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By Root 1046 0

was on the inside, of course, because I was married to John, but in truth everyone was on the inside. In David Ginsberg’s story of joining our campaign family, there is a clearer picture than I might draw. On New Year’s Day 1998, David drove down to North Carolina to join the Senate campaign. It was his first time in the South other than traveling I-95 on the way to Florida, and everything was foreign to him. It was sixty degrees out, and he was wearing shorts; less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been freezing at a New Year’s party in New York City. His dad had helped him drive down, and he helped him bring his things into the hotel room, as David hadn’t found an apartment yet. When his dad pulled away David had the oddest sense of complete dislocation. Not only was he in a city where he didn’t know a single person yet, he was in an entire region of the country where he didn’t know anybody. He had never been here before, and he had just committed to live here for eleven months based on a ten-minute phone call with some trial lawyer down in Raleigh. He was twenty-two and pretty scared. Within weeks of meeting us, meeting the campaign family we had assembled around us, all that seemed far in the past. David said it was as if he had gained two new families—the family of the campaign, with the team-like spirit of singular focus, then the additional layer of John and me on top of that. It was an amazing transformation, going from totally disoriented and lost to feeling right at home. And that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the way we all treated one another, the sense of community in the campaign, and the personal care we all took with one another. Opening our home was just a symbol of opening ourselves to these people who had committed themselves to John. It was easy.

The rules at our Washington house were the same as the rules in Raleigh. If you are expected for a meeting, just walk in and announce yourself; don’t make someone get up from the meeting to answer your knock. If you want something to drink or to eat, the kitchen is in there; you can have anything you want—as long as you fix it yourself. When we moved to the house on P Street in Georgetown, it was the same. The feeling in all these houses was a good one, with many threads of our lives crossing one another, from our personal lives, from the children’s lives, from neighbors, from these young people—and older people—who were helping, and from friends. There was noise and life all around us in the meetings—the meeting might be in the library, but there was always another conversation in the kitchen, and the children coming in with book bags into the front hall. I participated, but I also listened and learned. All the little pieces I picked up fleshed out answers I would later give when I was on the road. All the anecdotes gave life to the policies, and I would tell them and retell them. After a televised town hall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, one man called in to say that it was probably easy to tell all those facts and stories since I had cue cards. My mother was furious, but I was just amused; I couldn’t have cue cards at a town hall with a dozen questions. My cue cards were the hours and hours—days or weeks, even—I spent listening to these bright young men and women share what they knew with John and, by osmosis, with me.

And so it went for the next months. Between trips to Iowa and return trips to New Hampshire, there were meetings on health care and the environment, on domestic security and education, on the military and on the military family. This will sound strange, but the tone of the meetings wasn’t actually partisan. I doubt many meetings like them are. The complexity of the problems that faced America was daunting and the solutions difficult. There was no room to find anything except the right answers. Again, I don’t want to mislead; Emma Claire and I were sitting on the floor talking as Robert, James, and Derek were coming in and claiming chairs for yet another meeting. C-SPAN was on, as usual, in the background. There had been a Senate