A Fighting Chance

The next day, we showed up hours ahead of my scheduled speaking time, exactly as instructed. Everyone had been given heavy plastic identification badges and told to hang them around their necks. The tags were checked and rechecked as we approached the arena, entered it, and then got closer and closer to the backstage waiting room. Going to the bathroom involved a complicated handoff from one station to another, as well as a series of confusing turns. After I navigated it once, I quit drinking water.

As I waited for my turn at the podium, I thought about this chance. An audience of twenty-five million—the number sounded beyond improbable. I figured I would never in my life get another chance to speak to this many people, so I’d better use this chance to say what I really wanted to say. And now I was about to step out on the stage.

I tried to breathe. I had exactly fifteen minutes—one shot—and I needed to get it right.

The system is rigged.

That’s what I wanted to talk about. For me, that captured what was wrong with the country, how our government had been hijacked by the rich and the powerful. How it didn’t have to be this way. How we could do better.

My heart was hammering. The stage manager gave me a little push, and I stepped into the blinding lights. People started applauding. It looked like a zillion people, on their feet and starting to yell. That made me even more nervous. My mouth went dry. My teeth felt sticky. In a flash of deep insight, while twenty-five million people looked on, I realized why it had been a bad idea to stop drinking water hours earlier.

But after a few seconds, something shifted. I stopped thinking of the delegates and all the others in the arena as just an anonymous crowd. I could see faces. I could see people wave. They were ready. No, they were eager.

It was like the night at the T-stop in Boston when that young guy told me this was his fight, too. This wasn’t just my race. This was our race.

For a brief, absurd moment, I wanted to stop. I felt a sudden urge to line up everyone in the audience so I could spend a minute with each person, shake hands or hug or touch an arm, and say, “I know how important this fight is. We’ll fight together and we’ll win.”

And then I took a deep breath and started.

I explained that I was here to talk about how hardworking people were getting the short end of the stick. I talked about Mitt Romney’s famous statement that “corporations are people”:

No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.



I asked the question asked by so many of the men and women I’d met: Is America’s government working for the people, or is it working only for the rich and powerful?

People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: They’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.



I talked about middle-class families, people who get up early, stay up late, people who run small businesses and struggle to meet payroll, people who worry about having enough money to make it to the end of the month.

These folks don’t resent that someone else makes more money. We’re Americans. We celebrate success. We just don’t want the game to be rigged.



Afterward, the crowd gave me a big round of applause.

President Clinton came next. I wasn’t nearly as memorable as the former president, but who is? Still, I’d said what I wanted to say, and it felt great to have the chance to say it.





Union Proud

After the convention, I shifted from high gear to superhigh gear. With the election only two months away, the days were starting earlier and running later. I felt like I was putting off everything until after the election, including sleep.

I was also eating less. I was nearly always scheduled for a “luncheon” or a “dinner,” but since I was always giving speeches and shaking hands, I almost never got more than a few bites at one of those events. I lived on hot, milky tea from Dunkin’ Donuts and fast food from everywhere. I lost more weight, and soon I constantly felt as though my pants were falling down. I started hitching them in back with a big safety pin. Every day brought lots of picture taking, and many times, as we’d line up to smile for the camera with our arms looped behind each other’s backs, I’d feel someone’s hand hit the thick bulge. I wondered if anyone speculated whether I was wearing a holster or carrying a wad of money back there.