A Fighting Chance

Even as he doubled down with his commercials about my Native American background, Brown opened a new front in the ad wars: he claimed I’d hurt asbestos victims. Many people who worked around asbestos developed mesothelioma, a horribly painful lung cancer that is nearly always fatal. A few years earlier, I had served as a consultant on a case to protect trusts that had set aside money for asbestos victims. Most asbestos victims supported the trusts—and were on the same side of the litigation over this issue as I was—because they knew this was the best way to get some payment for their injuries.

A lot of asbestos victims were upset about Brown’s attack ad, and some of them protested outside his office. Hoping to counteract the misinformation in the Brown commercials, we filmed two short ads featuring people who had lost a husband or a father to mesothelioma. Brown then claimed that these were “paid actors” rather than real victims. If many asbestos victims were upset before, now they were furious. They had gone through unspeakable suffering, and now they were being insulted. Said one victim: “Let Scott Brown tell me to my face that I am nothing but a paid actor, and I’ll set him straight on what it was like to watch my father suffocate to death.” Brown issued an apology.

As the race tightened, the ads were relentless. A lot of people volunteered to make ads for me, including Art Ramalho, the owner of the West End Gym in Lowell. Art has trained generations of working-class kids to box, and he is a local legend in Lowell. The first time I visited his gym, I saw the worn, wooden boxes next to the speed bags, and it took me a few minutes to connect the dots—some of the kids who came here were small enough to need a boost to reach the bag. Art has opened his gym—and his heart—to try to help the countless kids who have come his way.

Art went on camera to call me a “fighter” for working people. I wasn’t as fast with my fists as the fighters in Art’s gym, but I was grateful for Art’s help.

Many of our other ads talked about what I wanted to do in Washington, and some criticized Brown for how he voted. Some of our ads were pretty tough, but I didn’t make personal attacks—I wasn’t going to be drawn into that. Even so, I suspect the good people of Massachusetts were sick to death of political ads. I know I was.

Because That’s What Girls Do

As we headed into the final stretch of the campaign, women—and women’s issues—shot into the foreground in an unexpected way.

It had started several months earlier, when Republicans in the Senate led another effort to cut back on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Back in February 2012, they had introduced the Blunt Amendment, which would let a business or insurance company deny coverage for any medical service if it cited any vague “moral objection” to such coverage. No one was fooled: this amendment was intended to give any employer the right to deny insurance coverage for birth control. As it happened, my opponent in the Senate race didn’t just vote in favor of the amendment; he cosponsored it. I had criticized Senator Brown for his vote at the time, but he had doubled down and gone on the offense, attacking me.

Then, in August, Missouri congressman Todd Akin caused a firestorm when he asserted that women don’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” That was bad enough, but in October, Republican Richard Mourdock from Indiana said he believed that pregnancy due to rape was “something that God intended to happen.” Suddenly, people were talking about women’s issues with a new kind of intensity. The gains that so many of us (including me) had come to take for granted no longer seemed so secure.

The speed with which this hit the campaign was stunning. Yes, I was a woman candidate. (Well, duh.) And yes, I am all-the-way committed to reproductive freedom, equal pay for equal work, and equal opportunities. But I had focused my campaign on middle-class economic security and crumbling infrastructure. Those are issues that profoundly (and sometimes disproportionately) affect women, but no one calls them “women’s issues.”

I was genuinely horrified that a United States congressman would call any kind of rape “legitimate.” It made my skin crawl. Heck, I was horrified that a bunch of senators wanted to roll back coverage for birth control. I wanted to get right in their faces and yell: Are you kidding me? Are you guys from the Stone Age? After decades of fighting these battles, surely America’s women deserved better. A lot better.