Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [101]
We began that weekend by meeting the local faces connected to the names we had read over the years. There was a Lou D’Allesandro, whom we would court for months to come—the warm Italian American, with hands like my father’s, always outstretched, and his incredibly patient wife, Pat. We came to know of their children and their grandchildren, his daughter’s wedding and his brother’s illness, and we stopped thinking about them as political contacts urged by the staff and started thinking of them as friends. And here’s how I know: as I type Lou’s name, or Sharon Nordgren’s or Lucy Hodder’s, it is hard not to look in my Rolodex and find their numbers and give them a call. Yet if I did this throughout this book—and I have weakened more times than I want to admit to my editor—I would never finish it. John didn’t win them all. Peter Burling, whom I greatly admire, finally came with John, but only after his friend Dick Gephardt left the race. Dan O’Neill, who belonged to John’s brother’s union, the IBEW, would never make the commitment, but, honestly, John still enjoyed seeing him, because though it was politics, it was also the only life we were going to get, and we were determined to enjoy it. And John enjoyed Dan.
John had his first house party that weekend in Manchester. Ed Turlington had convinced Chris and Kristin Sullivan to open their Concord house to us and, what’s more, to invite their closest friends so that John could introduce himself. It was like riding a bicycle for the first time: John could do it, he was nimble and athletic, but it wasn’t always rewarding. Was he moving forward at all? As a senator, John had weekly town hall meetings—in North Carolina if he was there, in the Capitol for visiting constituents if he was not—so the give-and-take of the house party questions did not bother him. But these people were not just looking for answers to their questions. They were looking for a horse to ride in the 2004 primary, almost two years away, and many of them—most of them—would not decide anything on their first or second or third chance to check out each horse. They had seen it happen before, potential candidates testing the waters—some ran, some didn’t. No need for them to get wet yet. All of this was new for us. Honestly, we didn’t know anything about the process, and the withholding of support by people who clearly liked John left us less than sure-footed.
My role in this was to smile, shake hands, and make small talk. I could handle that. As John spoke in the living room, I stayed in the kitchen playing with the assembled babies—Jake Sullivan was not yet born, but there were plenty of babies—and I looked carefully at this precious house. Kristin had made café curtains and painted and stenciled the walls. Pictures were framed with handmade mats. They hadn’t just let us into their house, they had invited us into their home, and when you let yourself feel that offer, it made all the reservations in the next room meaningless. Chris and Kristin probably had a lot of conversation after that day about whether to support John; I had already made up my mind about them.
It was a series of houses that weekend, repeating over and over what we had experienced at the Sullivans’. The last, in Nashua, at the Foster house, which was surrounded in every direction by ice, left us with lots of questions. Not about Joe and Marisa—they were terrific—but about this process and about what John needed to do, if he was to convince a constitutionally skeptical audience. One thing he would need, he said, was more concrete answers about where he wanted to go. The criticisms were easy, the solutions were not. So when we returned to Washington, John set about developing a real platform.
This was a year of politics and policies in our house. The meetings we had in our home were just like the meetings we had always had with the people on John’s staff. I