Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [115]
Cate had exams at Princeton, so we spent most of caucus evening on the phone with her, reporting what Miles, Rob, David, Aaron, and Jennifer were hearing from the people in the field. And it looked good. John, who had been a distant fourth a few weeks earlier, was a close second in Iowa. We had heard, through one of Kerry’s field generals, that if the caucuses had been three days later, the places would have been reversed, so pronounced were the trends. But we were not unhappy. Dennis Kucinich called first, then Dick Gephardt, and then Howard Dean, all congratulating him. John called John Kerry to say, “Good race.” And then each of the candidates went out to speak. The great showing was John’s, but it also belonged to the Iowa staff. Rob Berntsen was the oldest person on the Iowa team, and he was thirty-two; most of them were in their early twenties, some were paid, some volunteered, and they worked every bit as hard when John’s numbers were at 5 percent as they did at the end. John’s speech was a tribute to them. But there was no rest. We left the stage and the state, and at 1:30 A.M., in a hangar in Concord, New Hampshire, we had a rally.
By seven the next morning John was in front of a television camera again, about to be on the Today show. As he waited to be interviewed, through his earpiece he could hear Katie Couric and Matt Lauer talking about Howard Dean. John had no idea what they were talking about. John spoke in Des Moines and we went straight to the airport. We were probably the last people in America to hear about what came to be known as The Scream. I want to be clear: The Scream did us no good. We had always heard that two stories come out of Iowa, and what we wanted was for John to be one of them. If The Scream hadn’t happened, Kerry and John would have been the stories coming out of Iowa, since they had garnered 70 percent of the caucus-goers between them. Since it did happen, Kerry and The Scream were the stories. And there was no New Hampshire bump. All the might-have-beens.
We thought there might be a bump anyway. The crowds in New Hampshire that week rivaled the Iowa crowds. The locations again were too small, but I was traveling with John more, and I would take John’s overflow crowds and answer their questions in a warm-up town hall. One of his first post-Iowa town halls was in a high school gym. Glenn Close was traveling with us, entertaining the children with her Cruella De Vil persona from 101 Dalmations and taking her not inconsiderable knowledge about health care to forums as John’s surrogate. She and I were crouched on the stage as John began, but Miles came and tapped us on the shoulder. Could we go to the overflow room?
The overflow room was a whole other gym, and the bleachers there were filled with four or five hundred people. I saw Jonathan Alter, whom I admire greatly, come in. I memorized where he was sitting and then never looked there again. It was possible to look at Sandy Mucci like she was someone from my hometown and just talk to her. It was impossible to look at Jonathan Alter and use that same conceit. The first question I got asked was from a Lyndon LaRouche supporter about why we wouldn’t let LaRouche on the Democratic ballot. The crowd, tired of LaRouche supporters disrupting town halls, started booing the questioner. I asked them to stop. People can ask anything. And then I turned to her and said, Candidates don’t decide who is on the ballot, but if it had been up to me to decide, he wouldn’t be on the Democratic primary ballot—he’s not a Democrat. It set the tone for everything after that: there was no restriction on the questioning. Miles hadn’t actually seen me do a town hall, and when he came back in to see how I was doing, I was answering a question on North Korea. He listened and left. I’d be okay.
Exams at Princeton were now over and Cate was campaigning with her father and on her own. Her roommates and a dozen more of her friends from Princeton—Sun Jung, Adrienne, Courtney, Hayden, Erica, Jenna, Catesby, George, Steve, and