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By Root 1063 0

He knew that the A-teams on these staffs are with the presidential and vice presidential candidates and that he would be forced to make do with less staff and less money, and he’d heard, despite the puffball interview, that I expected a lot. But he took the job anyway, thinking wrongly that the job couldn’t possibly entail that much. As my schedule became more and more complicated, so did Ryan’s life; he was driven to mailing his dirty laundry to Washington so that it could be cleaned and sent to him at a later stop. Although I didn’t know it until much later, he, like Kathleen, didn’t tell anyone that he had taken the job. When he was asked what he was doing for me, he would say he was just filling in temporarily.

The rest of the staff was collected by Lori Denham while I was on the road. Rebecca Werbel signed on to help Kathleen with scheduling. Courtney O’Donnell would help Karen Finney. Puja Pathak and Susan Ochs put the briefing books together that I got every night. Briefing books are notebooks with the positions of the campaign and the information about the places we went. If I was going to Buffalo, essentially this notebook would say, Here’s the deal on Buffalo. Here are your talking points. I remember when Cate looked at her first briefing book during John’s primary campaign. Where are the facts? she asked. I don’t need to be briefed on rhetoric. Well, I had the same problem with the Kerry campaign briefing books. They were written like arguments for a position. I could do the arguing in my own words better than I could do it in someone else’s, but in order to make the argument, I needed the facts, good or bad. I didn’t want to be surprised. I didn’t want fluff, and I sure didn’t want spin. Except when I was keeping the breast cancer a secret, I never pretended to be anything other than what I was, and I didn’t hide that I was upset that the campaign was spinning me instead of informing me. At first, I filled in the facts myself, going online after nearly everyone else had gone to sleep. When we finally got the briefing books right, I also got a little more sleep. And then Ryan devised a system of cards so that I had information about every state, every place we went, every issue I talked about. The average income in West Virginia, the percentage tuition increase in Pennsylvania colleges, jobs, wages, health care costs, Medicare premium increases. I would have all the pieces, so I could give people the right information. I wanted to convince audiences, and to do so, I had to be candid and honest. The facts gave me the ability to do that. Poor Puja and Susan, and Michelle Jolin and Lisa Ellman, who handled policy on my team; I don’t think any team worked as hard. And every day, I went to two or three or four more places, and they had to do it all over again for each one. Each night I would update the cards with the briefing book they sent for the next day, and before each town hall or interview, I would look over the cards, Do I know this well enough to talk about it?

I will admit here that I was tough on these people. I didn’t think of it as being tough, at the time, and I don’t think of it as unfair now. I don’t think I asked any more of anyone else than I asked of myself. But looking back, I know I asked a lot of all of us. The election was important, and I didn’t want to make or hear excuses. I called from Cincinnati once. I was about to have an event at the new Freedom Center. What, I needed to know, had John Kerry done on African American issues while he was in the Senate? It wasn’t in the briefing book. Well, he’s going to…No, no, I stopped them. Not what he’s “going” to do, I want to know what he “has” done. There’d been a lot of civil rights legislation in the past twenty years; had he cosponsored any of it? How had he voted on it? Silence on the other end. Let me know when you find out, and then I will go to this event. It wasn’t their fault, they had gotten the “He’s going to…” answer from the Kerry policy desk. But wherever the problem, my team was taking the heat.

As long as I am being candid, I admit