Granny D’s American Century

19 | A Campaign from Our Town

A Campaign from Our Town In speeches at the end of daily walks, I talked about Senator Gregg and the influence of special interest money, of course, but mostly I slammed George Bush’s attacks on peace, Social Security, real homeland security, and the deficit. I claimed that the advances made by the “Greatest Generation” were being destroyed. A lot of people were deciding that the ninety-four-year-old woman with the bad cough might be too old for six years in the Senate, but was dead right about George Bush. Campaigns are stressful. There were competing visions of which way we should go. We held a meeting in my living room to iron things out. Blue thought she should move on. She didn’t like the tensions and the anger. Somehow, we all understood that she was our coal-mine canary. She was carrying the soul of the future for us. Jane, a management consultant who worked in New York City but who lived in Peterborough and helped us run our meetings and keep on schedule, had a tear in her eye. “Then that’s it for the campaign,” she said in a whisper. The factions came together in that moment. There would be other problems in the days ahead, but everyone understood that we were doing this for the future. Blue stayed, though she spent more and more of her time organizing college campuses. She took Rosie on the road. During all this, my walking the state continued. Jim drove me to the far corners of the state to walk the postal roads, and our brass band and banners made a splash. We had “Burma Shave” signs posted all over the state. They were series of four or five signs along the two-lane highways, with a dozen different messages, such as: “Her Campaign Cash / Is Fat-Cat Free / She’ll Represent / Just You and Me! / Doris “Granny D” Haddock for us Senate.” And: “When Will Congress / Work for Me? / I’m Sending In / My Granny D!” We had a veritable factory of volunteers turning out the handmade signs and installing them. A former Justice Department lawyer, Maury 19 A Campaign from Our Town 165 Geiger, now from the north woods of New Hampshire—who was then and remains today a major force working for humanitarian conditions in Haiti—slept on the floor of our little campaign headquarters in Peterborough, waking each dawn to oversee another crew of sign makers and installers. The people of Peterborough piled into the office to gather up the signs and posts and drive them to locations across the state. They brought food, hosted barbecues and even a barn dance. It was democracy to make Thornton Wilder proud. Looming ahead had always been the live, televised candidate debate . I was petrified at the thought of it. If I didn’t hear the questions well, or if I got flustered and couldn’t think of what to say, it would be the end, and deeply embarrassing to all my friends. My opponent was a polished debater and was Bush’s sparring partner in preparation for Bush’s debate with Kerry. The night for our debate finally came, and I did make him answer to his campaign donor conflicts and his support for disastrous Bush policies. The high moment was when he, after describing a sublime moment fishing in a stream, asked me what I could do to improve on his environmental record. “I hope you didn’t eat that fish, Senator,” I answered. I attacked him for the levels of mercury in New Hampshire streams, partly a product of the Bush administration’s loosening of environmental regulations on coal-fired power plants. I whacked him for warrantless wiretapping allowed by Bush’s Patriot Act, which the senator erroneously denied. I looked and sounded my age, all right, but I held my own, considering . Most of the television viewers polled gave me the debate, though they were probably being kind. There was something of a coup in the headquarters in the final few weeks. The Kucinich folks wanted to do house parties and pull me off the road to just do speeches. Dennis and some others thought it was far too late for house party organizing, and he insisted that the walk should continue right up to Election Day. He said we needed to put all our few remaining dollars into television ads, and the staff should all take cuts by half in order...