A Fighting Chance (35 page)

I said good-bye to the customers, waved to the toddler, and headed on to our next event.

A week and a half later, I was surprised when a
Daily Beast
headline blared,
WARREN TAKES CREDIT FOR OCCUPY WALL STREET,
followed by a story that quoted my brother David declaring, “She’s not a lesbian.”

My first thought was, He called my seventy-year-old brother? Why? And I had to wonder: I’d been happily married to the same man for thirty-one years; why would anyone be talking about whether or not I’m a lesbian? And what difference would it make if I
were
a lesbian?

It took a minute for another thought to hit me: Surely the headline about my taking credit for Occupy Wall Street wasn’t accurate. Why on earth would I have said that? When people on the campaign trail had asked about the activists involved in Occupy Wall Street, I’d said that I understood their frustration but I had no connection to the protests.

I called Kyle. There must have been a mistake—right? Kyle kept recordings of most of the interviews in case of problems like this one. But Kyle had seen the story and already checked: “The sentence is in your interview.”

Huh?

Kyle was right: the sentence was there. Incredibly, I’d said: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they [Occupy Wall Street] do.” I was trying to say that I’d worked on these issues for a long time and felt really angry about what the banks had done to families. But the quote didn’t come out that way at all.

I was deeply embarrassed. My words sounded so puffy and self-important, and they made it seem as if I were trying to take credit for a protest I wasn’t even part of. I wondered if some alien had invaded my body and said something stupid while the real me was visiting a desert island. I wondered if politics turned everyone into an idiot—or was it just me? I wanted to cover my head with a blanket and never come out.

I was as fired up about the crash and about Wall Street as anyone, but the Occupy protesters were putting together their own movement in their own way. I tried to take back those words every time I was asked about them. But the words were out there, and I couldn’t erase them.

I learned a painful lesson from that interview. The old way of talking with the press—long conversations and lively discussions—was gone. There was a huge difference between being an “expert” and being a “candidate.” The game had changed.

I wanted to spend the campaign talking about what had gone wrong in America and what we could do differently, but to make that happen, I had to learn not to step on my own tongue. I was starting this race behind, and I realized that if I let even one sentence go sideways, the story wouldn’t be about the foreclosure crisis or the rising cost of college—it would be about the gaffe.

When I first started talking to people about running for office, a lot of people said to me, “Don’t let the consultants change you,” and I’d always assured them that I wouldn’t allow it to happen. But like it or not, I had to change. Not because of a consultant, but because I started to understand the cost of a stupid mistake. I wasn’t going to change who I was or what I was fighting for, but I was in a different boxing ring now. I needed to learn the new rules, and I needed to learn them fast.

And there was another reason to be careful: The Republican Party had hired someone with a video camera to follow me around. The so-called tracker was a big guy who pointed his camera at me every chance he could. I was filmed talking with people on the street, asking one of my staffers where the bathroom was, and blowing my nose while walking across a parking lot.

At the end of one event, I thanked the supporters and my staff and said good-bye. After Bruce and I got in the car, he put his arms around me and gave me a kiss. I’d just started to unwind a little when Bruce yelled, “The tracker!” and we jumped apart, like two high school kids who had been caught making out.

Bruce and I made jokes about it—“Wanna go outside and get a big smooch?”—but every time I left the house, I could feel my shoulders tighten up.

Now I needed to change: I needed to measure every sentence. The really awful part was that I wasn’t sure I could.

A Rally in Framingham

On October 25, the day after the
Daily Beast
article came out, we had our first organizing meeting for volunteers. I’m not sure what I expected. For one thing, our brand-new campaign team was pretty distracted by the tornado of questions from reporters about my stupid Occupy quote.

Instead of starting out in Boston or Springfield for our first volunteer gathering, we picked Framingham, a town about twenty miles west of Boston. The election was still so far off that we didn’t know what sort of turnout to expect and tried to keep our expectations low.

My senior advisor, Doug Rubin, put the event together. He had helped run Governor Deval Patrick’s campaign and served as the governor’s chief of staff. He gave the kind of solid guidance that was enormously valuable. Doug was sure that a public event for volunteers was a great idea, and I trusted his savvy and judgment when he set this up.

But now, half an hour before the start of the event, I was loading up on calories at the nearby McDonald’s and having serious second thoughts. What if nobody came? I was pretty sure that my idiotic gaffe had ruined any chance of the event being a success. Since it was too late to do anything about it, I didn’t say it to Doug at the time. Better just to keep smiling.

The meeting was held in an auditorium at Framingham State University. As people started drifting in, I stood near the main entrance and greeted them. There were lots of young people—no surprise: we were on a college campus. But there were also lots of seniors. And families with kids. And vets wearing their service caps, a couple of people with walkers, and a middle-aged guy with his arm in a sling. Mothers and daughters. Sisters.

A number of people said something about their earlier political experiences: “I was with Teddy Kennedy in ’94.” “I helped Martha Coakley two years ago in her fight against Scott Brown.” “My husband and I had a coffee for Governor Patrick when he first got started.”

Others said they weren’t sure if they were going to volunteer, but they came because they wanted to hear what I had to say. Some said they were independents, and a few said they were registered Republicans.

But a lot of people said something very different:

“I’ve never been involved in politics in my life.”

“I’ve never campaigned for anyone.”

“This is my first time.”

Mine too.

When the line at the door was down to a trickle, I turned around to walk to the stage and realized that we’d filled the entire auditorium. There were several hundred people, a number of them standing around the edges of the room. I gasped—I mean really, not metaphorically.

I was so excited that I jumped up onstage and took a photo of all those volunteers on my cell phone, and we sent it out later that night on Twitter. The picture shot around the Internet. A few days later, one blogger wrote, “This looks more like the kind of crowd you’d see at a presidential volunteer meeting late in the campaign than a rally for a Senate candidate 13 months before the general election.” Wow.

The interest and enthusiasm I encountered that night knocked me over. I had barely started running for office, yet hundreds of people showed up. All these men and women and kids, out on a dark, chilly night, filling out forms so they could volunteer to spend time holding signs or making phone calls or knocking on doors. These people weren’t getting paid to help the campaign. Most of them had jobs and kids and mortgages and a long list of obligations. But they were here because this race mattered to them.

I was excited about all those volunteers, but I was also anxious. What if I let them down? My job was to win this race, and I had just screwed up pretty badly with the
Daily Beast
. What if they stood in the rain holding signs, gave up their weekends to knock on doors, and put their hopes in me? What if they made real sacrifices and I lost?

Later in the campaign, I ran into a college student at a Tstation. Bruce and I had decided to sneak out to the movies. We took the T to a big movie theater in downtown Boston, then had dinner at a little Italian place. By the time we headed home, it was about eleven o’clock. We stood on the subway platform with a few other late-night travelers, waiting for the train.

A thin young man—really just a kid—in a loose-fitting suit, with a backpack slung over his shoulder, looked at me and smiled. A minute later, he came over. “Are you Elizabeth Warren?”

He was from central Massachusetts, the first in his family to go to college. He was attending school in Boston and he loved it, but he said he worried about money all the time. He worked a full-time job during the school year and took two jobs during the summer to try to cover as much as he could. As we waited for the subway, we talked about student loans, declining government investment in universities, and rising tuition. Finally, he asked if he could take a picture. Bruce snapped the shot on the young man’s phone. The kid smiled and started to walk away, then turned around.

“I give you money every month, and I’m taking on hours so I can give more.”

I felt as if he’d hit me with a spear right between the ribs. Good Lord—this kid was working until nearly eleven o’clock on a Saturday night and he was sending
me
money? I smiled weakly and said something along the lines of, “Uh, I’m doing okay in the campaign. Maybe you should keep your money. I’ll be fine. Really.”

He looked back at me. “No, I’m part of this campaign. This is my fight, too.”

And that really was the answer. It wasn’t just my campaign. My name was on the ticket, but these folks weren’t volunteering and donating for me. They were supporting something a lot bigger. When I said that we were better off if we invested in the future together, they already knew it was true—and they lived it. They thought America could do better, and they wanted it every bit as much as I did. And they would do everything possible to try to make that better future a reality.

This is my fight, too.
It still gives me goose bumps.

Worth the Investment

As the fall raced by, I continued dividing my time between politics and teaching. At the end of the term, I planned to stop teaching and start campaigning full-time. Late that fall, it began to sink in that it was at least possible that I would soon teach my last class ever.

It was a bittersweet thought. Sure, I was revved up about the coming election, and I wanted very much to win. But if I joined the Senate, I would miss the classroom terribly. I loved holding a piece of chalk and watching the lightbulbs go on for my students—love love loved it. It’s what I had wanted to do since I was a little girl. Leaving it behind would be hard.

But I was starting to discover that although running for office was sometimes awful, the experience could also be deeply personal. Not when I was smiling for cameras or giving a speech to a big group—it would happen unexpectedly, during the intimate moments of campaigning. One day I sat in an ice-cream shop with the mother of two boys, both of whom had been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. They were handsome little guys, active and ready to bolt from their chairs at any moment. As the boys ate, their mother instinctively kept a hand on one and a close eye on his brother, but that didn’t distract her from making a passionate plea. Please, please work for more funding for research, she said. “We’re so close.”

The boys’ mother was right. Autism, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer—science is advancing at a pace people only dreamed of a generation ago, and now we are right on the edge of discoveries that will change the world for millions of people. Besides, money invested in research creates opportunities for businesses to develop. Nanotechnology, MRIs, fiber optics, GPS, tumor detection—federally supported research has propelled our businesses forward, giving us a competitive edge around the world. Even medical research is a solid financial investment. Every $100 spent supporting basic medical research generates an estimated $221 in new business activity. We get healthier
and
we double our money—that’s how to build a stronger future.

For more than half a century, that was part of America’s strategy: Invest in science. But as a share of our gross domestic product (GDP), today our federal investment in research is half what it was when I was growing up.
Half!
I thought that now more than ever—with so many discoveries right on the cusp—we should be pushing harder on the accelerator and investing more money in research, not putting on the brakes.

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.