Staying True (11 page)

The boys with my father, Christmas 1999
.

Sisters Kathy and Gier with me and Mom

Gubernatorial inaugural ceremonies, January 2007

Mark’s third and final term as a U.S. congressman, summer 1999

Our maturing family, May 2009

Mark also consulted the boys and me about his decision, and we all were unified in our support. The way I saw it was not so dissimilar to when Mark decided to run for Congress. The prospect of running for the state’s highest political office energized Mark; the intense focus and his ideas for new possibilities for the state clearly would make him happy. I also figured that this would be a fifteen-month undertaking from the day he decided until what might well be a primary defeat. If Mark happened to win, I would at the very least look forward to all of us living together under the same roof, unlike his time in Congress.

He wanted to go for it; I pledged my support. But this time, I was adamant that I would not serve as campaign manager.

Mark hired a young woman to handle his schedule and another to manage incoming money and plan fundraisers. Next he hired a press secretary who, though worth his weight in gold, came cheap (which Mark liked) because his most recent job had been playing in a rock band. Many others showed up to volunteer through that first summer and the momentum started to build, but Mark was frustrated having to manage the staff and seemed unable to find a manager to his liking. As the summer wore on, he began his push to get me to change my mind and return again as campaign manager.

Although I was proud of running his successful congressional campaigns, I knew from experience the toll the job would take on the boys. I also knew it would likely unhealthily shape the kind of time I would have with Mark. These were reasons enough to refuse the role, but there was another big reason I worried about. If I took the job, ours would be the only statewide campaign in South Carolina ever led by a woman, much less a wife. There were—and still are—many in the political and power base in the state who sneered openly at me and suggested it was not my place to do this work. I have come to love South Carolina deeply, but I’m not blind to the challenges still in place for women there. There still exists an old-fashioned chauvinism that would have women stay out of positions of power or strength. Perhaps they forget that South Carolina has plenty of strong and successful women in its history.

One such famous trailblazer (and a personal hero) was Eliza Lucas, who, in 1738, was left in charge—at the age of sixteen—of her family’s three plantations in the lowcountry. In addition to overseeing the plantations, she educated her younger sister and some of the slave children, pursued her own courses in French and English, and did legal work for poor neighbors. All the while she experimented with a new crop called indigo. By the age of nineteen, Eliza Lucas became the first in South Carolina to successfully produce blue dye from indigo, ultimately leading to great wealth for the area. After marrying Charles Pinckney, Eliza had four children, including two who were key players in the move toward our nation’s independence and the war that followed. Not only did Eliza Pinckney accomplish great things when facing life’s challenges, she also
gave back
to the world. She was a loyal wife, she raised successful children, and she left an indelible mark in more ways than one.

Mark knew that these were my standards of personal success and he worked on me—sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously—to see that in coming back on as campaign manager I would have the opportunity to meet them. He continued to plead his case, and six and a half months into his campaign I gave in, plain and simple. As fall began and the older boys returned to a school routine, I secured help for the little ones and started to pitch in formally with the campaign.

Win or lose, I knew that for me, the standard of success in this campaign wouldn’t be measured by the simple metric of whether Mark won. As the boys were older, their needs were more complex. I felt my efforts would be a success if I ran a well-organized, ethical campaign while never feeling that I had neglected my children.

Toward this end, I tried to stay close to home. The ground floor of our Sullivan’s Island home has a concrete slab floor and exposed heating/AC ducts. Until Mark announced his candidacy for governor, we used it as the boys’ playroom, a place where they could do whatever they wanted, and we also had one room there that served as Mark’s office. Thereafter, we rearranged the entire space for the campaign office, bringing down folding tables as desks and adding computers and phones as needed. By closing off a corner near the bathroom, we created a bedroom for campaign workers, bringing two sets of bunk beds from the barn at Coosaw, and putting the boys’ old dinosaur sheets on them. It became known as Jurassic Park. We also used the old garage area and divided that space into more campaign offices.

The average age of the group downstairs was about twenty-two, which gave me, at age thirty-nine, the right to refer to my “little kids” upstairs and my “big kids” downstairs. Before long it was anybody’s guess as to what or who I would find when I went down the steps. I felt sometimes as if I were in charge of a large group of animals at a zoo.

When the boys returned from school—Marshall in fourth grade and Landon in second were in school until three o’clock and Bolton and Blake were home all afternoon—they added an entirely new flavor to the campaign. At any given moment, we’d have big and little kids jumping or wrestling together on the trampoline or shooting hoops in the driveway. The boys made a game out of catching the press secretary on breaks outside for a smoke. We had a bunny, Sully, who came downstairs with Bolton to visit often. Our kids charged through the offices dressed in armor with swords, or they might swap football cards with one of the campaign workers, or ride bikes to get snacks together down the street. We had a cat then named Spot who did not take kindly to the new routine at the house. He randomly threw up on the computer keyboards and sometimes would disgust us further by presenting a creature caught on his hunt.

Things downstairs were active into the evening most nights. I would cook dinner upstairs and soon was cooking for extras, happy to have others so dedicated to our new mission. I did my best to juggle it all and usually enjoyed all the activity in the house. There were certainly times, though, that I wanted to close my eyes and wish it all away. I reminded myself again and again that this pace and this activity would not, could not, last forever.

A campaign is an intense affair and a statewide race has so many overlapping facets that it becomes a big boiling pot that needs to be kept bubbling without spilling over. While we all had a great deal of fun in the campaign, and some of the daily volunteers or employees are now lifelong friends, it would be a lie to say that I never lost my cool. I understood that loose talk, loose finances, or shaky attention to detail can all unravel a campaign. There was a place at the bottom of the stairs where we hung beach hats and baseball caps. I would bring a worker to this spot if I needed to have a stern or serious discussion about an issue in a semiprivate location. Not surprisingly, the gang began to speak of getting in trouble as being “taken to the hats.”

Fundraising in politics is also a 24/7 job—not something I ever enjoyed, but it seems a necessary evil throughout the political process. We raised and spent more than $7 million in small increments through mail or events in South Carolina and beyond during that campaign. We had stacks of shoeboxes filled with checks around the office and systematically made sure that every donor received a letter signed and personalized by Mark.

I tend to think of the ability to raise money as an indication of the strength of one’s ideas and of one’s ability to communicate those ideas. Mark was good at it; I was not. I chose to abstain. On most evenings Mark was off raising money, while I focused on keeping things going at home. As we got closer to the election, I attended fundraisers if they were large ones or appeared with Mark when needed, but I held off as long as possible so I could stay at home with the boys. I know Mark gave back to the country and to the state through his service as a congressman, governor, and in the Air Force Reserves, work of which we can all be proud. Yet I wonder what it cost him to continually be at functions with his hand out asking for money. I have long believed that it “is in giving that we receive” and that generosity helps keep a person focused on important things in life outside of the self. The constant take, take, take is one of those things that serves as another way to isolate a politician. In this way, the easier it got for him to ask others for money, the more he moved away from our youthful idea of a citizen legislator and toward the identity of a career politician.

Even though fundraisers weren’t my thing, the boys and I did need to be on the road with Mark for appearances. While I care about being generally well-groomed, on the campaign trail in a high-profile race the idea of “appearances” gets ratcheted up several notches. I always needed to be aware of how I looked or how our children looked or acted in public. The public pays close attention to adorable little boys, but unfortunately, little boys are hard to control, especially when one or more of them is potty training. I had always encouraged the boys to simply go outside discreetly if they couldn’t hold it. This saved many a pair of pants during potty training. But in the early stages of the campaign, Blake, then aged two, dropped his short pants to relieve himself unceremoniously on a gravestone in an old churchyard as we were leaving a crowded church service. I had all the boys dressed in matching outfits, so I couldn’t pretend this boy wasn’t my own—tempting as that might have been at the time—so when a woman there called Blake to my attention, I grabbed him up and hurried to the bathroom hoping not to make a scene.