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By Root 980 0

seventeen hours away. Sam, Mary, Marcus, Lexi, Linda, Derek, Mark, Robert, everyone tense and excited and no one in a mood to fight about seats. We got to Cleveland and saw the familiar face of Al Rutherford, who looks more like a diplomat than an advance man. We had worked with Al in the primaries, and Sam knew that John would be completely at ease knowing Al was in charge in Cleveland. Another hotel—entered through the service bays—so I couldn’t say which one. Cate arrived, and the next day so did the children, after a couple of days back home at school. John’s parents were there somewhere, but I didn’t see them until after the debate. There was this sense that there was a tornado all around us, and yet Al created this serene island so John could focus. And then time sped up and suddenly Cate and I were being seated next to Kristen Breitweiser, the beautiful and courageous September 11th widow who traveled with John in much the way the Military Moms with a Mission traveled with me. Cate and I were holding hands, we were in what would be John’s line of vision, and Gwen Ifill, the moderator, was giving the audience instructions on clapping, which they usually ignore, although that would not be the case tonight. Tonight all was serious. It was as if there were two Titans clashing. We’d read the press analysis. Experience and judgment on one side of the table and humanity and intelligence on the other. And then the debate began, and John immediately started dismantling the notion that he was looking at a man of judgment.

I watched Dick Cheney’s hands. I had taken enough depositions as a lawyer to know to watch his hands, and they were in motion. The man I had seen on television, sitting completely still in a meeting with the President or speaking as his flat hand punctuated his sentences in the air, this man was now holding one hand down with the other. I could have told Dick Cheney that I had been in many an argument with John and that he could, if he chose to, shake you. Cheney made his points about John, undoubtedly scored some points, but he never had what he clearly had expected to have: the upper hand with this whippersnapper. Finally, I think in desperation, though I am certain I will never know—Cheney said something he thought sounded dismissive of John and which was patently false: “The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.” I turned to Cate, for I had sat for what seemed like hours next to Lynne Cheney while John sat two seats away next to Dick Cheney at the National Prayer Breakfast. It was untrue. When the debate was over, the families—as they always do—go up to the stage, hug their family, and exchange civilities with the opposition. John picked up Jack, who had run out to him, wanting to know, insisting to know in his deepest, most threatening, four-year-voice, Which one is Cheney? I had made my way to Cheney and, poking a finger at his lapel, I said, “You have too met John. We were all together at the National Prayer Breakfast.” In the Kerry staff room they were watching on monitors; they couldn’t hear me, they could only see me poking my finger. What, they wondered, was she doing now? “Oh, yes,” he smiled, “we were.”

Within minutes, of course, the entire press corps was poking their fingers in his lapel. Immediately on networks and blogs, the footage and the photographs went up. It was gratifying in one sense, but it changed what people were talking about. They weren’t talking about the focus groups who had watched the debate and decided, without knowing about the misstatement, that John had won the debate. Instead they were talking about John and Cheney previously backstage at Meet the Press, or John and Cheney at the swearing in of Senator Elizabeth Dole, or…. The next day Cate was on CNN’s American Morning with Bill Hemmer. Liz Cheney, Dick and Lynne’s thirty-something daughter, was participating by remote and still backing the line that her father had never met John before. She explained that thousands of people attend the Prayer Breakfast, which they do, but she was looking