A Fighting Chance (42 page)

The speed with which this hit the campaign was stunning. Yes, I was a woman candidate. (Well, duh.) And yes, I am all-the-way committed to reproductive freedom, equal pay for equal work, and equal opportunities. But I had focused my campaign on middle-class economic security and crumbling infrastructure. Those are issues that profoundly (and sometimes disproportionately) affect women, but no one calls them “women’s issues.”

I was genuinely horrified that a United States congressman would call any kind of rape “legitimate.” It made my skin crawl. Heck, I was horrified that a bunch of senators wanted to roll back coverage for birth control. I wanted to get right in their faces and yell: Are you kidding me? Are you guys from the Stone Age? After decades of fighting these battles, surely America’s women deserved better. A
lot
better.

The Woman Question that had come up earlier in the campaign now returned with a vengeance, only this time it was framed a little differently. Now it was one version or another of “What is
up
with you women this year?”

What was up? Simple: Women were
fired up
. It’s hard to describe the energy I felt among women on the campaign trail that fall. Old and young, married and single, straight and gay. Women poured into our campaign offices, and huge numbers showed up at our events. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the longest-serving woman in the history of the US Senate and a longtime force on women’s issues, came to Massachusetts to rally the troops. Ethel Kennedy—well into her eighties but still full of spirit—showed up with her daughter Rory and wowed the volunteers. High school students volunteered alongside women who had been retired for twenty years or more. Parents brought baby girls, plopped them in my arms, and whipped out their cameras.

For months now, whenever I met a little girl on the campaign trail, I would bend down, take her hand, and tell her quietly, “I’m Elizabeth and I’m running for Senate, because that’s what girls do.” Now that statement took on special significance. More parents than ever asked for pictures, and I got to hold tiny newborns and kneel down to do pinky promises with shy little girls.

At some point in October, I met a marvelous old lady when her granddaughter pushed her wheelchair over to me. She was tiny and frail, but she took my hand and smiled impishly. “I’m dying,” she said, “but not too fast. I plan to see you win.”

Early on, our campaign team had taken a close look at Scott Brown’s record on women’s issues. It wasn’t terrible. He had broken with his party to support the Violence Against Women Act. He said he was prochoice, although he didn’t turn down the support from the prolife groups that endorsed him. But he had voted against a bill for equal pay for equal work, and he was a cosponsor of the Blunt Amendment. More important, he supported a national Republican leadership that seemed hell-bent on rolling right over women’s rights. When it came to women’s issues, a fair assessment of Brown’s voting record would be “pretty good some of the time”—but why should that be good enough?

When Senator Brown and I met for our second debate, women’s issues came up in a surprising way. Somewhere toward the middle of the debate, the moderator asked us to name our favorite Supreme Court justice. Brown’s response: Justice Antonin Scalia. The ripple through the audience was instantaneous: Scalia? The most outspoken, conservative, anti-choice, anti-woman justice on the Court—
that’s
the justice Scott Brown liked best? A few people started to boo, and Senator Brown backtracked, naming in quick succession Justices Kennedy, Roberts, and Sotomayor. As he tried to recover, the cameras caught the expression on my face. I looked like I was about to cough up a hairball. (I felt like it, too.) When my turn came, I named the prochoice woman on the Court whom Brown had voted against: Elena Kagan.

On October 10, when Brown and I met in Springfield for the third debate, women’s issues surged to the front once again. In response to a question, Brown repeated a line he had used often about how he lived in a houseful of women and that he had long fought for women’s rights. I said I had no doubt that Senator Brown was a good husband and a good father to his two daughters. But I pointed out that in Washington, he voted on laws that affect all our daughters:

• He’s had exactly one chance to vote for equal pay for equal work, and he voted no.

• He had exactly one chance to vote for insurance coverage for birth control and other preventive services for women. He voted no.

• He had exactly one chance to vote for a prochoice woman—from Massachusetts—to the United States Supreme Court, and he voted no.

Those were bad votes for women, and it felt right to say so. The way I saw it, women deserved to be represented by someone they could count on, not
some
of the time, but
all
of the time.

I could feel the momentum of our campaign building, almost like a physical force. Our team was so excited that sometimes it felt as if there were lightning in the air. We knew that a lot of people were starting to focus intently on this race; they had come to understand how much their vote would matter.

Meanwhile, the polls stayed close. Some showed me ahead, some showed Brown still in the lead, and others had us within a point or two of each other. We were going to fight this all the way to the end.

Sweet Otis

Now it was time for a final surge of stump speeches and rallies and get-out-the-vote drives. Adam and I crisscrossed the state in the Blue Bomber. Mindy and Tracey ran the headquarters like seasoned generals, while Roger and Jess lived out of their cars as they rallied troops everywhere. Bruce met with volunteers and spoke at events, turning in surprisingly passionate stump speeches for his sweetie. We made plans to fly the kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews to Boston for the big day.

Six days before the election, Halloween arrived. That evening, I stood out on the front porch and admired all the kids coming by to trick-or-treat. Photographers did their best to capture the candy traditions at our house and compare them with those at the Browns’ home. It seemed that nothing could escape politics, not even our choice of treats on Halloween. As the night went on, a raucous party across the street spilled outside and turned into a parade over to our house to meet the candidate and take lots of silly pictures.

Throughout these festivities, Otis should have been right there beside me. He liked visitors. Besides, this was a night when little kids came to the door to pet him and drop yummy treats on the floor. What could be better?

When the doorbell rang the first few times, Otis pulled himself to his feet and stood in the hall while kids came in to pet him. At one point he lumbered out into the front yard to survey the sidewalks and reflect on all the activity. But after he came back into the house, he lay down and didn’t get back up. He rested his head between his big front feet, his jowls spread out on the floor. As I went back and forth from the door to the candy bowl, he followed me with his huge brown eyes.

When Bruce and I turned out the porch light for the evening, Otis had trouble making it upstairs. Later, in the dark, I listened to his labored breathing.

Early the next morning, we took Otis back to Angell Memorial. His vet was kind, but she made it very clear that Otis was in a lot of pain. “He could hang on for a few more days, Elizabeth, but he’s doing it just for you. He’s ready to go.”

I was long past the unfairness of it all, but I didn’t want to lose him, at least not yet. Couldn’t he stay just a little longer?

Bruce said it was time to let him go. Finally, I agreed.

We sat on the floor with him and said our good-byes. I rubbed his big head and scratched behind his ears. I remembered the puppy who had flopped down on the air-conditioning vent and the big doggie who had let the grandchildren crawl all over him. I thought about how when life was tough, he would nuzzle me and somehow remind me of more important things in the world.

After Otis died, Bruce and I held him for a long time.

With the election only five days away, Bruce and I decided not to say much about Otis. It wasn’t a political calculation. I knew that if word got out, people would open their hearts. There would be hugs and “I’m sorry” everywhere I went. And once I started to cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

So we kept the news close, just Bruce and me and a few other people. I told myself: In five days, I can cry. But right now, I’ve got to close it off. I have to keep going just a little longer.

We Will Win

November 6, 2012: Election Day. It was exactly fifty years to the day that Massachusetts had voted to send a young Ted Kennedy to the US Senate for the first time.

Now, after fifteen months of nearly nonstop campaigning, it all came down to this day. The meetings and the rallies, the fundraising and the ads, the debates and the trackers—all that was over, and now it was up to the voters. Would Scott Brown hang on to the seat Kennedy had held for nearly half a century, or would I pry it loose? Today was the day the people of Massachusetts would decide.

Early in the morning, Bruce and I walked over to the nearby elementary school where we had voted for nearly twenty years. We formed a kind of makeshift parade, with a small herd of family, neighbors, and well-wishers tumbling down the sidewalk together. My niece Melinda had made matching blue satin headbands with “WARREN” spelled out in silver glitter across the top for the little girls, and they walked to the school in full glory.

Bruce and I have a running joke: I never tell him how I voted. But the joke has a point, because I take democracy seriously, and that includes the sanctity of the polling booth. And on that morning, standing in the little portable voting booth with its red, white, and blue canvas curtain, I saw my name on the ballot for the United States Senate.

Sure, I knew it would be there, but seeing it in black-and-white was a drop-dead serious moment for me. I knew that all across Massachusetts millions of voters would see what I was seeing—a choice between two very different people, a choice between two very different visions for our country. If the voters chose me and my vision, they would be asking me to carry their hopes for a better America. Voting always gives me goose bumps, but today I stood for a few seconds longer, thinking about what it would mean to have a chance to go to the US Senate to fight for working families.

After we voted, we piled all the kids and grandkids into the Blue Bomber and a couple of rented vans and zipped around eastern Massachusetts, visiting polling places and union halls, phone banks and campaign offices, urging on the teams that were still knocking on doors and holding signs. By early afternoon, we were starved, and we stopped at the Five Guys in Medford for hamburgers. When we walked in, a woman in her fifties was sitting near the door; she looked up and yelled, “Holy s**t! It’s Elizabeth Warren!”

She recovered slightly, and after glancing at the three seven-year-old girls who were with me, she apologized. Then she said, “I guess I didn’t think you were real.” I knew what she meant: to most people, politics seems like something that happens in a faraway place, not in the local Five Guys.

In the early evening, we all headed to the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston to wait for results. Children and grandchildren and volunteers and state officials crowded into noisy rooms. People bubbled with cheer and early signs of victory. (“Voting is heavy in Lynn!” “They need more rides in Brockton!”) But we still had a long way to go.

I slipped away to an empty room and practiced my speech. No, I practiced both my speeches—a concession speech and a victory speech. This wasn’t the moment to take anything for granted.

Shortly after the polls closed, I went into the bathroom to change clothes. It was the first quiet moment I’d had since bounding out of bed before daylight. As I dressed, I thought about my mother. Would she be happy with the way I’d turned out? I’d gotten married and had children—and grandchildren—and Bruce and I owned a home and had saved money for our retirement. And somewhere along the line, I had decided to go to Washington and try to make a difference.

Mother had been afraid for me, not wanting me to venture out. But
she
had ventured out. When we needed her, she pulled on that black dress and blew her nose and did something she had never done before. She showed me what it meant to grow up, to be responsible, to do what needed to be done. And now the daughter of a telephone operator and a maintenance man might be going to the United States Senate.

The next few hours were a blur, but then one station flashed the headline and soon another:
WARREN BEATS BROWN
. Suddenly the race was over. Later we learned that the margin was big: 54–46.

The weekend before the election, our volunteers had knocked on more than three hundred thousand doors and made more than seven hundred thousand phone calls in what I’m told may have been the largest get-out-the-vote drive the state had ever seen. The effort paid off: people turned out in droves. It was the highest turnout for any election ever held in Massachusetts—an astonishing 73 percent. That was thrilling to me: no one is going to strangle democracy in our state!

It was also the most expensive Senate election in the entire nation that year. Wall Street contributed truckloads of money to try to keep me out of the Senate, but in the end it didn’t work. Senator Brown’s campaign raised $35 million, but to my amazement, we raised $42 million, and more than 80 percent of our contributions were for $50 or less. I still have trouble grasping how much money that was. I’m stunned by how many people sacrificed and by how much effort it took to raise so much money. But I saw at least a small silver lining: The People’s Pledge held. Maybe—just maybe—we created a new model for reducing the stranglehold of the Super PAC.

Finally, it was time for me to walk to the hotel’s ballroom and appear onstage. As I stepped out, I was hit by a wave—a cheer that rose as a single sound. I looked out at all these people, packed in tight, standing and roaring their excitement. I saw a sea of faces, but I knew these faces. I saw hundreds of people I had come to know during this campaign, one at a time. People who held signs and made calls. People who urged me on when victory seemed so far off. People who believed that even a first-time candidate could win a tough race if we worked hard enough for what we believed.