A Fighting Chance

Kyle Sullivan, who ran communications for the campaign, also came along. I felt lucky to have him as part of the team; he was cheerful and easygoing and he knew all the reporters in Massachusetts. He had set up a meeting at the diner with Samuel Jacobs from the Daily Beast. The three of us sat at a small, four-seat table and had a lively and engaging conversation that lasted twenty minutes, maybe longer.

During my time on COP and then at the consumer agency, I had talked with a lot of people in the press about the need to hold big banks accountable. A typical interview would last a while—sometimes a half hour or more—and the conversation would usually include plenty of back-and-forth about ideas and sometimes even an in-depth discussion about data. So I waded into the Daily Beast interview the same way I always had—expecting a lively exchange about whatever issues particularly interested the reporter.

That fall, Occupy Wall Street was going full throttle and Occupy Boston was making headlines, so Jacobs and I spent much of our time talking about Wall Street—the lack of accountability, the fury people were feeling, the need for change. I talked about the consumer agency and the kind of difference it was beginning to make. He really seemed engaged, and Kyle said he thought it was a good interview. Me too.

I said good-bye to the customers, waved to the toddler, and headed on to our next event.

A week and a half later, I was surprised when a Daily Beast headline blared, WARREN TAKES CREDIT FOR OCCUPY WALL STREET, followed by a story that quoted my brother David declaring, “She’s not a lesbian.”

My first thought was, He called my seventy-year-old brother? Why? And I had to wonder: I’d been happily married to the same man for thirty-one years; why would anyone be talking about whether or not I’m a lesbian? And what difference would it make if I were a lesbian?

It took a minute for another thought to hit me: Surely the headline about my taking credit for Occupy Wall Street wasn’t accurate. Why on earth would I have said that? When people on the campaign trail had asked about the activists involved in Occupy Wall Street, I’d said that I understood their frustration but I had no connection to the protests.

I called Kyle. There must have been a mistake—right? Kyle kept recordings of most of the interviews in case of problems like this one. But Kyle had seen the story and already checked: “The sentence is in your interview.”

Huh?

Kyle was right: the sentence was there. Incredibly, I’d said: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they [Occupy Wall Street] do.” I was trying to say that I’d worked on these issues for a long time and felt really angry about what the banks had done to families. But the quote didn’t come out that way at all.

I was deeply embarrassed. My words sounded so puffy and self-important, and they made it seem as if I were trying to take credit for a protest I wasn’t even part of. I wondered if some alien had invaded my body and said something stupid while the real me was visiting a desert island. I wondered if politics turned everyone into an idiot—or was it just me? I wanted to cover my head with a blanket and never come out.

I was as fired up about the crash and about Wall Street as anyone, but the Occupy protesters were putting together their own movement in their own way. I tried to take back those words every time I was asked about them. But the words were out there, and I couldn’t erase them.

I learned a painful lesson from that interview. The old way of talking with the press—long conversations and lively discussions—was gone. There was a huge difference between being an “expert” and being a “candidate.” The game had changed.

I wanted to spend the campaign talking about what had gone wrong in America and what we could do differently, but to make that happen, I had to learn not to step on my own tongue. I was starting this race behind, and I realized that if I let even one sentence go sideways, the story wouldn’t be about the foreclosure crisis or the rising cost of college—it would be about the gaffe.

When I first started talking to people about running for office, a lot of people said to me, “Don’t let the consultants change you,” and I’d always assured them that I wouldn’t allow it to happen. But like it or not, I had to change. Not because of a consultant, but because I started to understand the cost of a stupid mistake. I wasn’t going to change who I was or what I was fighting for, but I was in a different boxing ring now. I needed to learn the new rules, and I needed to learn them fast.

And there was another reason to be careful: The Republican Party had hired someone with a video camera to follow me around. The so-called tracker was a big guy who pointed his camera at me every chance he could. I was filmed talking with people on the street, asking one of my staffers where the bathroom was, and blowing my nose while walking across a parking lot.