A Fighting Chance

The story starts in Oklahoma, where I grew up, and it tumbles through a life built around husbands and babies and setting the kitchen on fire. I made my way to a commuter college, a teaching job, a public law school, and, eventually, a professorship. As I started weaving in academic research, I became more and more worried about what was happening to America’s families, and the story shifted to Washington, where I picked my first public fight. In 1995, I agreed to take on what I thought would be some part-time public service for a couple of years, and I quickly got caught up in a battle over our nation’s bankruptcy law. I know that sounds a little obscure, but underneath it was a clash about whether our government exists to serve giant banks or struggling families.

The battle lasted much longer than I’d expected—a full ten years, in fact. My own life threaded through, of course, with graduations and funerals and grandchildren of my own. When that battle ended, I picked up another, and then another and another—a total of five big fights in all. They ranged from fighting for a fresh start for families who had suffered a job loss or a serious illness, to trying to force the government to be transparent about what was really going on with the bank bailout, to tangling with the big banks over dishonest mortgages. But the way I see it, even as they took me this way and that, all five battles were about a single, deeper threat: America’s middle class is under attack. Worse, it’s not under attack by some unstoppable force of nature. It’s in trouble because the game is deliberately rigged.

This book tells a very public story about fraud and bailouts and elections. It also tells a very personal story about mothers and daughters, day care and dogs, aging parents and cranky toddlers. It’s not meant to be a definitive account of any historical event—it’s just what I saw and what I lived. It’s also a story about losing, learning, and getting stronger along the way. It’s a story about what’s worth fighting for, and how sometimes, even when we fight against very powerful opponents, we can win.

I never expected to go to Washington. Heck, for the most part I never even wanted to go. But I’m here to fight for something that I believe is worth absolutely everything: to give each one of our kids a fighting chance to build a future full of promise and discovery.





1 | Choosing Battles

I KNOW THE DAY I grew up. I know the minute I grew up. I know why I grew up.

I was twelve, tall for my age and self-conscious about how thin I was. My bones stood out in my wrists, my knees, my elbows. I had crooked teeth and wore glasses for reading. I had straight-as-string dark brown hair that my aunt Bert cut twice a year. I already knew that I would never be beautiful like my much older cousin Candy, who was a sorority girl and had married the son of a successful car dealer.

I was standing in my mother’s bedroom on a warm spring day. Mother had pulled a black dress out of her closet and laid it on the bed. She was crying. My mother cried a lot after my daddy got sick.

A few months earlier, on a cold, gray Sunday, my daddy had been working on our car. Near evening, he came in and sat down at the kitchen table. He just sat there. Daddy was always on the move, so it was odd to see him sit still, looking down, as if he was concentrating on something. His skin looked splotchy and his hands shook.

I was at the table reading, and Mother was at the stove, frying something for dinner. She asked him what was wrong. When he didn’t say anything, she accused him of being sick, and he denied it. I closed my book and went upstairs to my bedroom.

After a while, Mother called up the stairs, “Betsy, we’re going to the hospital. You stay here. Eat your dinner.” By then my three brothers had all grown up and moved out, so it was just me and my little dog, Missy. After dinner, Missy got the scraps and I waited for someone to come home.

For the next week, Aunt Bee and Uncle Stanley picked me up from school. Every afternoon, they took me to the hospital, where Mother sat by Daddy’s bed. Daddy was slim, with close-cropped gray hair. He had light blue eyes and fair skin that was always slightly sunburned, but now he looked gray and tired.

All week, people from our church came by our house with casseroles and thick, sweet desserts. I remember how they used the words heart attack. Everyone paused before they said it. “When your father had his, uh, heart attack, was he working outside?” “I heard your daddy had, um, a heart attack. I hope he’s going to be all right.” The pauses scared me.

After Daddy got out of the hospital, he stayed home for a long time.

He ate poached eggs with the yolks taken out, and when he lifted a bag of groceries out of the car, Mother would yell, “Don, stop! Stop that!” I could hear a thread of panic in her voice.

We lived in Oklahoma City. My parents had bought this particular house because it was right inside the boundary line of what my mother believed was the best school district around. The house had wiring that sparked and plaster that fell off the ceiling, but Daddy was handy, and it had a big yard where my mother grew irises and roses. That spring, Daddy didn’t work around the house. Mostly, he sat by himself on an old wooden chair in the garage, smoking and staring somewhere far away.

My mother usually picked me up from school in our bronze-toned station wagon. One day she showed up driving the old, off-white Studebaker that Daddy had been driving back and forth to work. As I climbed in the car, I asked where the station wagon was.

“It’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone.”