbrush the previous day, but we had stopped at a drugstore and, from a meager selection, I hurriedly picked the best replacement. And now I was standing in front of the mirror at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, drying my hair and trying to style it with this new brush. I reached around to the back of my head, wrapped the damp hair around the brush, and held it there while I aimed the dryer at the brush. And then, as I have done thousands of times, I tried to pull the brush away. It wouldn’t come. I put the dryer down and tried to work the hair loose from the brush with my fingers, but the brush was in the back of my head and I couldn’t see which way to work. Five minutes, then ten, and the brush was still there. I was alone and due downstairs soon. I called Jennifer, sure she could fix it, but she didn’t answer—she had gone with John and, during his interviews, had turned her phone off. I called Miles Lackey, John’s chief of staff, in his room. Hearing the alarm in my voice, he hurried down. Now, Miles grew up with only brothers, he was balding, and he hadn’t any notion how to help. He pulled and wrestled with the brush, but it did no good. Then I had another try, and he would BlackBerry Jennifer in panic. I couldn’t go on television with a hairbrush sticking out from the back of my head. Finally he spotted a fork, left over from a meal someone had eaten in our room the night before. He washed it and used the tines to pry the hair loose from the hairbrush. Every yank hurt, and every yank was bliss. Finally it was out. I combed my still-damp hair with John’s comb and hurried downstairs. With only a minute to spare, I fell into the seat opposite Campbell. I have no idea what I said or how I looked; I only know that I was no longer wearing a hairbrush.

Cate had exams at Princeton, so we spent most of caucus evening on the phone with her, reporting what Miles, Rob, David, Aaron, and Jennifer were hearing from the people in the field. And it looked good. John, who had been a distant fourth a few weeks earlier, was a close second in Iowa. We had heard, through one of Kerry’s field generals, that if the caucuses had been three days later, the places would have been reversed, so pronounced were the trends. But we were not unhappy. Dennis Kucinich called first, then Dick Gephardt, and then Howard Dean, all congratulating him. John called John Kerry to say, “Good race.” And then each of the candidates went out to speak. The great showing was John’s, but it also belonged to the Iowa staff. Rob Berntsen was the oldest person on the Iowa team, and he was thirty-two; most of them were in their early twenties, some were paid, some volunteered, and they worked every bit as hard when John’s numbers were at 5 percent as they did at the end. John’s speech was a tribute to them. But there was no rest. We left the stage and the state, and at 1:30
A.M
., in a hangar in Concord, New Hampshire, we had a rally.

By seven the next morning John was in front of a television camera again, about to be on the
Today
show. As he waited to be interviewed, through his earpiece he could hear Katie Couric and Matt Lauer talking about Howard Dean. John had no idea what they were talking about. John spoke in Des Moines and we went straight to the airport. We were probably the last people in America to hear about what came to be known as The Scream. I want to be clear: The Scream did us no good. We had always heard that two stories come out of Iowa, and what we wanted was for John to be one of them. If The Scream hadn’t happened, Kerry and John would have been the stories coming out of Iowa, since they had garnered 70 percent of the caucus-goers between them. Since it did happen, Kerry and The Scream were the stories. And there was no New Hampshire bump. All the might-have-beens.

We thought there might be a bump anyway. The crowds in New Hampshire that week rivaled the Iowa crowds. The locations again were too small, but I was traveling with John more, and I would take John’s overflow crowds and answer their questions in a warm-up town hall. One of his first post-Iowa town halls was in a high school gym. Glenn Close was traveling with us, entertaining the children with her Cruella De Vil persona from
101 Dalmations
and taking her not inconsiderable knowledge about health care to forums as John’s surrogate. She and I were crouched on the stage as John began, but Miles came and tapped us on the shoulder.
Could we go to the overflow room?

The overflow room was a whole other gym, and the bleachers there were filled with four or five hundred people. I saw Jonathan Alter, whom I admire greatly, come in. I memorized where he was sitting and then never looked there again. It was possible to look at Sandy Mucci like she was someone from my hometown and just talk to her. It was impossible to look at Jonathan Alter and use that same conceit. The first question I got asked was from a Lyndon LaRouche supporter about why we wouldn’t let LaRouche on the Democratic ballot. The crowd, tired of LaRouche supporters disrupting town halls, started booing the questioner. I asked them to stop. People can ask anything. And then I turned to her and said, Candidates don’t decide who is on the ballot, but if it had been up to me to decide, he wouldn’t be on the Democratic primary ballot—he’s not a Democrat. It set the tone for everything after that: there was no restriction on the questioning. Miles hadn’t actually seen me do a town hall, and when he came back in to see how I was doing, I was answering a question on North Korea. He listened and left. I’d be okay.