“Les agradezco de su voto,” said Benito Salazar into the telephone, and moved on to the next name on his list. Cordell, our volunteer coordinator, checked on walkers headed to African-American neighborhoods on the West Side, while my high school teachers Mrs. Chismar and Mrs. Lightcap sat at a folding table and called through the voter lists one last time.
There were dozens of people helping to get out the vote. With every seat taken, my sixty-six-year-old mother was sitting on the floor, a cell phone in one hand and pen in the other, marking down responses on a clipboard propped on her knees. People from every corner of my life filled the once-empty storefront. There was Jody Freid, the self-described universal Jewish mom of the campaign, next to a friend of mine from Harvard who had come in to help for the final days. There were high school kids that our intern, Tyler, had recruited, next to neighborhood leaders and sheet metal workers. An elderly homeless veteran, whom we had nicknamed “Jimmy Carter” because of his resemblance to the former president, made calls next to a Notre Dame student taking a day off from class.
“How’s it look?” I asked one staff member or another every ten minutes or so, peering over their shoulders in the boiler room at headquarters as they obsessively refreshed the spreadsheets on their laptops. Trackers at key precincts sent back reports on turnout, showing our strongest precincts coming in very strong. We wouldn’t know how people voted until six, but the places where I was most popular were voting off the charts.
I retreated to my house by the time the polls closed, wanting to be out of the team’s hair and needing a little quiet before preparing, win or lose, to face my supporters and the cameras. I climbed out through an attic window onto the small balcony overlooking the river, and was watching its mesmerizing flow when the phone rang. Dvorak was politely conceding and pledging his help in the general election; soon Hamann called to do the same.
Mike drove me back to headquarters, and Kathryn met us as we came in the back door. It felt as if everyone I had ever known was in there. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the other corner where a podium was set up for me to give a speech, working across the room in a blur of handshakes and hugs. We had won a majority in the five-way race, decisively securing the party’s nomination in our Democratic city. The Republicans had not found a strong nominee on their side; indeed, many Republicans had crossed over to vote for me in the Democratic primary, knowing that a Democrat would likely win in November and hoping that it could at least be someone with a business and military background. Almost certainly, this was the ball game.
In my speech I thanked each staff member, down to the interns, and the campaign volunteers. I reminded them the real work was ahead, then insisted as we had at the campaign’s outset that South Bend had everything we needed to succeed and grow. But I knew now that the challenge ahead would be different in nature. It was one thing to pull together a coalition for a campaign; another to keep a community unified through momentous changes. After the speech, as the applause grew to a roar, I turned to Mike: “Let’s be sure to enjoy this. Pretty soon we’ll have to start making decisions, so tonight may be the most popular we’ll ever be.”
WITH MOST COMPETITIONS, YOU SLEEP in after the big day and begin to recover your energies. But for political candidates, the day after a win at the polls usually starts even earlier than Election Day itself, making the rounds of the morning TV shows. Determined to cover all the local stations in the morning-show window, I raced through the green rooms and studios of all four, in one case going on right after the puppies from the animal shelter. On television, you typically get two or three minutes to boil down whatever you have to say—and in my case, the hardest part was doing so while seeming lucid before dawn. It felt like one last challenge to cap off the months of phone calls, debates, and fundraisers. But I knew as I faced the studio lights and camera lenses that this was going to be the comparatively easy part. Going from campaigning to governing meant there would be plenty of interest in what I had to say, but far more attention on what I was actually going to do.
7
Monday Morning: A Tour
Waking up comes hard. I’ve never been a morning person, and nothing can take the edge off a 5:30 cell phone alarm tunneling into the sweet haze of sleep. Strategically placed, the phone sits in the next room so that I can’t snooze or silence it without first getting out of bed. That four-second-long walk will bring just enough alertness to remember my promises. I must stay in motion, and not slide back into the warmth of my dreams.
I try not to wake Chasten as I slip out from under the covers and walk to the small table where the phone sits. Truman is indifferent, curled up into a brown fur oval on a bench two feet from the bed. I lumber across the floorboards of the landing toward the bathroom to brush my teeth. The one-inch white hexagonal tile, cold on my feet, is the same kind as in the foursquare house where I grew up, some five hundred feet away. In the mirror, I make eye contact with an unshaven, bleary-eyed man in his mid-thirties, looking harmless but not thrilled to see me at this hour. I’ll just never be a morning person.
If it were a Tuesday, I would have about half an hour to create the impression of being a morning person, for the benefit of a local TV or radio audience. Though I’m hours away from my best level of functioning, coffee and professional necessity can make me just lucid enough to coherently answer the questions of the hosts on my near-weekly round of morning news appearances. It’s one of my best opportunities to make the case for a new idea or make the public aware of a new development in the accelerating growth of our city.
But this is Monday; no media today, and no early event, which means it’s a run day. It’s cold out, but there is no ice on the ground. Ice will deter us, and sometimes rain gets us down, but if it’s more than zero degrees out and not slippery, then Joe and Tim and I can do our morning run. I pull on track pants over long underwear, a U.S. Navy hoodie over a long-sleeve T-shirt, and think about the saying I heard once during a delegation to Scandinavia: there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. (It rhymes in Danish: ikke d?rlig v?r, bare d?rlig kl?r.) In other words, put on enough layers and you’ll be fine.
Even the stairs are grouchy; they creak no matter how softly I tread. Everything in this 1905 house moves a bit, breathes a bit, especially in the wintertime. When I step out onto the porch to fetch the South Bend Tribune, I can see my breath, just as I could see it indoors when the real estate agent showed me the house in 2008. It had been vacant for nearly two years; most of the pipes had burst, and an irregular chorus of low-battery beeps came from a half dozen smoke detectors upstairs. The porch was in near-collapse; some of the small columns holding up the second-floor veranda were split in two, yet somehow still in place. Two big columns held up a small balcony outside the attic, one with a hole in its base so big you could put your hand through it. Carpenter ants and termites had undermined the pillars. Inside, every room had either cracked plaster or strange and peeling wallpaper, or both.