A Fighting Chance (36 page)

Jobs are personal, too. At one construction site, I asked the workers how long they were going between projects. A big guy in his fifties, a heavy-equipment operator, talked about what it was like to go eleven months with no work. “I’d show up every day, follow every rumor and every lead, but nothing—I mean, nothing.” He talked about his kids, an older boy who wanted to go to college, and about his wife trying to get an extra shift at the diner. Others added their own stories—seventeen months without work, six months, nine months. They talked about how hard it was between jobs. The big guy said, “I sat home and wondered how far the life insurance would go. Would they be better off if I just died?”

He had worked so hard and played by all the rules, and it hadn’t been his decisions that brought down the economy. He hadn’t asked for any special deals. He just wanted a fighting chance.

For a long time, I would wake up in the night and think about the big guy, about the two little boys, about the man with Alzheimer’s. I’d feel a weight on my chest. More than ever, I wanted to win this race. I wanted the chance to fight for them.

I Am Woman

In those early months in the race, reporters would sometimes ask me a variation of the question “What’s it like to run as a woman?”

I always smiled mildly, but I hated the question. I was pretty sure no one asked Scott Brown how it felt to run as a man.

Still, I knew the subtext. No woman had ever been elected senator or governor in Massachusetts—and a lot of people thought no woman
could
be elected senator or governor. The Woman Question delivered a not-so-subtle message: Don’t kid yourself, girlie. Big-time politics is a boys’ game.

Early on, I spoke to several women who helped me think about whether I should run for office. One of them was Stephanie Schriock, the dynamic head of EMILY’s List. Stephanie spends a lot of her time recruiting women to run for office, and she promised that if I decided to run, she would help me through the campaign. She wanted me to jump into the race, but she never sugarcoated how tough it would be. One of her remarks stuck with me: We need to try. When a woman runs, she makes it easier for the next woman to run, and that’s how we’ll win.

Back in the summer, I had also spoken with Patty Murray, a senior member of the US Senate, about whether I should run. I started listing the reasons I might not be good enough for this job.

After a few minutes, Patty cut me off: “Oh, please.” Then she told me that women always think of reasons they aren’t good enough. Men never ask if they’re good enough to hold public office, Patty said; they just ask if they can raise enough money to win.

Huh.

I also talked with Mandy Grunwald, who had worked with a lot of women who’d run for office and who signed on as my media consultant. She knew more about electing women to office—and men, too—than pretty much anyone on earth. Early on, she explained one of the facts of public life: “It happens with every woman. People have to talk about how she looks before they can talk about what she says.”

I tried to get over it, but I always winced when I saw a news report that started with a description of my appearance. The day after I announced my candidacy, some clever reporter said I was “a strand of pearls short of looking like the head of the PTA.”

Oh goodie. Anyone want to offer a witty comment about my glasses or my hair?

Whose Kids?

When I had a spare minute, I spent it studying. I tried to digest the new job numbers or the latest developments in Iran. Ganesh took a leave of absence from his job as a law professor so he could be policy director for the campaign. In short spaces between campaign events and fundraising, he gave me policy briefings and arranged for experts to give me mini tutorials on energy policy or health care or advanced manufacturing. Madeleine Albright came to help, and she spent a day talking to me about issues from all around the globe. It was like being back in the classroom, except this time I got to be the student. It felt as if my brain was being stretched in a thousand directions at once.

I slept less, ate less, worked more.

Part of campaigning was telling my own story. At first it felt a little funny. I had spent years talking about the stress on middle-class families. But it’s one thing to discuss stagnant wages and dangerous mortgages and economic issues that affected millions of people; it’s another thing to talk about me and my family. Over time I found that describing my background and saying a few things about how I got here seemed to strike a chord with people—the story of the daughter of a maintenance man who graduated from a commuter college and ended up as a professor at Harvard.

When I mentioned paying $50 a semester for college some people gasped, but a lot of people nodded. Pretty much everyone I talked to agreed that young people needed a shot at a college education, but support for education was shrinking. A kid going to a state college today would pay (adjusted for inflation) about three times more than his or her dad had paid a generation earlier. America had once invested in young people like me, but we weren’t providing those kinds of opportunities to kids anymore—at least not at a price middle-class families could afford.

Late one afternoon, I spoke in the dining room of a house in a small town near the south coast. The chairs had been pulled out of the room, and about twenty people had crowded in, standing around the table or leaning against the walls. It was clear from their uniforms and work shirts that several of those in attendance had stopped off after their shift at work was over. A couple of people had parked their children in the living room, where the television had been turned down low.

I talked about building opportunities, about building a future for all our kids. As we moved to questions, the conversation took on more energy. We talked about children in overcrowded classrooms and what it takes to build an economy that will produce good jobs for all our kids, not just a few. We talked about why kids need safe neighborhoods and access to health care.

As the group broke up, a man in his sixties came over to me. He was thin, with the leathery skin of someone who had worked outside for many years. He wore a Vietnam vets cap that was frayed on the right side of the bill; he’d probably grabbed it there a million times.

He didn’t smile, and his voice was flat. I looked for clues—maybe a little hostile? I wasn’t sure.

“Yeah, you talk about building a future,” he said. “But what about transgender? What about them?” Now he looked full-on angry.

Wow. That seemed to fall out of the sky. I felt the instinctive need to crouch, as if we were about to get into a fight.

I said just as flatly: “We build a future for all our children. And that means transgender children.
All
our children—no exceptions.”

He held my gaze for a moment and then said: “Damn right.”

He went on to explain that he had a grown son who was transgender. “In a million years you’ll never know the special kind of hell he has gone through. I want somebody who fights and doesn’t back off.”

I relaxed. A future for all our kids, every one.
This
was a fight I was ready for.

Running a Campaign Without Karl Rove

In November, Karl Rove got in the race. He and his Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its sister organization, Crossroads GPS, were targeting Democrats they thought were vulnerable, and apparently I was high on that list. Control of the Senate would hang in the balance in 2012, and the Republican Party had every intention of keeping Scott Brown in office. They were taking no chances.

Rove was one of the wiliest political operators in the country. He had been the mastermind behind George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House, and since then he had built a reputation for launching ads that were (according to a blogger for the
Washington Post
) “full of falsehoods and distortions that were widely debunked by independent fact checkers.” Since Rove’s donor list was secret, Crossroads GPS didn’t even pretend to be embarrassed if they were caught in a lie. These guys were playing for keeps, and they seemed to be perfectly willing to lie and cheat if that’s what it took to win.

A full year before the election, Rove’s group took out two attack ads against me. The day the first ad came out, I was taping an early-morning interview for a local news program. When I arrived at the station, no one showed any particular interest in talking with me about the issues at the center of my campaign. The question everyone wanted to talk about was: Had I seen the Karl Rove ad?

Um … What ad? I’d heard that Rove had bought advertising time, but I’d been up late the night before, and that morning I’d barely had time to get dressed and gulp down a mug of tea before heading for the studio. I hadn’t seen anything.

The station’s staff took me into the darkened control room and ran the ad on a bunch of screens. Everyone watched me while I watched the ad. I wondered if they thought I was about to burst into tears.

Up came this truly awful picture of me, my face puffy and weird-looking, and in the background was this creepy zombie-movie music that seemed to suggest I intended to eat voters’ brains. Then came a series of images that linked me to Occupy Wall Street, riots, attacks on the police, and heavy drugs.

My first impulse was to say, Good grief, where did they get that awful picture? My second impulse was to laugh—the ad was beyond bizarre. It didn’t feel real. It was so screwy that it didn’t even seem personal, as if they were talking about some other person, maybe someone who starred in horror movies.

Several weeks later, the second Rove-backed ad came out. This ad was just plain cuckoo. It blamed
me
for the bank bailout and ended with: “Tell Professor Warren we need jobs, not more bailouts.” What? My official response was to call the ad “ridiculous,” but that doesn’t capture what I was feeling. Charging that I was too cozy with banks was like attacking Newt Gingrich for being too shy or George W. Bush for being a pacifist. We were entering a new kind of crazyland.

What frustrated me, though, was the fact that it’s very hard to hit back against this kind of thing. Karl Rove was making outlandish claims, but for all practical purposes, they were anonymous. His name didn’t appear in the ad. The names of his buddies, the rich guys who financed the ad, didn’t appear—and no one could find out who they were. I was fighting a shadow opponent, and I could flail all day and never land a blow.

But I wasn’t the only one under attack: an environmental group had already gone after Scott Brown for his votes supporting Big Oil. The race was barely under way, and it wasn’t hard to see where one of the hottest Senate races in the country was headed. Brown and I would both do our best to make our case to the voters, but we could easily wind up drowning in ads by outside groups.

Scott Brown spoke a lot on the campaign trail about stopping outside ads. At first it seemed to me like empty talk, but I began to wonder if there was a way to make it actually happen. Could we ask the TV stations not to air the ads? (No chance—too much profit, and people would worry about censorship.) We could gripe all day long about how terrible outside ads were, but was it really possible to keep the Super PACs on the sidelines?

In January, Brown and I started talking about doing something big and even a little radical. There was no legal way to stop the outside groups from running ads, but eventually the two campaigns signed on to a deal with real teeth: Both candidates pledged that if any outsiders came in to help us, we would penalize ourselves. The penalties would carry real weight—whoever was helped by a Super PAC ad would dip into our own campaign contributions and give money to charity. We worked it out so that if Karl Rove ran $1 million in ads against me, Brown’s campaign would have to give $500,000 to the charity of my choice. And the same was true in reverse. In effect, we each pointed a gun at our own feet and then said to the outside groups: “Don’t come any closer or I’ll shoot!”

At first, my campaign team was uneasy with the prospect of a deal. Would Scott Brown follow through? I’m sure he wondered the same thing about me. No one could force either side to go along. For this agreement to work, Brown and I had to trust each other.

I had another reason to be worried. Every time I went out on the trail, I met people who looked me in the eye, shook my hand, and then whispered that they had given me money. People told me about cutting out doughnut runs and digging a little deeper so they could pitch some money into the kitty for my campaign. People said a hundred variations of “We contributed it to your campaign because we believe in what you are doing.” If some outside group ran an ad against Scott Brown and this deal forced me to divert contributions away from my campaign, would I be betraying the people who had donated their hard-earned money? Did I have any right to gamble with their contributions?

We were in uncharted territory, but Scott Brown and I were both willing to give it a try. The deal had at least a chance of working, and the alternative of allowing the race to be swamped by outside ads seemed truly awful—for Brown, for me, for every voter in the Commonwealth. Besides, maybe this new approach could make campaigns more accountable and help pull the electoral process back in the right direction—even just a little.

On January 23, 2012, Scott Brown and I signed the People’s Pledge.

The reaction from the press was positive but skeptical. Politico called it a “first-of-its-kind pact.” The
Washington Post
hailed it as a “groundbreaking attempt,” then quickly added, “It’s unclear how effective the agreement will be.” The
American Prospect
predicted that the agreement wouldn’t have any impact on the Super PACs, but “bless their hearts for trying.”

Who could blame the skeptics? I wasn’t confident this would work, either. The proof would be in the results.

As for the Super PACs and other outside groups, the reaction was also mixed. The League of Conservation Voters—the group that had gone after Brown—announced: “We are inclined to respect the People’s Pledge.” The response from Karl Rove’s Super PAC, however, was more ominous: