A Fighting Chance (39 page)

They stood at the podium, eleven-year-old Octavia on a box and seven-year-old Lavinia on a larger box, facing a crowd of more than three thousand people holding signs, shouting, and clapping. The girls smiled, and then Octavia said:

My brother, Atticus, is too little to be up here with us, so I’m talking for him, too. We are here to introduce our Gammy, Elizabeth Warren. She is running for the United States Senate because of us and because of all kids. We’re really proud of her.

The cheers for the girls were like those at a big family party—loud and enthusiastic. Lavinia had wanted to do cartwheels on the stage, but the space by the podium was narrow and I figured it would be way too dangerous, so she just waved. I came out on stage, gave both girls hugs, then launched into a speech about how families were getting pounded and it was time to take on Wall Street, time to take on Big Oil, time to fight back.

After the speech, I went backstage to wait. And wait, and wait, and wait some more. I think I was on my tenth game of Go Fish with Octavia and Lavinia by the time they called me back and announced the result: I had received more than 85 percent of the vote, meaning the primary process was over!

Now I was officially the Democrats’ choice and officially Scott Brown’s opponent. I knew the race was going to get even more intense over the next few months, but I understood that the endorsement I’d been given meant the people in this arena were ready to fight. I was ready, too.

During my speech, I had talked about Ted Kennedy, our party’s longtime champion in Massachusetts and in America. Later, riding home with Bruce and the kids, I thought about him again. I remembered the first time we’d met. I remembered his battered satchel, his enormous pride in Massachusetts as he looked out that twenty-fourth-floor window, his willingness to take on the long-odds fight for all the working families who were going broke. I leaned against the car’s window and thought about the election ahead and how I might have the chance to help working families, too. I couldn’t be Ted Kennedy, but at least I had a strong model for how to fight for what was right.

I pulled out my cell phone. I had saved a voice message from back when we were fighting for the consumer agency, and I’d listened to it off and on for years. It begins, “Oh, Elizabeth, uh, this is Ted Kennedy, just calling to thank you for your help.…” The message goes on, but I just wanted to hear the first part. I just wanted to hear his voice.

Getting Down to Business

As the summer went on, we still gathered in living rooms, but now we spilled into backyards and parks, cafés and bars.

Lots of bars, as a matter of fact.

Okay, that sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s not. Many times, in fact, I visited bars and insurance offices and all kinds of small businesses. Elizabeth Vale, who had helped us launch the CFPB, was now our champion for building business liaisons for the campaign. Over time, she hooked me up with tons of people who ran small businesses—restaurants and Internet start-ups, plumbers and home health care providers, florists and building contractors, landlords and dry cleaners. I met with fishermen in Gloucester, Scituate, and New Bedford to talk through the economics of their business. And yes, I met people who owned bars.

Some of these business owners were ready to support me. But others would say something like “I usually vote Republican because Republicans are pro-business.”

And I’d always get straight to the point: “Do you worry about how much you pay in taxes?”

“Sure.”

“So how much money do you have stashed in bank accounts in the Cayman Islands? How much intellectual property have you transferred to a foreign tax haven? How much of your income is shielded with depletion allowances?”

You can guess the response: None. None. None.

Then I would talk with these business owners about the ongoing battle over tax policy in America. A lot of it is couched in “big government vs. little government” or “pro-business vs. anti-business.” But I think most of that is a deliberate distraction so people don’t see the real battle. The critical question is: Who pays? Does everyone pay, or just the little guys?

For businesses, the real battle isn’t whether we need the government to invest in education and infrastructure and scientific research—businesses need all those investments. There’s nothing pro-business about crumbling roads and bridges or a power grid that can’t keep up. There’s nothing pro-business about cutting back on scientific research at a time when our businesses need innovation more than ever. There’s nothing pro-business about chopping education opportunities when workers need better training. To most people, it’s pretty obvious that businesses need government investments.

No, the real battle isn’t “pro-business vs. pro-government”; the real battle is whether everyone pays or just the little guys. Giant companies hire armies of lobbyists to craft custom-made tax loopholes. And it’s working: big corporations are paying an average tax of 12.6 percent of their profits, less than half of the advertised 35 percent corporate rate. Meanwhile, middle-class families and middle-size (and small) businesses are left to pick up the tab.

Over the course of that summer, I also talked with a lot of people who were self-employed. For so many of them, achieving any sort of financial security seemed to hover just out of reach. After completing a job, they often had to wait to collect what they were owed, but in the meantime, they had to meet their own expenses. They paid their own insurance, and they paid their income taxes straight up—no special tax loopholes for them. They weren’t asking for special breaks. They just wanted a level playing field.

That sure seemed right to me.

Money Talks

Guy Cecil, a gifted strategist who helps Democrats organize Senate campaigns, is a true believer. When he talks about how his grandmother fled an abusive husband with five little children in tow and then waited tables for forty years, he turns the story into a deeply optimistic parable about what’s possible in America—if people are given a fighting chance. Guy was once a Baptist minister; when he came out as gay he knew his congregation wouldn’t accept him, so he left and eventually started living his values through elections.

Back when I was first thinking about running for the Senate, Guy came to see me. He told me that I’d probably need to raise $20 million to $30 million.

I was stunned. I’d never run for office, and I was ready to stop right there. I looked at Guy and said, “Thirty million dollars—are you kidding me?”

Guy has a very gentle smile, exactly the kind you’d expect from a kindly pastor. He turned that smile on me and said in a calm voice that he knew it was a lot of money, but I needed to understand the hard reality of campaigning for a competitive Senate seat. It’s really, really expensive.

In fact, Guy was wrong about what it would take—or maybe he was just trying to ease me into the shallow end of the pool. By July 2012, our campaign had already raised $24 million, and we weren’t even in the homestretch yet. We were headed for a number that was a lot bigger than $30 million.

Raising money was exhausting. It was endless. I spent hours on the phone, and then spent more hours, and then more. There were days I felt like a hamster on a wheel. No matter how many calls I made, no matter how many people said yes, I needed to raise more money.

Every time I sat down to make calls, I thought about the polls: I was still behind. Scott Brown still had a big money advantage. People told me that if I didn’t raise enough money, in the final stretch Brown would blitz all the television and radio stations and drown out any message I tried to deliver. And then the race would be over. I would lose.

So I picked up the phone and made another call.

I was incredibly lucky—and deeply grateful—to get so much generous help. I met a couple in Newton who celebrated their anniversary by eating sandwiches at home and writing me a check for the amount they would have spent on dinner at a nice restaurant. A boy still in grade school raided his piggy bank and brought me a bucket of change. A man wrote me a check for the exact amount of his tax refund, with the comment that it was “unexpected money, so I figure it can do some unexpected good. Go win!”

Paul Egerman and Shanti Fry organized people to host house parties and breakfasts and bring their friends into the campaign. Smart and driven, they donated hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours to the campaign. In turn, they persuaded countless numbers of others to give money to our cause. And they had terrific partners in two members of my staff, Michael Pratt and Colleen Coffey.

We also raised money online, along with lots of support. EMILY’s List and the League of Conservation Voters encouraged their members to help, and they really came through, adding great momentum to the campaign. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee signed on early with the petition encouraging me to run, and they stayed with me every day right through the election.
MoveOn.org
also put their shoulder to the wheel. And Daily Kos, Democracy for America, and Progressives United rallied their huge e-mail lists time and again behind our campaign. To say I felt humbled by these extraordinary efforts doesn’t begin to cut it. So many people made real sacrifices, and I was profoundly grateful for all their help.

Eventually, we closed the money gap with Scott Brown, and we were able to open campaign offices all over the state and get television ads on the air early and stay on straight through Election Day. Meanwhile, the People’s Pledge was holding, so I didn’t have to fight both Karl Rove and Scott Brown simultaneously.

Still, I felt like I had my hand out all the time, and I hated having to ask, over and over. The first contest we had run during the campaign was to ask our supporters what slogan should go on the back of our Elizabeth-for-Senate T-shirts. The winner was:
“The best senator money can’t buy.”
I thought about that slogan every day—and every time I sent yet another e-mail asking people to donate. I asked for help because I needed to compete with Wall Street money; it was my only chance.

The same wretched system that had given giant banks such extraordinary influence over Congress also forced every candidate to constantly ask for money. And I had to wonder: If politicians didn’t have to raise so much money, would the bankruptcy wars have ended differently? Would Washington have responded differently in the wake of the crash of 2008? Would the government have focused more on saving homeowners and less on saving giant banks?

Money, money, money—it whispers everywhere in politics. It twists a little here, bends a little there. And far too often, it tilts in the same direction: in favor of those with buckets of cash to spend.

I believed in what I was fighting for, and I worked hard to raise money for the campaign. And I would do it all over again. But to make lasting change, to level the playing field so that everyone gets a chance, the money part of elections has got to change. I knew it during the campaign and I know it now. Our democracy deserves better. We deserve better.

Shrink the Vote

In August, the Republicans picked a new target: my daughter, Amelia.

Ooh boy.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I later learned that Massachusetts (along with many other states) had taken some heat for not following a federal law designed to make it easier for people to register to vote. The National Voter Registration Act, passed in 1993, requires states to offer people the chance to register to vote when they get a driver’s license, which is why the law is usually called “Motor Voter.” Seems sensible, and that part of the law was working pretty well. But since not everyone gets a driver’s license—especially the disabled, elderly, and urban poor—the same law required states to invite people to register to vote when they applied for social services, such as veterans’ benefits, food stamps, or Medicaid. That’s where Massachusetts had dropped the ball.

And that’s where Amelia figured in. Not long after we finished writing
The Two-Income Trap
together, Amelia started volunteering for a nonprofit group called Demos, which tries to help strengthen the middle class and promote democracy through research and advocacy. By the time of my Senate campaign, she had been working with Demos for several years, and they had elected her chairman of the board. It was a part-time volunteer position involving things like choosing an audit committee and setting the agenda for board meetings.

Demos had been pushing a lot of states, including mine, to comply with the federal voting law. Now Massachusetts was finally mailing out half a million voter registration cards. In early August, Scott Brown issued a furious statement calling the state’s mailing “outrageous,” and he accused Amelia of aiding this effort in an attempt to benefit my campaign.

In fact, Amelia had nothing to do with the Massachusetts mailing. Demos had started pushing for state compliance with federal voting laws two years before Amelia began volunteering for the organization, which was many years before I had even thought of running for the Senate.

But to me, that wasn’t really the point. Scott Brown was a sitting US senator, and he was outraged that his home state was making an effort to
follow federal law
. Huh? The real issue for me had nothing to do with Amelia or even Demos: the real issue was about doing everything possible to help people register to vote. I thought voter registration was supposed to be like organizing a blood drive or holding a Thanksgiving charity raffle—the kinds of values that we all support, from both political parties.

Okay, people can laugh and say I’m hopelessly naive, but this issue is a direct shot at democracy. In many states, the Republicans have made voter suppression a regular part of their arsenal, chipping away at early voting, African American voting, Latino voting, immigrant voting, student voting, you-name-it voting. As the Tea Party–affiliated True the Vote campaign famously said, they wanted voting to become like “driving and seeing the police following you.” I guess attacking my daughter for her involvement in an organization that was pushing states to help more people register to vote was just one more page out of their standard playbook.