Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [112]
Not much was going John’s way. We had a core of supporters in Iowa and a core in New Hampshire, but as Dean’s rocket was taking off, the pool of people from whom we could try to garner support was dwindling. By November, it looked like the big unions were going to go with Dean, unions that might have—with a different tableau—gone to Dick Gephardt or to John, based on their policies and histories. The whole ship was tilting. We kept plugging in the same way we always had, but the holiday break was welcome. We called the campaign office in Washington to find out who was staying in D.C. for Thanksgiving, and then we called the “Thanksgiving orphans.” Dinner will be at 1 P.M., we said, don’t be late. Cate and I put together a menu, and whenever one of the staff arrived—Miles or Marc Adelman, Jennifer Swanson or James Kvaal—we would hand out assignments: stir the mashed potatoes, fill the water glasses. Then John and I sat down with the staffers and our children—in other words, our family.
It was that Thanksgiving weekend, though, that John and I sat one quiet afternoon in our house in Washington and talked about whether he would stay in the race. There is a tired you get when you are working hard but you are seeing the product of your work, which buoys you. We were not that kind of tired. We were just plain tired. There was no payday in this. Should he get out? I didn’t think so, for all the same reasons I had believed in him before.
“But we’re not gaining anywhere; how do we get any momentum?”
“Remember Gephardt?” Even Gephardt told John to remember Gephardt. On November 15th, as we had stood backstage at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, a huge Democratic dinner that—once every four years—is a cheerleading contest between the various campaigns, John and Dick talked. “Don’t worry about the numbers now,” Dick said, “things move quickly in Iowa.” He should know. Dick had come from nowhere before Christmas to winning the Iowa caucuses in 1988. We wanted Dick to be right, of course. After singing “Happy Birthday” to Jennifer Palmieri at a staff dinner after the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson festivities were over, Dick’s encouragement was the topic of conversation.
We’d just keep working. It would happen, or it wouldn’t.
We didn’t become panicked. In fact, the polls released a lot of pressure. To give you an idea of the relaxed mood, the morning after Jennifer’s birthday, Emma Claire kept interrupting John’s preparation for an interview. It might have been fine, except that C-SPAN was filming the preparation. Emma Claire wanted to know what Jennifer’s husband had gotten her for her birthday. “I don’t have a husband,” Jennifer said. “What did your boyfriend get you?” “I don’t have a boyfriend.” “Why,” Emma Claire wanted to know, “doesn’t anyone like you?” It was all caught by the C-SPAN camera, and Jennifer’s love life, or absence thereof, was shown nationwide on Road to the White House, like a very targeted personal ad: WFS—Democrat.
And it turned out that Dick Gephardt was right: things can change in Iowa quickly. After Christmas, the crowds at John’s events started to increase. We didn’t have any money for polling, but we would hear from other campaigns that John’s numbers were creeping up. John had tried to set a positive tone in his dialogue with other Democrats—no reason for them to stand in a circle and shoot at one another, he figured. And his decision had kept the other campaigns fairly positive. But as the caucus date—Monday, January 19th—approached, negative campaigning started. Dean was losing ground, and he struck out. Gephardt hit back. We would come into the hotel room, turn on the television in those last days, and shake our heads. If this works, John loses. But it didn’t seem like John was