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By Root 1056 0

—everything we did was uphill. And sometimes it was a struggle because the campaign hadn’t done what we needed, which led to some frustrating visits. There was one ill-planned trip when more thought had been given to the press than to the event. I was to meet voters at Dusty’s, a diner in Claremont. We got there, and I met one supporter who wanted to say hello before he ran to an appointment. That was fine, I thought, until I moved into the room where I would “meet voters.” My schedule should have said “meet voter.” One elderly man, not always clear in what he said, was sitting at the table we’d reserved. And there were one television and two print reporters to capture this campaign low—or what I thought was a low until we left there and drove to a senior center to meet people during lunch, only to learn that we had mistimed it—it certainly wasn’t because I had dawdled at Dusty’s—and gotten there after lunch. With a print reporter still in tow, I spoke to the lone man there, who was sweeping the lunchroom.

The primary season was punctuated by candidate debates, and the first one was May 3rd in South Carolina. George Stephanopoulos, who moderated, immediately got John Kerry and Howard Dean to do what we knew their staffs had spent all week telling them not to do: they got in a spat. Dick Gephardt got in a plug for his health care plan. John got in his line in response—something about Enron. And in what seemed like minutes, it was over.

John and I left immediately after the debate. John was to speak the next day at the Kennedy Library in Boston, so the two of us took a chartered plane from Columbia to Logan Airport. As the pilots flew around a storm off the coast, we could see the skies light up. And in that vastness where the sky seemed alive and the heavens seemed open for a glimpse, we fell apart. It was Wade. It was how much he would have enjoyed all of this. It was how much we missed him. And it was the pressure of the moment, even with a decent performance behind him, that all came crashing in at once—and the illuminated sky was the perfect backdrop. We recovered, we always did. But the difficulty of talking to George Stephanopoulos or Tim Russert or Bob Schieffer will never compare with the difficulty of not talking to Wade.

In May 2003, I made my first solo trip to Iowa. We would always say that the people of Iowa were, at their core, so much like the people of North Carolina, and everyone assumed it was political rhetoric. It wasn’t. We felt at home in Iowa. Brad Anderson, Aaron Pickrell, and Kim Rubey, John’s Iowa press secretary, were with me when in Jim Larew’s packed office in Iowa City, I just talked, like talking to friends from home, except that I gave Kim a start when I said, in the intimate way you would say such a thing, “Can we go off the record for just a minute?” In politics there is no such thing as off the record. When you say it in front of press, you might as well be shining klieg lights on yourself and announcing, Listen up, this could be good. I don’t remember what I wanted to be off the record—maybe my comparison of John and George Bush’s athletic history. All I remember is that it wasn’t worthy of the newspaper, which made Kim very happy.

The summer of 2003, after countless Democratic dinners, forums, and debates, after dozens of polls in which John did not make the top one or two or three, our family took a two-week bus tour of Iowa and New Hampshire. In preparation, I bought the children a new round of play clothes to replace the ones with holes and stains, and myself something that was casual but—there is no other way to say this—First Lady–like. Needless to say, I had nothing like that in my closet. And I made copies of The Song Book.

Since I was in college I have been writing down the lyrics to songs. Before computers, I would take the lyrics down in shorthand, transcribe and type them onto notebook paper, and alphabetize them. Word processors made corrections easier, and then the Internet made the process almost effortless. The only qualification to get into the songbook is that I have