A Fighting Chance

Later, after a rally on the South Shore, an attractive woman in her fifties stayed around to introduce me to her tall, good-looking husband. She was losing him to the mists of Alzheimer’s, and she pleaded with me for more investment in Alzheimer’s research. She also worried that his day care center would fall victim to budget cuts. She just wanted to hold on to her job and keep her beloved husband at home a while longer.

She was right, too. Keeping her husband at home, and keeping her working, made sense economically and was worth fighting for on those grounds alone. But her story raised a much deeper point. Fighting for the man with Alzheimer’s or fighting for the two little boys was also about our basic humanity. What kind of people are we? What are our shared values? Many congressional Republicans think it’s fine to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to giant oil companies and corporations that park their money overseas, even as medical research budgets are hit by another round of cuts and care centers have long waiting lists. But those spending choices don’t reflect the values of the American people.

A mother and a wife were fighting for their loved ones, and I wanted the chance to fight alongside them. I wanted it passionately. I wanted to remind people that every one of these policy fights is also deeply personal. When we make choices about investments in scientific research, millions of people are touched, one person at a time.

Jobs are personal, too. At one construction site, I asked the workers how long they were going between projects. A big guy in his fifties, a heavy-equipment operator, talked about what it was like to go eleven months with no work. “I’d show up every day, follow every rumor and every lead, but nothing—I mean, nothing.” He talked about his kids, an older boy who wanted to go to college, and about his wife trying to get an extra shift at the diner. Others added their own stories—seventeen months without work, six months, nine months. They talked about how hard it was between jobs. The big guy said, “I sat home and wondered how far the life insurance would go. Would they be better off if I just died?”

He had worked so hard and played by all the rules, and it hadn’t been his decisions that brought down the economy. He hadn’t asked for any special deals. He just wanted a fighting chance.

For a long time, I would wake up in the night and think about the big guy, about the two little boys, about the man with Alzheimer’s. I’d feel a weight on my chest. More than ever, I wanted to win this race. I wanted the chance to fight for them.





I Am Woman

In those early months in the race, reporters would sometimes ask me a variation of the question “What’s it like to run as a woman?”

I always smiled mildly, but I hated the question. I was pretty sure no one asked Scott Brown how it felt to run as a man.

Still, I knew the subtext. No woman had ever been elected senator or governor in Massachusetts—and a lot of people thought no woman could be elected senator or governor. The Woman Question delivered a not-so-subtle message: Don’t kid yourself, girlie. Big-time politics is a boys’ game.

Early on, I spoke to several women who helped me think about whether I should run for office. One of them was Stephanie Schriock, the dynamic head of EMILY’s List. Stephanie spends a lot of her time recruiting women to run for office, and she promised that if I decided to run, she would help me through the campaign. She wanted me to jump into the race, but she never sugarcoated how tough it would be. One of her remarks stuck with me: We need to try. When a woman runs, she makes it easier for the next woman to run, and that’s how we’ll win.

Back in the summer, I had also spoken with Patty Murray, a senior member of the US Senate, about whether I should run. I started listing the reasons I might not be good enough for this job.

After a few minutes, Patty cut me off: “Oh, please.” Then she told me that women always think of reasons they aren’t good enough. Men never ask if they’re good enough to hold public office, Patty said; they just ask if they can raise enough money to win.

Huh.

I also talked with Mandy Grunwald, who had worked with a lot of women who’d run for office and who signed on as my media consultant. She knew more about electing women to office—and men, too—than pretty much anyone on earth. Early on, she explained one of the facts of public life: “It happens with every woman. People have to talk about how she looks before they can talk about what she says.”

I tried to get over it, but I always winced when I saw a news report that started with a description of my appearance. The day after I announced my candidacy, some clever reporter said I was “a strand of pearls short of looking like the head of the PTA.”

Oh goodie. Anyone want to offer a witty comment about my glasses or my hair?

Whose Kids?