A Fighting Chance

When I had a spare minute, I spent it studying. I tried to digest the new job numbers or the latest developments in Iran. Ganesh took a leave of absence from his job as a law professor so he could be policy director for the campaign. In short spaces between campaign events and fundraising, he gave me policy briefings and arranged for experts to give me mini tutorials on energy policy or health care or advanced manufacturing. Madeleine Albright came to help, and she spent a day talking to me about issues from all around the globe. It was like being back in the classroom, except this time I got to be the student. It felt as if my brain was being stretched in a thousand directions at once.

I slept less, ate less, worked more.

Part of campaigning was telling my own story. At first it felt a little funny. I had spent years talking about the stress on middle-class families. But it’s one thing to discuss stagnant wages and dangerous mortgages and economic issues that affected millions of people; it’s another thing to talk about me and my family. Over time I found that describing my background and saying a few things about how I got here seemed to strike a chord with people—the story of the daughter of a maintenance man who graduated from a commuter college and ended up as a professor at Harvard.

When I mentioned paying $50 a semester for college some people gasped, but a lot of people nodded. Pretty much everyone I talked to agreed that young people needed a shot at a college education, but support for education was shrinking. A kid going to a state college today would pay (adjusted for inflation) about three times more than his or her dad had paid a generation earlier. America had once invested in young people like me, but we weren’t providing those kinds of opportunities to kids anymore—at least not at a price middle-class families could afford.

Late one afternoon, I spoke in the dining room of a house in a small town near the south coast. The chairs had been pulled out of the room, and about twenty people had crowded in, standing around the table or leaning against the walls. It was clear from their uniforms and work shirts that several of those in attendance had stopped off after their shift at work was over. A couple of people had parked their children in the living room, where the television had been turned down low.

I talked about building opportunities, about building a future for all our kids. As we moved to questions, the conversation took on more energy. We talked about children in overcrowded classrooms and what it takes to build an economy that will produce good jobs for all our kids, not just a few. We talked about why kids need safe neighborhoods and access to health care.

As the group broke up, a man in his sixties came over to me. He was thin, with the leathery skin of someone who had worked outside for many years. He wore a Vietnam vets cap that was frayed on the right side of the bill; he’d probably grabbed it there a million times.

He didn’t smile, and his voice was flat. I looked for clues—maybe a little hostile? I wasn’t sure.

“Yeah, you talk about building a future,” he said. “But what about transgender? What about them?” Now he looked full-on angry.

Wow. That seemed to fall out of the sky. I felt the instinctive need to crouch, as if we were about to get into a fight.

I said just as flatly: “We build a future for all our children. And that means transgender children. All our children—no exceptions.”

He held my gaze for a moment and then said: “Damn right.”

He went on to explain that he had a grown son who was transgender. “In a million years you’ll never know the special kind of hell he has gone through. I want somebody who fights and doesn’t back off.”

I relaxed. A future for all our kids, every one. This was a fight I was ready for.

Running a Campaign Without Karl Rove

In November, Karl Rove got in the race. He and his Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its sister organization, Crossroads GPS, were targeting Democrats they thought were vulnerable, and apparently I was high on that list. Control of the Senate would hang in the balance in 2012, and the Republican Party had every intention of keeping Scott Brown in office. They were taking no chances.