Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [134]
Summer was ending. In mid-August the children’s school would start. We needed to get them back into a routine, so the children and I went back to Washington. It was from there that I was to leave for my first solo venture as the wife of the vice presidential nominee. I was going to Ohio in early August. Jennifer Palmieri was the press secretary for the Kerry-Edwards campaign there. She had called me before taking the job. Should I go? Of course, I said and then added, with no premonition whatsoever, that’s the election, right there. Go. Well, she had, and now she had put together an event in Columbus to thank a woman restaurateur who had registered hundreds of single mothers in her restaurant. I would use the opportunity to talk about why this election was so important for women. John Kerry and my husband had campaign planes. Teresa had her own plane. I was flying commercial—which would not last long—and now I wasn’t flying at all because the flight had been canceled and there was no other way to get there. Ryan’s first job as my trip director was to tell me that there was no trip. I started that day asking for a private plane.
Our new team was still feeling its way. My schedule was, at first, made up of panel discussions with women on different topics. The campaign would locate women in various towns to talk about health care or education or domestic security. The stories I heard were incredible; the women I met were strong or crumbling or fighting. But it wasn’t a format I liked much, because I was too much an emcee making sure the shy panelist spoke up and that the vociferous panelist—and there were one or two or more of those—gave others a chance. It seemed to me, too, that the women on the panels and in the crowd had already decided how to vote. I was preaching to the converted. Maybe those were the only people they could get to see the spouse of a vice presidential candidate. I could understand that. But when I read in the nightly press clips that my events were open only to Democrats, I was livid. So even if an undecided voter had wanted to hear me, I asked the staff, they couldn’t? No, the press had it wrong, they told me, but I think the press had it right and my staff, who didn’t yet know me, was trying to protect me. Maybe they were worried that if I was able to get so exercised over a briefing book, how would I respond to a heckler? It would not have been an unreasonable concern, except that, as I said, they didn’t know me yet.
I had met hecklers. When John announced his candidacy at the University of South Carolina, a half dozen boys with Bush signs had been disrupting the speakers before me with chants and shouts, so when I took the microphone, I spoke first to them. “We have press here from all over the country,” I said in my most motherly voice. “I just know you boys are going to show them some good Southern manners.” That’s all it took, and they never said another word. It’s all in the tone of voice. When protesters gathered outside a community health clinic where I was doing a town hall, I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen them until our SUVs were pulling away. I told Ryan I wanted to thank them, for no one before had ever found me important enough to bother protesting my visits. He said nope, not a good idea.
But I wanted to talk to them, to anyone who might be persuaded, even those others had written off. I had been trying in those early weeks to make a point about the closed and ticketed Bush and Cheney campaign events, and apparently—because of an excess of caution or a misunderstanding