Tag: presidential campaign

Me & Pete Buttigieg

Me & Pete Buttigieg

Never have I felt so valued at church as I did last Sunday. Presbyterians I hardly knew tugged at my sleeve or grabbed my elbow or those less buttoned-up screeched in my face — all congratulating me on getting to meet Pete Buttigieg. I’d posted a photo of Pete and me on FaceBook that week. A well-heeled Democratic couple in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood scrambled a party together that raised $700,000 for the Presidential campaign of candidate Kamala Harris six days after she chose Governor Tim Walz as her Vice Presidential running mate. A friend bought two tickets he couldn’t use and asked if I’d like to have them.

Gulp. Yes. Yes. Yes. I said. Pete Buttigieg is the most poplar Democrat in the United States. He’s the youngest person ever to serve as US Secretary of Transportation, was the mayor of South Bend, ran for president in 2020, is married with two children and oh, he’s gay. When he kicked off his campaign for President in 2019, I traveled to South Bend with Amy, Peter and Mark in the pouring rain to be at his announcement in the leaky old Studebaker factory. Pete was on Kamala’s short list for Veep, but, well, he’s gay. The US electorate can stretch its collective imagination to accept only one major cultural shift at a time. I guess. Democrats like me are giddy over the historic candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, a black woman, running at the top of the ticket. We would have been rapturous if she’d chosen Pete, but honestly, we’re not far from that in her choice of Tim Walz, a funny smart former high school football coach who loves state fairs, teaching, sitting on Congressional committees, governing Minnesota, serving in the National Guard and traveling to China.

I just love campaigns. I love candidates, campaign organizers, campaign volunteers, campaign consultants, campaign buttons, campaign events and campaign offices. My high school held a student-led Democrat-Republican combined mock convention in 1964. I was assigned to be Republican candidate Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign manager. I wrote to Rockefeller’s campaign office in New York requesting his platform in order to write my nominating speech for the mock convention. The campaign responded by sending me free stuff: crates full of campaign buttons, posters, leaflets, scarves, ties, cufflinks, bracelets, position papers, and even a suggested stump speech. I plastered the school with Rockefeller posters and made sure every student had some sort of paraphernalia with “Nelson” on it. The students chanted “Nelson! Nelson!”, I delivered my nominating speech and Rockefeller won the student endorsement by a wide margin. 

I had already been steeped in soda-shop debates rebutting a freshman classmate’s anti-government racist diatribes. I read the boy’s constant companion, the 1958 publication The Blue Book of the John Birch Society ( a precursor to Trumpism and Project 2025) in order to prove him wrong point by point.

In the eighth grade my class was bussed to the airport and given hand-held American flags to wave and cheer as President Dwight Eisenhower deplaned from Air Force One. 

Sixty-five years later, I’m still at it.

When Is This Nightmare Going To Be Over?

When Is This Nightmare Going To Be Over?

On November 8, 2016, I settled into an election night victory party in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. The first bit of bad news came over the TV early: Indiana Democratic Senate candidate Evan Bayh lost. Wizened political operative Keith Lesnick flashed a guttural look, “That’s bad.” 

Fourteen hours later, fellow campaign volunteer Susan Keegan and I drove home to Chicago. We had no victory, no trophy, no good news. What we did have was despair, hopelessness.

Years before, in April 1992, I returned from a grueling 90-hours a week job in the Bill Clinton primary campaign. A psychiatrist treated me as if I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Within a few weeks, Hillary Clinton came to Chicago to speak at a women’s forum. I stood alone in the back of the room, away from the crowd. Someone came to me and said Hillary wanted to see me backstage. She greeted me with a teary hug, said she was sorry I left the campaign, asked if I would consider working at the Democratic Convention in August. I told her I was too tired, that I wouldn’t survive. She understood, thanked me for all I did to get the campaign off the ground and assured me her door was always open. We parted as friends, equals really. When I later worked in the Clinton Administration, I saw her many times. My admiration for her superior intellect increased, always undergirded by her unscripted and genuine kindness toward me. 

I felt a thousand little cuts during the 2016 campaign, watching her withstand the cruelest name-calling and ugly attacks not only by her opponent but by my own friends. For months after the election I felt like she died, like I died, like the country died.

At the end of that bleak November, I looked out over out my MacBook Air, watched three crows bounce from bare tree limbs to the ground and back—caw, caw, cawing at each other about their Thanksgiving dinner. I believed they knew me, saw me looking at them. They restored me, enlarged my soul, allowed gratitude to seep in, grateful for them if nothing else. I wondered for the millionth time since election day what Hillary was doing.

All of a sudden, something popped up in the corner of my screen: “White House forced to reverse course on Trump’s golfing.” I instantly broke off communing with my wild pets and opened the link to this urgent story. I don’t dislike golf, but I’m not interested either.  th-3  th-4Unknownmsnbc-logo_0  However, I had involuntarily begun to relinquish my time to so-called breaking news. I clicked. The next thing I knew a little box appeared with a photo of a pair of shoes I coveted. Hmmm, I wondered if those were on sale. I clicked. As I lifted out of my chair to take a break, I saw two pop-ups I had to read first:  “Is a ‘deep state’ subverting the presidency?” and “Bald Eagle Population Booming In Chicago.”  

It’s two years later and this compulsion, this savage addiction is my sentence for seizing the fantasy that something is going to happen to reverse the outcome of the election.

Any day now.