A Fighting Chance (40 page)

But the assault shifted the Senate contest in another way. Amelia was suddenly in the limelight. And once Scott Brown and the Republican Party started attacking her, it quickly became clear that she was deemed “fair game” for anyone who wanted to take a whack at her.

Amelia’s phone rang off the hook, and several articles about her appeared in the papers. Reporters combed through her background and called up her old friends and co-workers, trying to find people who would talk about her for a newspaper story. Amelia kept assuring me that she was fine—after all, she’s a successful businesswoman in her own right, and she could handle what came at her. But I felt terrible.

I knew politics was a rough business, but I had really hoped I’d be the only target. So far, the Republicans had denounced my dead parents, harassed my brothers, and attacked my daughter. And this was all on me. My family hadn’t asked for any of this, and if I had kept my head down, none of this would have happened to them.

Home Front

One night a week or two later, something was worrying me in my sleep. I finally came half-awake and heard a cough. Not exactly a cough, maybe more of a hack. I drifted back to sleep, then heard it again. My brain cleared enough to locate the sound.

I nudged Bruce and said, “What’s wrong with Otis?”

We both waited in the dark, but Otis didn’t make any sound, so I got out of bed. I rubbed his head for a few minutes. He seemed fine, so I went back to bed. But the next morning, Bruce said he wanted to take Otis in for a checkup, just to be sure.

When I got home that night, Bruce took me out to the porch swing and sat beside me. He held both my hands. This wouldn’t be good.

“The treatments aren’t working,” he said quietly. “The lymphoma is back.”

I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest—and I hadn’t seen it coming. I remembered the stats from Otis’s doctor: half of all the dogs treated for lymphoma are alive a year later. Half. One year. We’d had less than eight months.

I felt cheated. If half the dogs were alive a year later, how could he possibly be sick again? Couldn’t the treatments be changed? As I tried to talk this through, my voice kept rising. Finally, I was shouting at Bruce—no, I was shouting at the fact that Otis was sick again, as if I could somehow hold off reality by force of will.

Bruce let me rail on. When I finally fell silent, I was breathing hard. He gently pointed out to me the other side of what the vet had said: half the dogs die within a year, even with treatment.

I started to cry. I wanted someone to bargain with. Please, please don’t take Otis.

Bruce said Otis had started a new round of treatments that day, and we’d see what they could do. When we picked him up at Angell Memorial the next day, he was obviously sick but clearly glad to be back with his people. He dropped his head and wagged his whole back end as he slowly made his way toward us.

Later that night, we huddled together on the couch. We took up our usual positions: Bruce on one end and Otis sprawled across the other, with me wedged in between them. As I rubbed Otis’s ears, I whispered, “Please be okay. Please be okay.”

Corporations Don’t Dance

In early September, Bruce and I headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the Democratic National Convention. A few weeks earlier, the word had come from the White House: President Obama wanted me to speak on Wednesday night, right before Bill Clinton.

I had never been to a national convention, and on Tuesday morning, September 4, I went to a rehearsal. While I waited for my turn, I tried to think of when I had first seen this political spectacle. I must have been about seven, sprawled on the floor with my dolls, on a tweedy rug in front of a black-and-white television. All three channels carried whichever national convention was taking place just then. I thought it was boring and hoped
I Love Lucy
and
Gunsmoke
would come back on soon. While my parents dutifully half watched, my father smoked and read the newspaper and my mother kept a book propped in her lap. My parents weren’t especially political, but I had some general idea that my father thought President Eisenhower was a decent man.

Now I looked around the giant arena in Charlotte and thought about how the woman standing here would have seemed as far away as the moon to that little girl in front of the television set.

“Don’t shout,” someone said. “This microphone is so sensitive it can pick up your heartbeat.” I got jolted back to the present.

I was standing on the stage of the awkwardly named Time Warner Cable Arena, and while one technician was warning me about the sound system, another was checking the podium height. (The thing actually moved up and down so it would look just right in front of shorter and taller speakers.) The hall was largely empty, although a number of people were setting up seats or adjusting camera equipment or just wandering around.

I tried to stay calm and focused. Tomorrow night, I would speak right before former president Bill Clinton. In front of a live audience of about twenty thousand people and a television audience of twenty-five million. During the homestretch of a race in which I was still behind. Nope: no pressure at all.

The arena had been built in 2005 as a home for the Charlotte Bobcats of the NBA. The stage was big, and even though the basketball court had been filled in with rows of seats, the place still looked like a giant gym—a nice, new gym, but a gym all the same. Maybe the Democratic Party should have spiced things up by putting us all in jerseys and baggy shorts.

After we finished the run-through, I walked back to the hotel with Ganesh and Tom Keady. As we headed down the street, some women on the other side shouted, “Hey, there’s Elizabeth Warren. Woo-hoo! Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” I looked over to wave and walked straight into a pole. I wasn’t hurt, but I felt really stupid.

After that, Ganesh and Tom walked closer to me, watching me carefully to make sure I knew there were obstacles ahead. “Pole!” one would yell. “Curb!” the other would caution. My life now had a sound track. Worse, I had proven I needed it.

The next day, we showed up hours ahead of my scheduled speaking time, exactly as instructed. Everyone had been given heavy plastic identification badges and told to hang them around their necks. The tags were checked and rechecked as we approached the arena, entered it, and then got closer and closer to the backstage waiting room. Going to the bathroom involved a complicated handoff from one station to another, as well as a series of confusing turns. After I navigated it once, I quit drinking water.

As I waited for my turn at the podium, I thought about this chance. An audience of twenty-five million—the number sounded beyond improbable. I figured I would never in my life get another chance to speak to this many people, so I’d better use this chance to say what I really wanted to say. And now I was about to step out on the stage.

I tried to breathe. I had exactly fifteen minutes—one shot—and I needed to get it right.

The system is rigged.

That’s what I wanted to talk about. For me, that captured what was wrong with the country, how our government had been hijacked by the rich and the powerful. How it didn’t have to be this way. How we could do better.

My heart was hammering. The stage manager gave me a little push, and I stepped into the blinding lights. People started applauding. It looked like a zillion people, on their feet and starting to yell. That made me even more nervous. My mouth went dry. My teeth felt sticky. In a flash of deep insight, while twenty-five million people looked on, I realized why it had been a bad idea to stop drinking water hours earlier.

But after a few seconds, something shifted. I stopped thinking of the delegates and all the others in the arena as just an anonymous crowd. I could see faces. I could see people wave. They were ready. No, they were eager.

It was like the night at the T-stop in Boston when that young guy told me this was his fight, too. This wasn’t just my race. This was our race.

For a brief, absurd moment, I wanted to stop. I felt a sudden urge to line up everyone in the audience so I could spend a minute with each person, shake hands or hug or touch an arm, and say, “I know how important this fight is. We’ll fight together and we’ll win.”

And then I took a deep breath and started.

I explained that I was here to talk about how hardworking people were getting the short end of the stick. I talked about Mitt Romney’s famous statement that “corporations are people”:

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.

I asked the question asked by so many of the men and women I’d met: Is America’s government working for the people, or is it working only for the rich and powerful?

People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: They’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

I talked about middle-class families, people who get up early, stay up late, people who run small businesses and struggle to meet payroll, people who worry about having enough money to make it to the end of the month.

These folks don’t resent that someone else makes more money. We’re Americans. We celebrate success. We just don’t want the game to be rigged.

Afterward, the crowd gave me a big round of applause.

President Clinton came next. I wasn’t nearly as memorable as the former president, but who is? Still, I’d said what I wanted to say, and it felt great to have the chance to say it.

Union Proud

After the convention, I shifted from high gear to superhigh gear. With the election only two months away, the days were starting earlier and running later. I felt like I was putting off everything until after the election, including sleep.

I was also eating less. I was nearly always scheduled for a “luncheon” or a “dinner,” but since I was always giving speeches and shaking hands, I almost never got more than a few bites at one of those events. I lived on hot, milky tea from Dunkin’ Donuts and fast food from everywhere. I lost more weight, and soon I constantly felt as though my pants were falling down. I started hitching them in back with a big safety pin. Every day brought lots of picture taking, and many times, as we’d line up to smile for the camera with our arms looped behind each other’s backs, I’d feel someone’s hand hit the thick bulge. I wondered if anyone speculated whether I was wearing a holster or carrying a wad of money back there.

The tracker seemed to appear at every event. I’d come to understand that this was standard political fare, and I know a similar tracker followed Scott Brown, but I never got used to it. When people whispered to me about losing their homes or having a dad at home who was dying of cancer, I learned to look around for the tracker, worrying that a video of their private moment could end up in some political ad.

With the days ticking by, it was now all hands on deck. Legendary civil rights leader and longtime congressman John Lewis gave moving speeches about the power of the vote. Singer James Taylor and his wife, Kim, put on an amazing concert. John Kerry rallied the troops. Max Cleland brought together vets from across the state to underscore the importance of honoring our promises. Governor Deval Patrick had generously endorsed me back before the state convention, and he gave powerful speeches at some great rallies, accelerating the momentum of the campaign.

And then there was Boston mayor Thomas Menino. By this point he had been the city’s mayor for nineteen years, making him the longest-serving mayor in any major US city. He knew every inch of Boston, and he loved his city passionately—and his city loved him just as much. He was a Democrat, but he was also fiercely independent, and there was regular speculation in the press that he might endorse Brown or, almost as telling, stay neutral in the race. For over a year, I’d telephoned the mayor regularly, and he had asked me questions and given me advice—but no endorsement. In mid-September, he called to say: “I’m ready.” He told me he was convinced that I would fight for working people, and for him, that’s what public service should be all about.

Once he was in, Mayor Menino jumped into the deep end of the pool—a huge rally, speeches, signs, and even his own TV commercial. His signature line—“She’s good people”—was all over Boston. He brought along his ally from many battles, Michael Kineavy, who worked his magic and pulled in hundreds more helping hands. The mayor was a powerhouse, and the boost he gave the campaign was strong enough to taste.

After months of hard work, we finally seemed to be gaining ground against Senator Brown. The polls started to show real movement. I didn’t think it was possible for the campaign staff to get even more excited, but they did.

Contrary to all the predictions back in January, the People’s Pledge was still holding and Karl Rove was off the airways. I give Senator Brown a lot of credit: he held to the People’s Pledge. As I started catching up to him in the polls, he may have been tempted to back out and hope that outside money could swing things in his favor. But he stayed true to his promise.

One afternoon in mid-September, Roger Lau called. Get to Dorchester, he said. Right now.

So Adam turned the Blue Bomber around, and we headed off to Florian Hall in Dorchester. It’s a plain redbrick building with a flag waving out front, the kind of solid place that has been home to a million potluck dinners and retirement parties for firefighters and their families in eastern Massachusetts.

Firefighters had been a particular flash point in the Brown–Coakley race two years earlier. Although the union leadership officially endorsed Coakley, the rank and file were reported to have voted for Brown in big numbers. I’d been visiting fire stations for nearly a year, and it wasn’t lost on me that a lot of the cars and pickups parked near the firehouses still bore Scott Brown stickers.