A Fighting Chance (37 page)

[The agreement has] loopholes the Teamsters could drive a truck through, the longshoremen could steer a ship through, the machinists could fit a plane through, and government unions could drive forklifts of paperwork through.

And then it all went quiet.

Dodging Poison Darts

By January, life had taken on a new rhythm. I had taught my last class at Harvard—maybe my last class ever—and now my long days were scheduled to the gills, with every ten-minute block accounted for. Meeting-meeting-meeting, call-call-call. It was exhausting, but exhilarating, too.

What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side. I would almost persuade myself that I was starting to get the hang of full-throttle campaigning and then—
bam!
Out of left field, the state Republican Party, or the Brown campaign, or some blogger, would launch a rocket at me.

Some of the stingers were silly, some were nasty, and some were downright nuts. They accused me of plagiarizing my own book. They said I hated people who drank beer. Whatever the particulars, I’d get home from a long day of meeting with people and giving speeches, then end up in the basement late at night, digging out old calendars or pulling up old book manuscripts so I could rebut some ridiculous claim. I half expected someone to declare that I had given birth to space aliens, but at least that one passed me by.

The attacks were a big distraction and at times nerve-racking. And they were unrelenting. It seemed as though a new missile would sail in every day—except for the days when it was two or three missiles.

One morning, I stepped out of the shower just as the radio blared some accusation from a Republican Party official. I was dripping wet, and before I could think, I yelled, “Could you please wait until I get some clothes on?”

Bruce started picking up the papers off the front porch each morning and going through them, page by page, before he put them out on the kitchen table. On good days, he’d shout, “Clear!” and ask if I wanted oatmeal for breakfast.

But a lot of mornings there was no “Clear!” and no breakfast. It felt as if I were running through a forest at full speed while a band of hooligans threw poisoned darts at me. I needed to watch where I was headed and go as fast as possible, but I also needed to duck.

Bad News

One Monday afternoon in late January, Otis started vomiting. We mopped up and took him out for a walk, but every few hours he got sick again. We felt sorry for him, but not too alarmed. For a big, hunky dog, he had a delicate constitution. We’d seen this before, and we figured he’d picked up something yucky off the sidewalk and eaten it while we weren’t looking.

In the morning I hit the campaign trail, and Bruce took Otis to the vet. The vet said it was some kind of gastric thing, but he wanted to keep Otis overnight for some tests.

That was the first little ping of warning. Otis had never stayed overnight for a tummy problem.

The next afternoon I was riding in the car, headed to Worcester for some meetings, when Bruce called.

“Babe, I just left the vet.” He paused, and I could hear him breathing. His voice was tight. “It’s bad. Otis has lymphoma.” I felt the whole car start to sway. Otis? Lymphoma?

For a moment I sat very still. Suddenly I was acutely aware that I never spent even a minute of the campaign alone. I didn’t have an office where I could shut the door or even a ladies’ room where I could get away for a few minutes. Instead, my young staffer Adam Travis picked me up almost every morning in what we called the Blue Bomber (a bright blue Ford Escape) and drove me around to the day’s events. I would ride along next to him, making calls or reading briefings, until we jumped out and met with people. We refueled at Burger King or Chipotle, but our job was to get out and spend time with people. Some days it was just Adam and me, and other days we’d have two or three people riding with us in the backseat.

Today we had a full backseat. When Bruce hung up, I wanted to weep. I wanted to go home and hold Otis. I wanted Bruce to hold both of us. I wanted to cry out loud and blow my nose and cry some more. Instead, I leaned my head against the cold window and cried as inconspicuously as I could. I didn’t want to scare the young staffers in the car. I was pretty sure that Senate candidates weren’t supposed to cry.

The next two days were a blur. I had a full schedule, and Bruce was teaching, but he got Otis to MSPCA-Angell animal hospital. Otis was in such terrible shape that the vets started emergency treatments to stabilize him. From healthy on Monday morning to nearly dead on Thursday night. The world felt very uncertain.

Otis’s new doctor, Carrie Wood, called us to explain that the lymphoma would eventually be fatal. But she also told us that the disease could be treated and that about 50 percent of all dogs given treatments were alive a year later. Of those dogs, about 50 percent were still alive a year after that, and so on. Otis had a good chance of being with us for another couple of years—and maybe longer.

I was worried about what the treatments would do to Otis. Would he be sick all the time? Would he be in pain?

But Carrie said none of that would happen. The treatments would generally make him feel better, and he wouldn’t have any of the awful side effects that people experience with chemo treatments. We said to go ahead.

When we picked Otis up from the hospital on Friday afternoon, he was shaky but clearly happy to head home. I didn’t think he could climb into the backseat, but once I opened the car door, he was halfway in before I could bend down to help him. He was taking no chances of being left behind.

The treatments worked like magic. Otis seemed to bounce back as quickly as he had fallen ill. He was cheerful and frisky—or at least as frisky as Otis ever got. He was ready for his walks, and he began to gain back some of the weight he’d lost during the Week from Hell.

But the diagnosis changed me. Time with Otis seemed more precious, something not to be taken for granted. Before I left early in the morning or when the three of us settled in late at night, I often tried to snap a picture of Otis, as if I could somehow save these minutes. I spent hours on the phone, and I started sitting on the floor and gently combing Otis and rubbing his belly while I talked to people miles away. Otis seemed changed, too. Instead of snoring softly in another room while I worked on my computer, he moved closer to me. He would more often rouse himself and come over to get his ears rubbed or ask me to lean over and put my forehead against his. We were in this together.

But the campaign never slowed down. Every day the schedulers tried to squeeze in just a few more phone calls, a few more meetings. I went faster and faster.

As the weeks flew by, all time seemed more precious. Out in California, Atticus was learning to walk. Lavinia was moving up to the next level in her gymnastics class. Octavia was in fifth grade, and suddenly she was almost as tall as Amelia. I worried that real life was passing me by.

Alex had an announcement of his own: He was getting married to his girlfriend, Elise. He was a lucky guy. She was kind and gentle, with the sweetest smile I had ever seen. Alex and Elise were planning to buy a home in Los Angeles not too far from Amelia. He assured me that he and Elise would get married
after
the election. The campaign seemed to have ripple effects everywhere.

Back in Oklahoma, my brothers were getting older. Don Reed had climbed up on his workbench to change a lightbulb, and on the way down he took a bad fall. David had a cold he couldn’t shake, and John’s knees were bothering him. There was a snowstorm, then a windstorm, and later there was a hailstorm. I tried to call my brothers when I could, but I was constantly on the road, traveling around the state to meet with mayors and stop by union halls and senior citizen centers.

Was I doing the right thing? I’d wake up before the alarm went off in the morning and lie there thinking, I just want to be with family today. Then I’d get up and head out to a meeting or a breakfast or a rally. I’d talk about an America that once built the greatest middle class on earth. And I’d talk about banks that preyed on those families and a Republican leadership that thought Washington’s job was to serve the banks, not hardworking families. I talked about the huge number of Americans who were getting older and how we urgently needed to put money into medical research for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. This is the moment we should be investing in the next generation of young scientists, not cutting their funding. And as we sped along in the Blue Bomber from one stop to the next, I’d think about how this was the moment to speak out and how much I wanted to be in this fight.

Most nights I’d go home and start making phone calls while Bruce prepared for classes. Then Bruce and Otis and I would plonk down on the couch, watch a few minutes of TV, and collapse into bed. And I would often wake up in the night, straining to hear Otis’s breathing, needing to make sure he was still with us.

Mothers for Justice and Equality

By now, Roger Lau had signed on as the campaign’s political director, which meant he took me everywhere in the state—absolutely everywhere—to meet with everyone. Roger is the kind of person who always tells the truth, and people trust him. He is also the only guy I know who has tried out every hot dog stand, pizza place, 99, and McDonald’s from Pittsfield to Provincetown, and he was quick to provide a review of each one. This was critical information as we crisscrossed the state.

Roger had brought on Jess Torres to be his deputy, and on a dreary Saturday morning in March, Jess accompanied me to meet with Mothers for Justice and Equality. Jess is smart as a whip, but his real strength is that he’s fundamentally kind, and this was a morning in which everyone could use a little extra kindness. Gathering at Faith Christian Church in Dorchester, we numbered about fifty people, nearly all women, seated at round tables with about eight to ten chairs at each one. Most were mothers who had lost children to violence. Some had lost other family members, and some were friends or supporters. Also attending were a few religious leaders and community activists and an elected official or two, but this meeting belonged to the mothers.

By this point, I had gotten pretty comfortable standing in front of a crowd of people and making an energetic pitch about what we could do to create a better future for our children. But in this room, I was wholly inadequate. I didn’t have words to address a woman who had lost her child. The grief of these mothers was so overwhelming and their mission was so enormous and I had so little to offer.

Kim Odom, co-pastor of True Vine Church in Dorchester, led the group. Pastor Kim stood at her table and talked about the death of her son Stephen. She named him, and she named the moment she had lost him four years earlier. For an instant, she wasn’t with us; she was with her beloved son as he died. He had been thirteen, a good kid on his way home from a basketball game. After he was killed, she dedicated her life to preventing violence in her community.

When Pastor Kim had begun talking, I left the podium and stood with her. And when another mother rose, I moved to stand with her, and then with another mother. It was all I could do.

I knew the numbers. We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.

The politics surrounding this issue make me want to tear my hair out. I know that Americans care fiercely about keeping our kids safe. So why do we toss common sense out the window when it comes to protecting our kids from gun violence?

Of course, not every kid has the same risk of becoming a victim. A large number of those gun deaths occur in poor neighborhoods. Gang violence and street crime pose a far smaller threat in well-off suburbs than in gritty inner cities. I’d spent decades trying to ring the alarm bell about the economic stress on middle-class families, but lately I’d been talking more about poor families, too. Low-income families have it so much harder: they start further behind, so that even the smallest blows can knock a family to its knees. Car trouble or a sick baby can mean losing a day or two at work, and any emergency can mean a trip to a payday lender and stepping into a trap that can cost thousands of dollars. Piled on the economic stress is the reality that the ugly claw of violence tears more often at poor families than rich ones.

The challenges faced by poor families attempting to build economic security are far more extreme, but the same erosion of investment in the future that is hollowing out America’s middle class is also destroying the more limited opportunities that poorer families have to pull themselves forward. Much of what I was fighting for in an effort to rebuild the middle class—education, a thriving economy with good jobs, a level playing field where everyone pays their share—would provide an enormous boost to those in poverty as well. Building opportunity is about building it for everyone.

It comes back to the same question: Do we take care of some of our children, or do we build opportunity for
all
our children? For the mothers at Faith Christian that morning, that question came much, much too late. For them, the answer was: No, we do not take care of all our children. There would be no future for their beloved sons and daughters.

I spoke to the group for just a few minutes that morning. My words felt too small for such big wounds, but Pastor Kim was kind, and so were the other mothers in the room. In the end, we held hands and prayed together.

We prayed for all our children.

Native American

The long months of campaigning seemed to be having some positive effect. And if a victory over Scott Brown still looked like an uphill battle, I was at least gaining some ground.

Then the race turned really nasty.

It started in April with a question. Sixteen years earlier, in an interview in Harvard’s newspaper, a university spokesman had defended the faculty’s lack of diversity by noting my Native American background, and now a reporter wanted to know the details. I didn’t recall the long-ago article, and when the reporter asked about it, I fumbled the question. Within a few days, we found ourselves in a full-blown campaign frenzy, with Republicans demanding that I prove who my ancestors were and accusing me of getting my job at Harvard under false pretenses.