Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [100]
The children did see a lot of John on television. During the day, C-SPAN2, which covers the Senate, was always on in the hope we might catch him speaking or at least voting. My children looked at men (and a few women) in suits all day. At night, I would turn on the arts channel, and they would be lulled to sleep by an elegantly dressed woman singing an aria or a man in a tuxedo playing a piano concerto. We hadn’t realized what a skewed view of the world they were getting until John, leaving one night for a black-tie dinner, reached down to kiss Emma Claire good night, and she, looking at him quizzically, asked, “You play the piano?”
It was my job to make sure they knew a little more about their father, and I had a two-nights-away rule. He had to sleep in our house every third night, no matter what. We kept that rule—until we didn’t keep it. But in these early days, certainly on this first campaign trip, we were keeping the rule. In February 2002, with an icy rain blanketing southern New England, John and I visited New Hampshire.
There is something comforting about the election rituals in New Hampshire and Iowa, even for a neophyte. I hadn’t campaigned in the Senate race to any significant degree, and I wasn’t actually campaigning now. I was along for the ride, and the ride was taking me to Manchester. We stayed at the Holiday Inn, where politicians thinking about the New Hampshire primary have always stayed. A friendly journalist warned me that the cleaning staff could be bribed for a tidbit about the secrets of the rooms of politicians, so even though I couldn’t imagine we had anything to hide, I carried our trash, in the ice bag, to the lobby trash can each day. I wasn’t very good at being secretive, however. On this visit or the next, one of the reporters for a North Carolina paper forgot his shaving cream. I saw him forlorn in the small hotel store being told they didn’t have any. So I took him up to our room and, while John was getting in a morning run, he shaved using John’s bargain shaving cream over our sink surrounded by our toiletries. No secrets.
When John was back from running, we made our obligatory trek to the Merrimack Restaurant. It is a typical old-style diner with a dense darkness that bespeaks years of conversations, important and frivolous, with deep booths, a waitstaff that has been employed there for decades, and truly great diner food. And it is the place where every potential presidential candidate, at one time or another, makes a stop, or two, or three. John made his early, and it was recorded by CNN and USA Today. He and I sat in the back corner booth while two reporters peppered him with questions. Susan Page from USA Today said, “We’ve got the most recent poll from New Hampshire and you’re at one percent. Why in the world should anyone take you seriously as a possible presidential candidate?”
John wasn’t the least defensive. “What’s the margin of error in that poll?” he asked.
“Three percent,” she said. You could tell from her tone that she was anticipating his excuse that he could be as much as four or five percent in the poll.
Instead, he said, “So if I’m one percent, and the margin of error is three percent, I could actually have negative support?” “Yeah,” she said, laughing, “I guess that’s true.”
Instead of moaning or making excuses, he had taken a swipe at himself even bigger than the one she had taken. And that was the attitude we had. You give this your best effort, but the fact that it is important