Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [106]
From the pieces I picked up listening to John and sitting in the policy meetings in our library, I wrote my first stump speech. My baptism would be at the Concord, New Hampshire, home of Tenley and Peter Callahan and their precious, athletic children, who would come in and out as I spoke—children were the only things for which I was prepared. It was an inauspicious start—David Ginsberg spilled coffee all over my fortunately dark-colored pants suit on the plane. C-SPAN, unable to get permission from the campaigns to cover the candidates’ fund-raising events, covered the Callahan house party. My very first campaign event, and I had a camera on me as I spoke, and a huge microphone on a long boom followed me as I moved around the room meeting Tenley’s friends. My conversation about the Teletubbies? Caught on tape. And I am caught on tape again wishing that I had a Noo-noo, a vacuum-cleaner-shaped robot that would clean Teletubby spills and make Teletubby beds. When I gave my speech, I stood with my back literally against the wall of the Callahan kitchen and rattled through it at breakneck speed, all the while twisting the notecard on which I had written an outline around my index finger until, forming a perfect tube, it was useless as a speech aid. There was a woman there with whom I had gone to high school, and I could not convince even her to support John. It was two years away, she said. She would think about it.
The thing about terrible is that there is only one direction to go from there. And lovely Tenley did not jettison me or, more importantly, John. Each time I did a house party, or later a town hall, I learned something about myself—and I learned something about the people with whom I was speaking. There are a lot of ways to have this experience, but I only knew one, the one I had learned growing up—open up, let them in, and find out what we share. You didn’t have to be perfect, but you had to be open. But that made something political into something personal. I wanted Chris Black or Rob Nordgren or Deb Nelson to support John because I liked them and I knew they shared something important with John and with me. As with Paul Robitaille in Gorham, who grew up like John did, in a mill town in which the mills were closing, I fought for the connections and then I fought for the support, and I was disappointed when one did not lead to the other.
I made friends in New Hampshire: Kristin, Tenley, Lucy Hodder—at whose house I had my very worst house party—and Pam Yorkin, women who were simply fun to be with. And it wasn’t just voters, it was staff, too. Meghan Scott, young enough to be my daughter, became a friend, as did our state director, Caroline McCarley—you have to like anyone who, as a child, would name her dog Hugo Black. And it was at a luncheon honoring Caroline that I met Colin Van Ostern. We would eventually convince Colin to be John’s press secretary in New Hampshire. I knew immediately on meeting him that this was a young man to whom I could feel close. I was right. After all the primaries were nearly over, as Colin and I walked different directions to get to our respective gates at the Buffalo airport, knowing that this was likely the last time we would do this, I was simply sad. Not sad for the coming end of the campaign, but sad that there was no excuse now for Colin to be a part of our lives. I was wrong, though: Colin is still a part of our lives. I still see him at reunion parties—yes, we have them—and talk to him on the phone. And Meghan and Jay Heidbrink. And Pete Cavanaugh, who returned to Georgetown University after the election. Pete would stop by our house or, if we weren’t home, leave notes on our car. I was used to a house full of young people, and in a sense that’s what I still had.
As much as I liked the people, New Hampshire was always a struggle politically. It made sense that it would be. Howard Dean was from Vermont, John Kerry was from Massachusetts. There wasn’t much oxygen left for other candidates. John was Sisyphus