Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [141]
At the beginning of October, our family—our big family—moved to Chautauqua, New York, where John prepared for the vice presidential debate. Because it was past the regular season for vacationers, we had this extraordinary place almost to ourselves. Between debate preparation sessions, we would sit on the porches of the Athenaeum, a grand Victorian-era hotel, and look across the expanse of grass, across Lake Chautauqua, looking across to where Grant or Roosevelt might have looked—so long had the resort been a refuge from politics. And a place of politics, too. And it was both for us. In the morning we would eat breakfast with the children, then head to an auditorium where for hours a mock vice presidential debate would take place, John being John, of course, and Bob Barnett playing Dick Cheney, thick notebooks of Cheney’s positions and statements in front of him. As many a consultant suspected, I would undo some of their work during breaks. John would say, “What they are suggesting doesn’t feel right to me,” and I would support him, Do what feels right.
During one of the breaks, several of us remained in the auditorium to talk about the possibility of a question asking John to name three political mistakes he had made. Not a question any politician, any job applicant, anyone for that matter wants to answer. Before the break John had come up with two, but he hadn’t come up with a third. When he and Mark Kornblau got up to get some of the lunch laid out in the next room, Ron Klain, Bob Shrum, David Ginsberg, and I stayed on the sofas talking. I had an idea. What about his vote confirming education secretary Rod Paige? John had been really unhappy with Paige’s performance, as well as the revelations that had emerged about the Houston school district Paige had headed before his cabinet job. Well, maybe, said Klain. In a minute or two, he and Bob got up to get sandwiches, too. David and I talked until John came bounding back in the auditorium. “Shrum’s got a great idea for the third mistake,” he said. “Voting for Rod Paige!” David and I looked at each other and laughed. It is, you should know, campaign practice to take credit for other people’s ideas. But this, perhaps, was a first: taking credit for an idea of the candidate’s spouse. We have ribbed Bob mercilessly since.
It was a good time, a break before the last push, a time to watch football games on television—the area the staff had commandeered had a big TV and tables filled with food. I got a few of them to play Boggle with me, but it was really a young person’s space, and I had my own young people to tend to. After the afternoon debate preparations, we would go back to the porches and watch the children play football on the lawn—Emma mostly speeding away from whomever was trying to catch her, whether she had the ball or not, and Jack wanting to be the quarterback and finally losing the job when he threw the football from four feet away directly into Matthew Nelson’s groin. But soon the halcyon days were over, and the whole troop packed for Cleveland.
When I traveled with John, we traveled in his larger plane, John and most of his staff at the front, the Secret Service in between, and the press in the rear, everyone a little territorial—this had been their seat for weeks, “See that bag of chips on the floor? That’s my bag.” So the plane was crowded on the Monday afternoon we left for Cleveland, crowded and giddy with anticipation. The debate was