Saving Graces (27 page)

After the Baltimore debate, I went up to Chuck Todd and Craig Crawford in the spin room, a large hall where journalists could talk to the candidates or their surrogates about how the debate had gone. But Chuck and Craig were off to one side, alone. “Don’t you all need to be talking to someone other than each other?” I asked. Craig smiled. “How are we going to know what Conventional Wisdom is unless we talk to one another?” I doubt I could have gotten them to sing.

Aaron Pickrell, who ran the Iowa staff, and the entire Iowa staff, whenever they were on the bus, would sing. They were great sports about everything. Aaron would sing while bouncing Jack on his foot. Only Brad and Patrick, also from the Iowa staff, could also manage that feat. Rob, who’ll bounce his own baby when he returns from Iraq, was the most reticient. Johnny, who drove—and owned—the bus, was the music man, whether he sang or not. As we approached the site of a speech or a town hall, Johnny would turn on the music on the bus’s exterior loudspeakers, which drew in everyone age seven through thirteen in the surrounding blocks—none of them, of course, voters. When he moved from bus driver to disc jockey, he would take off his driving hat and put on a cap with a long ponytail attached.

Brenda, his wife, was just as polite as he was mischievous. It says something when the best-dressed woman on the bus is the driver’s wife. I could sometimes get Brenda to join in the singing. She had a prettier voice than she would allow, but whenever she would catch me pulling out the songbooks, she would start preparing something in the bus’s tiny kitchen to get out of singing. Brenda would feed us and feed us. She reminded me of the Cher character Rachel Flax in the movie
Mermaids
who, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, served her daughters hors d’oeuvres. We ate sausages wrapped in just about everything. We had pizza shaped in every way except like pizza. We had stacks of cheeses and meats and crackers cut into quarter-size circles, so we could make the smallest Dagwood sandwiches imaginable. And I don’t want to suggest we put our noses up. We ate it all. There were times when Randy Galvin, who watched the children, or Jennifer or Cate would beg Brenda to get some apples or something green, and she always would, but left to her own devices, it was pigs in a blanket. The only times her food was snubbed were when Sam Myers brought fresh corn aboard from a spot called Camp David in Iowa Falls and when we stopped at the Iowa State Fair. As John was giving a speech in the Iowa Falls restaurant, I was talking to the waitresses—since the customers were listening to John and no one at their tables was ordering anything. “That corn looks great,” I said. “Came in about noon,” one said. “Picked this morning,” said another. She saw the look on my face, a look born of two straight days of appetizers-as-meals, and she said, “We can cook you up some.” Without hesitation, I motioned to Sam. We still talk about that Camp David corn. And Brenda—and her tiny bus kitchen, it wasn’t a fair fight—was also outdone by the Iowa State Fair pork-on-a-stick. It’s called pork-on-a-stick, even though the stick is really the bone, but no one was quibbling. It was the best meat of any kind we’d ever had.

After Cate—who knew not to bother complaining, just join in the singing—Jennifer Palmieri was my most reliable singing companion. She would sing anything. She would sing anytime. Jennifer is also a child of a military family, but she is more like my father than me, jumping with both feet into every experience. She had moved enough to know the part of
The Great Santini
that is absolutely accurate for nearly every family: traveling in the wee hours and singing all the way. There are people who are so full of life that being around them either makes every moment delicious or exhausts you. Sometimes, admittedly, Jennifer would exhaust John. Sometimes, frankly, I would exhaust John. But she and I never exhausted each other, and I could pull out that songbook first thing in the morning or last thing at night, and she would start flipping through. “Ooh. Ooh. Ooh,” I can hear her say, “‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’! Let’s sing that.” Cate and I would reach for our songbooks.

Sam Myers, a Missourian who had been making trips like this longer than anyone, had the best voice on the bus—no surprise, as his parents were music teachers. Most of the time he didn’t need the songbook; he already knew the words. Although Sam had made lots of bus trips, he might not have been on one like this before. When Jack got on the bus for the first time, he gave Sam the once-over—checking out his hunting vest, the pockets filled with all the items Sam had needed in emergencies on previous trips, asking what the hair was that was growing under his nose—until he noticed Sam’s woven sandals and asked, “Why are you wearing girls’ shoes?” From that point on, Sam and Jack were a reliable comedy routine on the bus. Sam would be pointing out the route to Johnny, the driver, and Jack would be in his lap and in his way the whole time.

When James Galvin, Randy’s husband, brought his guitar out, he controlled the song list, which meant that the songs were keyed to a younger generation. Cate and Josh and Hunter and Aaron knew all the words, and by and large, I knew none. But that didn’t matter. I liked the great sense of fun that music brings, creating a community chorus that crisscrossed Iowa between oceans of cornfields and then navigated the narrow roads and sharp turns in the mountains of New Hampshire.

Colin Van Ostern, the New Hampshire press secretary, calculated that, during the one-week New Hampshire bus tour, we drove 1,757 miles, went to twenty-six towns for house parties and other events, had ten town hall meetings, had forty stops, 168 cans of Diet Coke, and 245 bottles of water. And through it we sang. Colin took Kim Rubey’s place. Meghan replaced Brad—and was a more agreeable singer. Some of the people who came on the bus for a day, such as Sharon Nordgren and Lou D’Allesandro, never got handed a songbook, because we were trying to get their support and someone thought when we had the songbooks in our hands we looked less like a campaign than a family on vacation. Exactly, I thought. It was that feeling of being a real part of something, something the candidate himself was a part of, not remote from, not smiling down from the mezzanine boxes, that constituted part of the campaign’s magic.

The bus was a moving G-rated pleasure palace. Emma Claire and Jack each had someone to watch them at events—Randy and Elizabeth Nicholas most of the time—so that John and I could talk and meet caucus-goers. They claimed the back of the bus, with the long benches on which to take naps and watch DVDs. Many a time John would have three or four reporters on a leg of the trip with us, but he would give separate interviews. The reporters-in-waiting would be banished to the back of the bus, where they would watch Kipper, the most civilized dog in the cartoon world, with the children. When John gave his first speeches, the children watched from that rear perch, opening the back windows. Having the children with us—which we did on weekends and when school was out—was good for all of us. And it was best for John. The family feeling was not one we lost because, well, we were a family. So sometimes the children would invite other children onto the bus during an event, as they did in Tama, Iowa, and sometimes when the children would tire of events, we would give them time away from the bus. Meghan, Randy, and I took the children to the Lost River Gorge caves in New Hampshire. With the steep drop-offs and bridges over gorges, I spent an entire day nervous. We thought there would be a lot of hiking, but we were wrong. There was a lot of crawling. Emma Claire and Jack gleefully climbed through caves and around rocks on their hands and knees—followed, I have to admit, by Randy and Meghan, whose combined ages didn’t add up to mine. I got good at saying,
Meet you on the other side.
The children went skiing on another trip with Chris Black. And swimming at Bev Hollingsworth’s daughter’s house. A campaign for John, a vacation for them.

As John campaigned, it was not unusual to meet up with people who were not going to be with you in the election. John was doing a town hall in Durham, New Hampshire, when I spotted a man with a video camera—not unusual—who had been at the last two events—unusual. One of the staff asked him if we could help him with anything, and he said no, he was just the Republican tracker. His name was Steve, and he had been hired to follow John and tape his public events. Oddly enough, even Steve became part of the family. We’d walk in somewhere, and there he would be, sitting right in the front so he could get a clear shot. Hey, Steve. Hey, Mrs. Edwards. After months of hearing John talk, he even allowed that he thought John made sense and he might even vote for him.

We kept plugging on, despite events with only a few people, despite low poll numbers. In late summer there was a labor rally in Iowa attended by all the candidates. John Kerry spoke before John, and the head of the union, who introduced the candidates, handed Kerry his personal $1,000 contribution when he introduced him. Geez. This was a group—working people—to whom John could appeal, and their president sent a clear message to go another way. With all of the polls putting Howard Dean on top and Dick Gephardt next, Kerry and John were fighting for the third spot, and it was certain that only three of them would come out of Iowa with their campaigns alive. When John started speaking, the crowd sat back in their chairs, arms folded. It didn’t look good. But as he spoke, they leaned forward, and then they started applauding what he was saying and finally they were on their feet. It was good, but the numbers didn’t change.

We continually worked on our speeches. John was starting to frame his stump speech in new language, using a phrase he had heard Christina Reynolds, who had been with us since the Senate campaign, use after she heard John talk about two school systems, two health care systems, two tax codes, one that benefited the rich, the other for the rest of America: It was Two Americas. And it was the beginning of a speech that would electrify audiences, but was it too late?

Campaign momentum would constantly be broken by debates. It wasn’t all bad. It meant television coverage, more people seeing the man, hearing the message, but it was also completely out of control. A one-hour debate would consume half a day and might result in John speaking for four minutes. And the questions were not the questions that we heard at town halls; no one there asked about polls or about money raised, and yet part of nearly every debate—and sometimes nearly all of them—would be these process questions, all inside-baseball, all irrelevant to most voters.

We drove in a van to Baltimore for a debate, and fifteen people had to stay quiet for the trip because John was on an hour-long telephone call from Bill Clinton, who was giving his advice on the debate. Sam Myers may have been used to being still for long periods, but it was painful for Jennifer, Jonathan Prince, and honestly me. In the New York Pace University debate, Cate and I sat in front of the Sharpton family. At each debate there was a different lineup of candidate families—Jane Gephardt and I were the most reliable, then Teresa and Gert Clark, but this was the only time I had seen the Sharptons. Al would be holding forth onstage and Al’s two daughters would be saying,
Just answer the question, Daddy. That’s no answer. Oh, Daddy.
It was pretty clear that Al got the same amount of grief from his daughters as John got from his.

John had a brutal schedule. Once when he was in Washington, we walked down to M Street to eat dinner. In the narrow, heavily traveled streets of Georgetown, we each had hold of one child, until John Kerry’s car pulled up alongside us. Kerry jumped out on the corner of Prospect and 34th. While I held both children, he and John talked about how hard it was to get heard in Iowa over the clamor for Dean. People say I should drop out, Kerry said. Will he? I asked after the Kerry car drove on and the traffic juggernaut it had caused dispersed. No, John didn’t think so. But, he added convincingly, it’s hard to keep going when nothing’s going your way.

Not much was going John’s way. We had a core of supporters in Iowa and a core in New Hampshire, but as Dean’s rocket was taking off, the pool of people from whom we could try to garner support was dwindling. By November, it looked like the big unions were going to go with Dean, unions that might have—with a different tableau—gone to Dick Gephardt or to John, based on their policies and histories. The whole ship was tilting. We kept plugging in the same way we always had, but the holiday break was welcome. We called the campaign office in Washington to find out who was staying in D.C. for Thanksgiving, and then we called the “Thanksgiving orphans.”
Dinner will be at 1
P
.
M
.
, we said,
don’t be late
. Cate and I put together a menu, and whenever one of the staff arrived—Miles or Marc Adelman, Jennifer Swanson or James Kvaal—we would hand out assignments: stir the mashed potatoes, fill the water glasses. Then John and I sat down with the staffers and our children—in other words, our family.

It was that Thanksgiving weekend, though, that John and I sat one quiet afternoon in our house in Washington and talked about whether he would stay in the race. There is a tired you get when you are working hard but you are seeing the product of your work, which buoys you. We were not that kind of tired. We were just plain tired. There was no payday in this. Should he get out? I didn’t think so, for all the same reasons I had believed in him before.

“But we’re not gaining anywhere; how do we get any momentum?”

“Remember Gephardt?” Even Gephardt told John to remember Gephardt. On November 15th, as we had stood backstage at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, a huge Democratic dinner that—once every four years—is a cheerleading contest between the various campaigns, John and Dick talked. “Don’t worry about the numbers now,” Dick said, “things move quickly in Iowa.” He should know. Dick had come from nowhere before Christmas to winning the Iowa caucuses in 1988. We wanted Dick to be right, of course. After singing “Happy Birthday” to Jennifer Palmieri at a staff dinner after the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson festivities were over, Dick’s encouragement was the topic of conversation.