Saving Graces (25 page)

When John was back from running, we made our obligatory trek to the Merrimack Restaurant. It is a typical old-style diner with a dense darkness that bespeaks years of conversations, important and frivolous, with deep booths, a waitstaff that has been employed there for decades, and truly great diner food. And it is the place where every potential presidential candidate, at one time or another, makes a stop, or two, or three. John made his early, and it was recorded by CNN and
USA Today
. He and I sat in the back corner booth while two reporters peppered him with questions. Susan Page from
USA Today
said, “We’ve got the most recent poll from New Hampshire and you’re at one percent. Why in the world should anyone take you seriously as a possible presidential candidate?”

John wasn’t the least defensive. “What’s the margin of error in that poll?” he asked.

“Three percent,” she said. You could tell from her tone that she was anticipating his excuse that he could be as much as four or five percent in the poll.

Instead, he said, “So if I’m one percent, and the margin of error is three percent, I could actually have negative support?” “Yeah,” she said, laughing, “I guess that’s true.”

Instead of moaning or making excuses, he had taken a swipe at himself even bigger than the one she had taken. And that was the attitude we had. You give this your best effort, but the fact that it is important doesn’t mean that you are important. You have fun at the same time, and you cannot let yourself think it has anything to do with who you will be when it is over, one way or the other.

We began that weekend by meeting the local faces connected to the names we had read over the years. There was a Lou D’Allesandro, whom we would court for months to come—the warm Italian American, with hands like my father’s, always outstretched, and his incredibly patient wife, Pat. We came to know of their children and their grandchildren, his daughter’s wedding and his brother’s illness, and we stopped thinking about them as political contacts urged by the staff and started thinking of them as friends. And here’s how I know: as I type Lou’s name, or Sharon Nordgren’s or Lucy Hodder’s, it is hard not to look in my Rolodex and find their numbers and give them a call. Yet if I did this throughout this book—and I have weakened more times than I want to admit to my editor—I would never finish it. John didn’t win them all. Peter Burling, whom I greatly admire, finally came with John, but only after his friend Dick Gephardt left the race. Dan O’Neill, who belonged to John’s brother’s union, the IBEW, would never make the commitment, but, honestly, John still enjoyed seeing him, because though it was politics, it was also the only life we were going to get, and we were determined to enjoy it. And John enjoyed Dan.

John had his first house party that weekend in Manchester. Ed Turlington had convinced Chris and Kristin Sullivan to open their Concord house to us and, what’s more, to invite their closest friends so that John could introduce himself. It was like riding a bicycle for the first time: John could do it, he was nimble and athletic, but it wasn’t always rewarding. Was he moving forward at all? As a senator, John had weekly town hall meetings—in North Carolina if he was there, in the Capitol for visiting constituents if he was not—so the give-and-take of the house party questions did not bother him. But these people were not just looking for answers to their questions. They were looking for a horse to ride in the 2004 primary, almost two years away, and many of them—most of them—would not decide anything on their first or second or third chance to check out each horse. They had seen it happen before, potential candidates testing the waters—some ran, some didn’t. No need for them to get wet yet. All of this was new for us. Honestly, we didn’t know anything about the process, and the withholding of support by people who clearly liked John left us less than sure-footed.

My role in this was to smile, shake hands, and make small talk. I could handle that. As John spoke in the living room, I stayed in the kitchen playing with the assembled babies—Jake Sullivan was not yet born, but there were plenty of babies—and I looked carefully at this precious house. Kristin had made café curtains and painted and stenciled the walls. Pictures were framed with handmade mats. They hadn’t just let us into their house, they had invited us into their home, and when you let yourself feel that offer, it made all the reservations in the next room meaningless. Chris and Kristin probably had a lot of conversation after that day about whether to support John; I had already made up my mind about them.

It was a series of houses that weekend, repeating over and over what we had experienced at the Sullivans’. The last, in Nashua, at the Foster house, which was surrounded in every direction by ice, left us with lots of questions. Not about Joe and Marisa—they were terrific—but about this process and about what John needed to do, if he was to convince a constitutionally skeptical audience. One thing he would need, he said, was more concrete answers about where he wanted to go. The criticisms were easy, the solutions were not. So when we returned to Washington, John set about developing a real platform.

This was a year of politics and policies in our house. The meetings we had in our home were just like the meetings we had always had with the people on John’s staff. I was on the inside, of course, because I was married to John, but in truth everyone was on the inside. In David Ginsberg’s story of joining our campaign family, there is a clearer picture than I might draw. On New Year’s Day 1998, David drove down to North Carolina to join the Senate campaign. It was his first time in the South other than traveling I-95 on the way to Florida, and everything was foreign to him. It was sixty degrees out, and he was wearing shorts; less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been freezing at a New Year’s party in New York City. His dad had helped him drive down, and he helped him bring his things into the hotel room, as David hadn’t found an apartment yet. When his dad pulled away David had the oddest sense of complete dislocation. Not only was he in a city where he didn’t know a single person yet, he was in an entire region of the country where he didn’t know anybody. He had never been here before, and he had just committed to live here for eleven months based on a ten-minute phone call with some trial lawyer down in Raleigh. He was twenty-two and pretty scared. Within weeks of meeting us, meeting the campaign family we had assembled around us, all that seemed far in the past. David said it was as if he had gained two new families—the family of the campaign, with the team-like spirit of singular focus, then the additional layer of John and me on top of that. It was an amazing transformation, going from totally disoriented and lost to feeling right at home. And that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the way we all treated one another, the sense of community in the campaign, and the personal care we all took with one another. Opening our home was just a symbol of opening ourselves to these people who had committed themselves to John. It was easy.

The rules at our Washington house were the same as the rules in Raleigh. If you are expected for a meeting, just walk in and announce yourself; don’t make someone get up from the meeting to answer your knock. If you want something to drink or to eat, the kitchen is in there; you can have anything you want—as long as you fix it yourself. When we moved to the house on P Street in Georgetown, it was the same. The feeling in all these houses was a good one, with many threads of our lives crossing one another, from our personal lives, from the children’s lives, from neighbors, from these young people—and older people—who were helping, and from friends. There was noise and life all around us in the meetings—the meeting might be in the library, but there was always another conversation in the kitchen, and the children coming in with book bags into the front hall. I participated, but I also listened and learned. All the little pieces I picked up fleshed out answers I would later give when I was on the road. All the anecdotes gave life to the policies, and I would tell them and retell them. After a televised town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, one man called in to say that it was probably easy to tell all those facts and stories since I had cue cards. My mother was furious, but I was just amused; I couldn’t have cue cards at a town hall with a dozen questions. My cue cards were the hours and hours—days or weeks, even—I spent listening to these bright young men and women share what they knew with John and, by osmosis, with me.

And so it went for the next months. Between trips to Iowa and return trips to New Hampshire, there were meetings on health care and the environment, on domestic security and education, on the military and on the military family. This will sound strange, but the tone of the meetings wasn’t actually partisan. I doubt many meetings like them are. The complexity of the problems that faced America was daunting and the solutions difficult. There was no room to find anything except the right answers. Again, I don’t want to mislead; Emma Claire and I were sitting on the floor talking as Robert, James, and Derek were coming in and claiming chairs for yet another meeting. C-SPAN was on, as usual, in the background. There had been a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Emma Claire looked at the television and, at five, astonished me by asking, “Which one is Orrin Hatch?” I pointed him out, and she said he had a nice smile. “Politicians have nice smiles, Emma Claire,” I said, “but you can’t pay attention to that; you have to listen to find out if they have nice words, and the words have to…” I probably talked on for three or four minutes until, completely bored, she got up and went outside. It was the typical reaction I got from my children over the years. When Cate asked me a question, she had learned to complete it with, “One word, if you can, Mom. I don’t need a dissertation.” I may have left English graduate school, but I never stopped wanting to teach, and here was my—somewhat—captive classroom.

My main job for years to come will be—until I am nearly too old for it—raising children, but the raising of these youngest children took place with James Kvaal laying out the intricacies of health care policy and Orrin Hatch smiling from the television screen, with Adrian Talbott bringing by homemade olive oil for the children and the first bulky Internet telephones sounding their alarming rings, with John Auchard and me spread out across the library editing John’s book
Four Trials,
piles of papers around us, Elizabeth Nicholas bringing lunch and dinner so we could meet a deadline, editing sometimes with the Disney Channel in the background and two small figures sitting cross-legged on the floor between us, watching Mulan or Hercules or Mickey himself. I can say all this without embarrassment at my parenting, as I spent the day in which I am typing this at two soccer games and a baseball practice. But the truth is that in the chaos and the openness of our house was a lesson for these children, the lesson we had taught the children before them, a lesson that would serve them well: let it all in. The boy with the hickey, the speechwriter with the tender little voice, the academic with the analysis of health care costs—let them all in. There’s always room.

Of course, it was about to all come in, into our lives and our house. John spent the fall talking one-on-one to his advisors, consultants, and staff. He would open the discussion about whether he should run for the Democratic nomination for president, and then he would let them talk. Miles, Nick Baldick, Jonathan Prince, David, John Dervin (who knew more about John than he did about himself), and Bruce Reed (who knew more about running a political campaign than the rest of us). Although it was not unanimous—Mike Donilon, for example, said he should run but should wait until 2008—most of the opinions were that he should run now. John was so professorial in his questioning that even I did not really know what he would ultimately decide. And while he was deciding, he was laying out an agenda in a series of speeches on education, the economy, homeland security, even reform of the criminal parole system. The speeches moved the campaign forward, but they also did something else, something more permanent: they solidified the bonds we had been building. Jonathan was now firmly a member of this family; Stephanie Jones, who worked with John on the Judiciary Committee, brought her brilliance into the circle. Derek Chollet, who handled John’s foreign policy in the Senate office, found a permanent seat at the table. Wendy Button joined us, bringing not just her skill with words but a gentle sensibility as well. There were the more experienced voices, too, people like Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling, and though they were welcome, would always be welcome, we knew that they had seats at lots of tables. I think of them as you might the children of an amicable divorce: they’d do Christmas at your house but Thanksgiving somewhere else. Others were somewhere in between. Peter Harbage, Tom Donilon, and Michael Dannenberg come to mind. We tried, not always successfully, not to ask more of any of them than they were ready to give. It was selfish, really; we liked them and respected them and didn’t want them to have to make a choice that could leave us without their company and counsel.