A Fighting Chance

At the end of one event, I thanked the supporters and my staff and said good-bye. After Bruce and I got in the car, he put his arms around me and gave me a kiss. I’d just started to unwind a little when Bruce yelled, “The tracker!” and we jumped apart, like two high school kids who had been caught making out.

Bruce and I made jokes about it—“Wanna go outside and get a big smooch?”—but every time I left the house, I could feel my shoulders tighten up.

Now I needed to change: I needed to measure every sentence. The really awful part was that I wasn’t sure I could.





A Rally in Framingham

On October 25, the day after the Daily Beast article came out, we had our first organizing meeting for volunteers. I’m not sure what I expected. For one thing, our brand-new campaign team was pretty distracted by the tornado of questions from reporters about my stupid Occupy quote.

Instead of starting out in Boston or Springfield for our first volunteer gathering, we picked Framingham, a town about twenty miles west of Boston. The election was still so far off that we didn’t know what sort of turnout to expect and tried to keep our expectations low.

My senior advisor, Doug Rubin, put the event together. He had helped run Governor Deval Patrick’s campaign and served as the governor’s chief of staff. He gave the kind of solid guidance that was enormously valuable. Doug was sure that a public event for volunteers was a great idea, and I trusted his savvy and judgment when he set this up.

But now, half an hour before the start of the event, I was loading up on calories at the nearby McDonald’s and having serious second thoughts. What if nobody came? I was pretty sure that my idiotic gaffe had ruined any chance of the event being a success. Since it was too late to do anything about it, I didn’t say it to Doug at the time. Better just to keep smiling.

The meeting was held in an auditorium at Framingham State University. As people started drifting in, I stood near the main entrance and greeted them. There were lots of young people—no surprise: we were on a college campus. But there were also lots of seniors. And families with kids. And vets wearing their service caps, a couple of people with walkers, and a middle-aged guy with his arm in a sling. Mothers and daughters. Sisters.

A number of people said something about their earlier political experiences: “I was with Teddy Kennedy in ’94.” “I helped Martha Coakley two years ago in her fight against Scott Brown.” “My husband and I had a coffee for Governor Patrick when he first got started.”

Others said they weren’t sure if they were going to volunteer, but they came because they wanted to hear what I had to say. Some said they were independents, and a few said they were registered Republicans.

But a lot of people said something very different:

“I’ve never been involved in politics in my life.”

“I’ve never campaigned for anyone.”

“This is my first time.”

Mine too.

When the line at the door was down to a trickle, I turned around to walk to the stage and realized that we’d filled the entire auditorium. There were several hundred people, a number of them standing around the edges of the room. I gasped—I mean really, not metaphorically.

I was so excited that I jumped up onstage and took a photo of all those volunteers on my cell phone, and we sent it out later that night on Twitter. The picture shot around the Internet. A few days later, one blogger wrote, “This looks more like the kind of crowd you’d see at a presidential volunteer meeting late in the campaign than a rally for a Senate candidate 13 months before the general election.” Wow.

The interest and enthusiasm I encountered that night knocked me over. I had barely started running for office, yet hundreds of people showed up. All these men and women and kids, out on a dark, chilly night, filling out forms so they could volunteer to spend time holding signs or making phone calls or knocking on doors. These people weren’t getting paid to help the campaign. Most of them had jobs and kids and mortgages and a long list of obligations. But they were here because this race mattered to them.

I was excited about all those volunteers, but I was also anxious. What if I let them down? My job was to win this race, and I had just screwed up pretty badly with the Daily Beast. What if they stood in the rain holding signs, gave up their weekends to knock on doors, and put their hopes in me? What if they made real sacrifices and I lost?

Later in the campaign, I ran into a college student at a Tstation. Bruce and I had decided to sneak out to the movies. We took the T to a big movie theater in downtown Boston, then had dinner at a little Italian place. By the time we headed home, it was about eleven o’clock. We stood on the subway platform with a few other late-night travelers, waiting for the train.