A Fighting Chance

I had no experience in electoral politics, but I had learned enough to know that if I did get in the race, the other side would raise millions of dollars with one main goal—to make me look bad. I thought I’d lived a pretty clean life, but I wasn’t perfect. Would they dig up something—anything—that could be distorted to embarrass me? Even worse, what if they made up a bunch of lies about me? And what if they spent truckloads of money spreading those lies, and people actually believed them? What if my children or my brothers or my granddaughters got hit by any of this? It was a stomach-clenching thought.

Someone suggested I meet with a campaign research pro, an expert in so-called opposition research, or “oppo.” These were the guys who dug into opponents’ backgrounds to find out where there might be trouble. The idea was for them to turn that around and start looking at my own background.

The research guy asked me all kinds of questions about my personal life—taxes, health, troublesome kids, alcohol, drugs. I understood that there were things everyone had a right to know, but this was so detailed and so invasive—nothing private, nothing sacred. And then he asked more about my married life. At the beginning of our conversation, I’d told the researcher about Bruce, and since we’d been married for thirty years, somehow the guy had missed the fact that I’d been married before. When I mentioned it, his head snapped up as if a dozen alarm bells had just gone off.

He wrote down some basic details, then asked, “And where is your ex-husband now?”

“He’s dead.…”

Before I could take a breath and explain about Jim’s terrible illness—about the awful cancer, about the blow to Amelia and Alex, about how he never had the chance to know his beautiful grandchildren—the research guy shouted, “Great!”

I felt as if I’d been punched. The guy saw my face and tried to cover his blunder: “I mean, not ‘great’ that he’s dead…” But it was out there. And I couldn’t help wondering: Who are these people? Who could say such a thing? And what comes next?

Yes, I’ll Fight

I decided to dip my toe in the water, just to find out whether I could do even the simplest sort of campaigning. If I couldn’t, then there really wasn’t anything to decide.

In mid-August, I started meeting with small groups of people in living rooms and backyards around the state. A few days into this test run, I went to a gathering in downtown New Bedford. Ganesh Sitaraman, who had helped out in the early days of COP and was now a beginning law professor, offered to drive me to the meeting. We found a parking space, hopped out of the car, and were hit by a wall of heat. It was one of those steamy, end-of-summer mornings when your hair frizzes and your shirt sticks to your back about sixty seconds after you step outside.

The meeting was held in a building located on a cobblestone street, just down the block from the public library. Built in the 1890s, when the town had been both a thriving port and a manufacturing center, it featured an ornate front entrance and lots of marble, but the corkboard covering the entry walls and the peeling paint on the radiators spoke of years of hard use. We climbed the stairs, heading to a room that had been offered for the meeting. Inside the room, big fans whirred, but they didn’t do much good.

Fifty or so people showed up and took their seats in neat rows of metal folding chairs. I spoke for about fifteen minutes, talking about the hollowing out of America’s middle class and about how it would get worse if the Republicans in Congress kept cutting back on our investments in one another. I took questions for a while. When the meeting was over, we were all sweaty and the room was even hotter than before.

Not everyone rushed out. Some people stayed to ask for a picture, and others wanted to urge me to run, to offer advice, or just to wish me luck as I figured out what to do. It was noisy, a blur of voices and electric fans. Someone was starting to stack the chairs.

As the crowd thinned out a bit, a woman in her midfifties walked over. Her face was flushed and her hair was a tangle of tight curls. She looked hot and tired, maybe a little angry. She stopped a few steps away from me and said, “I walked two miles to get here.”

Okay, she had my attention.

She dropped her voice a notch. “I walked because I don’t have a car that runs. I don’t have a car that runs because I don’t have a job.”

As we stood facing each other, she laid out her life in just a few sentences:

I have two master’s degrees. I’m smart. I taught myself computer programming. I’ve been out of work for a year and a half. I’ve applied, I’ve volunteered, I’ve gone everywhere, but nothing.

She paused for a long time, then plunged back in. She explained that she had held one job or another since she was seventeen. She had put herself through school. She had always, always, always worked hard.

Then she stopped, took a step forward, and lowered her voice to a whisper, as if she didn’t want to hear what she was about to say.

Now I don’t know if I’m ever going to get a real job again.

I held out both hands and she took them. We stood there, not moving, just holding hands. I muttered something bland like “I’m so sorry,” but she didn’t give any sign of hearing me. She was well past the polite social conventions. She was hot, and she was exhausted—mind, body, and soul.