A Fighting Chance (41 page)

Roger met me in the parking lot at Florian Hall. We went inside and shook hands with Ed Kelly and Mike Mullane. Eddie, one of the youngest presidents in the history of the state firefighters’ union, grew up tagging along behind his father, Jack, who served as a Boston firefighter for thirty-five years. He inherited his dad’s black hair and intense blue eyes. Now in his thirties, he has a pretty wife and two active children (“future firefighters,” as he likes to say). He also has the kind of solid build that leaves no doubt that he could throw someone over his shoulder and run full tilt out of a burning building.

Mike Mullane, a veteran firefighter with white hair and a little-boy smile, is a generation older. His wheezing breath and rattling cough are painful reminders of a life spent running into chemical fogs and toxic smoke.

Eddie and Mike brought Roger and me into a little office. As we took our seats, I noticed a photograph on the wall that showed one of the union leaders posing with Scott Brown.

With no preliminaries, Eddie started in. “Look, if this election is about who you want to have a beer with, Brown wins.” He paused. “Hell, no offense, but
I’d
rather have a beer with him.”

He looked pained. I looked at the photo on the wall and thought, Here it comes. He’s going to tell me he’s sorry, but the firefighters feel more comfortable with Brown and they’re going to support him. At least he’s got the guts to tell me face-to-face.

I looked back at Eddie, and he held my gaze with his piercing blue eyes. “But—f**k it—we gotta raise our families. And you are the best shot we’ve got.”

I blinked.

“Yeah, we’re endorsing you.”

Eddie said the firefighters had talked and talked and talked about it, and from his description, I gathered that some of the conversations had been heated. He explained that one of the leaders in the union had worked on Scott Brown’s campaign and another was a longtime friend. But in the end, the council had voted—unanimously—to recommend that the membership endorse me.

Finally, Eddie leaned back and smiled. Since we’re in, he said, we’re going to be in all the way. “You’ll be family.”

Eddie was good to his word and then some. The firefighters got a huge neon-yellow bus and put a giant picture of me on the side. They drove the bus all around the state, blasting its very noisy horn and often parking it near Scott Brown rallies.

During that long year of campaigning, I met lots of firefighters, but I also met hundreds of members of other unions. I met truck drivers, electricians, and sheet metal workers. Teachers and nurses, carpenters and musicians, janitors and bricklayers. Postal workers, home health care aides, steelworkers. I talked with them at construction sites and training centers, at job registries and volunteer events. They did many different kinds of work, and they had a wide range of worries, but those unions stood tall for
all
workers.

Most of the union members I met with were painfully aware that unions across the country were losing ground, as fewer workplaces were unionized. But unions were also losing ground politically. More than one president of a local union told me that other politicians would come to them for money and endorsements. But when they left the union hall, those same politicians spoke only in code, never saying the word
union
in their speeches. I think it mattered that in speeches and rallies and roundtable discussions, I said the word, long and loud:
“Union!”

The way I saw it, unions had helped build America’s middle class. They fought for better wages and reasonable hours. They fought for safer factories. They fought for pensions and retirement security. They fought for health care coverage. And every one of those benefits spread to other workers—union and non-union—which made the whole middle class stronger and more secure. And when the squeeze was on, unions showed up to fight for Social Security, for Medicare, for a higher minimum wage, for equal pay for women, and, to my great delight, for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They fought for the values that keep us strong.

Often enough during the campaign, I would hear the phrase
corporate and labor influence in politics,
as if “corporate” and “labor” were somehow two sides of the same coin. Really? Does anyone believe that an army of lobbyists fighting for tax loopholes and special breaks for one corporation is the same as the unions fighting for Social Security and equal pay? Does anyone believe that when corporations give money to take down unions and support so-called right-to-work laws, there are unions giving equal money to try to put companies out of business (and themselves out of a job)? Does anyone think that for every billionaire executive who can afford to write a check for $10 million to get his candidate elected to office, there is a union guy who can do the same? Give me a break.

In the battle over who Washington was really working for, the unions knew which side they were fighting on, and they fought as hard as they could. I was honored to have the chance to fight alongside them.

Debates

Scott Brown and I would debate each other three times during the campaign, and the first debate was scheduled for September 20. Polls showed that the race was now pretty close, and a lot of people found ways to tell me how important it was that I do a good job. I started getting nervous—really, really nervous.

Dan was full of Dan-style encouragement. He kept saying, “You could lose the whole race in a single bad minute during the debate.”

The prep sessions were a nightmare. Nearly a dozen staffers gathered around to help me prepare. One of them would ask a question: “What is the path to peace in the Middle East?” Or, “How should we create more jobs in the economy?” I would start into my answer, and somewhere in the middle of point one in my four-point plan, someone would yell,
“Time!”

I was supposed to answer every question in a minute and a half. Ninety seconds. One of the staff would ask another question, and again, before I could get to the main idea, someone would shout,
“Time!”

We played this miserable loop over and over. In desperation, the team scheduled some practice sessions during which I was allowed to answer “the long way” before we focused on the clock. I think they could see I was getting frazzled, so they tried to sound encouraging: “That was pretty good in minute four! Maybe you could just say that part first.” No problem!

In the end, Otis was my best coach. On the day of the first debate, I turned off my phone and shut down my computer. Otis climbed up next to me and put his head in my lap. I studied, and he snored. After a few hours, I was as ready as I’d ever be.

The first debate was held in a television studio. It was cramped and cold, a small set surrounded by giant cameras that looked like something out of a
Transformers
movie. Only the moderator, the two candidates, and some technical people were permitted in the room—not even our spouses could come in. When Senator Brown arrived, I walked over to shake hands. The moment was somehow surreal. Here was the man I was spending every waking hour trying to defeat. Our names were linked in thousands of press accounts, yet we’d met only a few times, and I don’t think we had ever spoken a dozen words to each other. In some other context, we might have made pleasant small talk. After a brief hello, we moved back to our places, he at his podium and I at mine, locked in silence before the program began.

We were allowed to bring note cards to the debate, and before we got started, I saw Senator Brown shuffling through his stack. I had a stack of cards, too. Most carried statistics that I thought were important (family incomes, unemployment rates, and so forth—I didn’t want to fumble a key number). But my last card was a photograph. It was a picture taken in front of Legoland with a gaggle of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews gathered around me. We all wore matching bright yellow tops, and we were all having a great time. The picture always made me smile. I looked at those children staring into the camera and thought: I’m in this race for your future.

I held the photo, and I remembered Reverend Culpepper’s advice: Have faith.

Someone in the studio called out a thirty-second warning. Everyone—Brown, me, the moderator—took sips of water, our actions synchronized as if we were runners at a starting gate who’d been told to “get set.”

A countdown, then the light on the closest camera came on. The moderator made the necessary introductions and asked the first question—it was about character—which he directed to Senator Brown.

Brown wasted no time. He said his thank-yous to the moderator and viewers, then lunged straight for my throat. “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color, and as you can see, she is not.” He expanded the accusation, asserting that on applications to Penn and Harvard, “she checked the box claiming she was a Native American, and clearly she’s not.”

We were thirty-three seconds into the debate, and Brown had already called me a liar and then called the people who hired me liars. He had falsely accused me of using my background to get a job. And he had invited everyone watching on television to take a close look at my appearance so they could judge for themselves just who my parents and grandparents had been.

I wanted to talk about Wall Street bankers and taxes and education, but Brown wanted to go in a different direction. So I stood my ground. I talked about my family. I made clear I never sought any advantages, and I pointed out that the people who’d hired me had all verified my account—100 percent. When I got the chance, I moved to the issues that I believed were at the heart of the election. I talked about how giant companies and billionaires were exploiting a bonanza of tax loopholes and how Scott Brown and the Republicans were determined to keep those loopholes open. I talked about how we should be investing in educating our kids instead of subsidizing Big Oil. And how billionaires should pay at least as high a tax rate as their secretaries.

The reviews the next day called the debate a draw, and not many outlets featured what I had to say about tax loopholes or investing in education. But nearly every media report included Brown’s attack over my background.

Two days after the debate, Brown and former Boston mayor Ray Flynn attended a campaign event inside a pub. A rally outside the pub included some of Brown’s Senate staffers, and they were caught on video joining the crowd in cartoon-Indian war whoops and tomahawk chops. The video got widespread attention—and a lot of criticism. But that didn’t stop Brown: he started running commercials accusing me of covering up the truth about my background and lying about my family.

It seemed this race was going to stay nasty right to the end.

Paid Actors?

Even as he doubled down with his commercials about my Native American background, Brown opened a new front in the ad wars: he claimed I’d hurt asbestos victims. Many people who worked around asbestos developed mesothelioma, a horribly painful lung cancer that is nearly always fatal. A few years earlier, I had served as a consultant on a case to protect trusts that had set aside money for asbestos victims. Most asbestos victims supported the trusts—and were on the same side of the litigation over this issue as I was—because they knew this was the best way to get some payment for their injuries.

A lot of asbestos victims were upset about Brown’s attack ad, and some of them protested outside his office. Hoping to counteract the misinformation in the Brown commercials, we filmed two short ads featuring people who had lost a husband or a father to mesothelioma. Brown then claimed that these were “paid actors” rather than real victims. If many asbestos victims were upset before, now they were furious. They had gone through unspeakable suffering, and now they were being insulted. Said one victim: “Let Scott Brown tell me to my face that I am nothing but a paid actor, and I’ll set him straight on what it was like to watch my father suffocate to death.” Brown issued an apology.

As the race tightened, the ads were relentless. A lot of people volunteered to make ads for me, including Art Ramalho, the owner of the West End Gym in Lowell. Art has trained generations of working-class kids to box, and he is a local legend in Lowell. The first time I visited his gym, I saw the worn, wooden boxes next to the speed bags, and it took me a few minutes to connect the dots—some of the kids who came here were small enough to need a boost to reach the bag. Art has opened his gym—and his heart—to try to help the countless kids who have come his way.

Art went on camera to call me a “fighter” for working people. I wasn’t as fast with my fists as the fighters in Art’s gym, but I was grateful for Art’s help.

Many of our other ads talked about what I wanted to do in Washington, and some criticized Brown for how he voted. Some of our ads were pretty tough, but I didn’t make personal attacks—I wasn’t going to be drawn into that. Even so, I suspect the good people of Massachusetts were sick to death of political ads. I know I was.

Because That’s What Girls Do

As we headed into the final stretch of the campaign, women—and women’s issues—shot into the foreground in an unexpected way.

It had started several months earlier, when Republicans in the Senate led another effort to cut back on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Back in February 2012, they had introduced the Blunt Amendment, which would let a business or insurance company deny coverage for any medical service if it cited any vague “moral objection” to such coverage. No one was fooled: this amendment was intended to give any employer the right to deny insurance coverage for birth control. As it happened, my opponent in the Senate race didn’t just vote in favor of the amendment; he cosponsored it. I had criticized Senator Brown for his vote at the time, but he had doubled down and gone on the offense, attacking me.

Then, in August, Missouri congressman Todd Akin caused a firestorm when he asserted that women don’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” That was bad enough, but in October, Republican Richard Mourdock from Indiana said he believed that pregnancy due to rape was “something that God intended to happen.” Suddenly, people were talking about women’s issues with a new kind of intensity. The gains that so many of us (including me) had come to take for granted no longer seemed so secure.