A Fighting Chance (33 page)

I was worried, but that’s not the same as being afraid. I knew the agency itself was on strong footing. Just before I’d left, we had endured a top-to-bottom inspection by the inspectors general. (The very title
inspector general
made me want to check to make sure my fingernails were clean and my shoes were shined.) We had received a glowing review for all our administrative organization and execution—we’d set up the agency without a hitch. And now the agency’s real work was under way. In the next two years alone, Rich would recover nearly $500 million that the banks had fraudulently charged their customers. Holly would help save lots of homes for service members deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. By June 2013, more than 175,000 people would turn to the consumer hotline for help.

We were starting to prove our case to more and more Americans: This consumer agency was worth fighting for. And every day the agency did some good, that fight would get easier—or so I fervently hoped.

Did David or Goliath win? The fight wasn’t over. Even so, I’d give this round to David.

But my role was over. It was time to hand this slingshot to someone else.

6 | The Battle for the Senate

H
OME AT LAST.
It was August 2011. We unpacked from Legoland and went to the Summer Shack for fried clams and beer. Bruce mowed the lawn and I attacked the overgrown holly bushes and maimed a couple of evergreens. The new school year would start soon: I got out my books and posted the reading assignment for the first class.

But life wasn’t quiet. Speculation was at high pitch about whether I might run for the Senate. The very popular Scott Brown had been in office for only a year and a half, but in November 2012 the seat that had been held for decades by Ted Kennedy would be up for grabs again. The press and online media were quick to offer opinions: She should run! She shouldn’t run! Plenty of people called the house, e-mailed advice, or stopped me on the street: Buy new glasses! Change your hair! Get married! (Whoa—again? I was pretty crazy about my
current
husband.)

I’d been back from California for a week or so when I got a call from a local Democratic Party official. He introduced himself, then said he was calling to urge me to get in the race. “Get your name out there,” he said enthusiastically. “Stir things up!” After offering a few more thoughts about why I should run, he paused, as if suddenly remembering that he was speaking to a stranger about the strange land of politics. “Of course, I don’t think you’ll win. But don’t take it personally—I don’t think anyone can beat Scott Brown.”

Run and lose. Gee, that sounded like fun. Maybe I’d do that right after I deliberately slammed my fingers in a car door.

But the guy who called had a point. If I jumped in, it would be a tough, tough fight. Unlike me, Scott Brown had grown up in Massachusetts. He was a longtime member of the National Guard, and over the years he had risen to the rank of colonel. He was well-liked and handsome, the kind of guy who might be played by Tom Cruise in the movie version of his life. He had developed a reputation as a moderate and bipartisan Republican, he had high approval ratings, and he already had nearly $10 million in the bank. He had been dubbed one of “Wall Street’s Favorite Congressmen,” with all the promise of future fundraising that the title implied. To a lot of the pundits, he looked to be in a great position.

When Massachusetts held its special election shortly after Senator Kennedy’s death, Brown had beaten Martha Coakley, a popular attorney general who was well known and had strong support across the state. A lot of people were downright nasty in their criticism of Martha after her loss, but even her critics acknowledged the exceptionally strong political skills of Scott Brown. After years of quiet backbenching in the state legislature, he had swept through Massachusetts politics like a gale-force wind.

My work on COP and then the consumer agency had gotten a fair amount of attention, and a number of progressives thought I might make a good senator. A petition made the rounds on the Internet, and seventy thousand people signed on, urging me to run against Brown.

Although I appreciated the support, no one could pretend that I didn’t have a stack of liabilities. I had never run for
any
office, let alone a highly contested national office like this one. Even before Martha Coakley’s defeat, women had not done well in statewide races in Massachusetts, and conventional wisdom held that this was a man’s game. Plus, I wasn’t born in Massachusetts or even New England; I was from Oklahoma of all places, and when I get a little excited, I have a twangy accent. I was not only a professor, but a
Harvard
professor. When the all-important question came up—“Which candidate would you rather have a beer with?”—I would lose, hands down.

Then there was money. I didn’t have a nickel in the campaign-fund bank, and the last time I’d raised money was when I’d organized a ferocious effort to help Amelia’s Brownie troop sell more cookies than any other troop in town. A lot of progressives had followed my work and might make contributions, but Scott Brown started with a huge war chest and the promise of much more to come.

And let’s not forget my age: I was sixty-two years old.
Sixty-two.
Wasn’t I supposed to be thinking ahead to rocking chairs and retirement plans, not crazy new ventures that require eighteen-hour days and months of grueling work? If I got into this race, I’d have to go all out, because I wouldn’t just be battling nice-guy Scott Brown here at home. I’d be swept up into a much bigger fight against the giant banks and the right-wingers like Karl Rove who were determined to give Republicans control of the Senate.

Okay, so the liability stack was high, and right at the top was something buried in my heart of hearts—I really didn’t
want
to run. I’d had enough of Washington. I’d never yearned for a life in politics. I missed teaching; I missed my research. I missed hiking with Bruce and time with our grandchildren. Atticus was a gorgeous nine-month-old, and I wasn’t likely to have another chance to hold a baby on my shoulder until he fell asleep.

I made the family calls. Our son, Alex, was blunt. “No way,” he said. “Don’t do it. It’ll ruin your life.” He advised me to return to Harvard and enjoy my life for a while. “You’ve done enough fighting.” My brothers took pretty much the same view: “Spend time with the grandkids.”

Alex—and my brothers and my cousins and my best friend—worried about what a campaign would do to me. They all offered versions of the same message: Politics is ugly and personal and nasty. You haven’t spent a lifetime developing the necessary armor. We love you and we don’t want to see you hurt. Please stay out.

They were right.

And yet … there was so much at stake in this election. I’d spent nearly twenty years fighting to level the playing field for the middle class, and I’d seen millions of working families go over the economic cliff—and it was getting worse. What kind of country would my grandchildren grow up in? What if the conservatives and the big banks and the big-time CEOs got their way, and Washington kept helping the rich and powerful to get richer and more powerful? Could I really stand on the sidelines and stay out of this fight?

And what would I feel like on the day after the election, if Scott Brown won and Wall Street had one of its favorite congressmen back for another term? What if Republicans took control of the Senate and undid the new financial regulations and crippled the consumer agency? What if they tried to repeal it? What if all that happened and I knew I hadn’t done everything I possibly could to stop it? Could I live with myself?

I had no experience in electoral politics, but I had learned enough to know that if I did get in the race, the other side would raise millions of dollars with one main goal—to make me look bad. I thought I’d lived a pretty clean life, but I wasn’t perfect. Would they dig up something—anything—that could be distorted to embarrass me? Even worse, what if they made up a bunch of lies about me? And what if they spent truckloads of money spreading those lies, and people actually believed them? What if my children or my brothers or my granddaughters got hit by any of this? It was a stomach-clenching thought.

Someone suggested I meet with a campaign research pro, an expert in so-called opposition research, or “oppo.” These were the guys who dug into opponents’ backgrounds to find out where there might be trouble. The idea was for them to turn that around and start looking at my own background.

The research guy asked me all kinds of questions about my personal life—taxes, health, troublesome kids, alcohol, drugs. I understood that there were things everyone had a right to know, but this was so detailed and so invasive—nothing private, nothing sacred. And then he asked more about my married life. At the beginning of our conversation, I’d told the researcher about Bruce, and since we’d been married for thirty years, somehow the guy had missed the fact that I’d been married before. When I mentioned it, his head snapped up as if a dozen alarm bells had just gone off.

He wrote down some basic details, then asked, “And where is your ex-husband now?”

“He’s dead.…”

Before I could take a breath and explain about Jim’s terrible illness—about the awful cancer, about the blow to Amelia and Alex, about how he never had the chance to know his beautiful grandchildren—the research guy shouted,
“Great!”

I felt as if I’d been punched. The guy saw my face and tried to cover his blunder: “I mean, not ‘great’ that he’s dead…” But it was out there. And I couldn’t help wondering: Who
are
these people? Who could say such a thing? And what comes next?

Yes, I’ll Fight

I decided to dip my toe in the water, just to find out whether I could do even the simplest sort of campaigning. If I couldn’t, then there really wasn’t anything to decide.

In mid-August, I started meeting with small groups of people in living rooms and backyards around the state. A few days into this test run, I went to a gathering in downtown New Bedford. Ganesh Sitaraman, who had helped out in the early days of COP and was now a beginning law professor, offered to drive me to the meeting. We found a parking space, hopped out of the car, and were hit by a wall of heat. It was one of those steamy, end-of-summer mornings when your hair frizzes and your shirt sticks to your back about sixty seconds after you step outside.

The meeting was held in a building located on a cobblestone street, just down the block from the public library. Built in the 1890s, when the town had been both a thriving port and a manufacturing center, it featured an ornate front entrance and lots of marble, but the corkboard covering the entry walls and the peeling paint on the radiators spoke of years of hard use. We climbed the stairs, heading to a room that had been offered for the meeting. Inside the room, big fans whirred, but they didn’t do much good.

Fifty or so people showed up and took their seats in neat rows of metal folding chairs. I spoke for about fifteen minutes, talking about the hollowing out of America’s middle class and about how it would get worse if the Republicans in Congress kept cutting back on our investments in one another. I took questions for a while. When the meeting was over, we were all sweaty and the room was even hotter than before.

Not everyone rushed out. Some people stayed to ask for a picture, and others wanted to urge me to run, to offer advice, or just to wish me luck as I figured out what to do. It was noisy, a blur of voices and electric fans. Someone was starting to stack the chairs.

As the crowd thinned out a bit, a woman in her midfifties walked over. Her face was flushed and her hair was a tangle of tight curls. She looked hot and tired, maybe a little angry. She stopped a few steps away from me and said, “I walked two miles to get here.”

Okay, she had my attention.

She dropped her voice a notch. “I walked because I don’t have a car that runs. I don’t have a car that runs because I don’t have a job.”

As we stood facing each other, she laid out her life in just a few sentences:

I have two master’s degrees. I’m smart. I taught myself computer programming. I’ve been out of work for a year and a half. I’ve applied, I’ve volunteered, I’ve gone everywhere, but nothing.

She paused for a long time, then plunged back in. She explained that she had held one job or another since she was seventeen. She had put herself through school. She had always, always, always worked hard.

Then she stopped, took a step forward, and lowered her voice to a whisper, as if she didn’t want to hear what she was about to say.

Now I don’t know if I’m ever going to get a real job again.

I held out both hands and she took them. We stood there, not moving, just holding hands. I muttered something bland like “I’m so sorry,” but she didn’t give any sign of hearing me. She was well past the polite social conventions. She was hot, and she was exhausted—mind, body, and soul.

She focused again, looked me straight in the eye, and said:

I’m here because I’m running out of hope. I’ve read about you for a long time, and I’m here to see you in person, to tell you that I need you, and I want you to fight for me. I don’t care how hard it gets, I want to know that you are going to fight.

I looked back at her and said, “Yes, I’ll fight.”

I didn’t really think about the size of the commitment I was making or what it would cost me or Bruce or the rest of our family. I simply thought, I can’t stand here and cry. And I can’t just walk out on her. She asked for a commitment, and I made it. Stand and fight—there was nothing else to say and nothing else to do.

She didn’t smile. She didn’t encourage me. She just held my hands and looked at me. Then she was gone.

That night, while Bruce and I walked Otis, the enormity of that meeting in New Bedford began to sink in. No public fanfare and no announcements in the papers, but I had promised to run for the US Senate.

I took a few more weeks to do some hard thinking and come to a final, official decision, but my heart was already in. And once I was in, I knew that the only way I could do anyone any good was to win—so I intended to win.