The Audacity of Hope

In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whatever
reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality of
momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy donors to promote my
cause, and small donors around the state began sending checks through the Internet at a
pace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from some
of the more dangerous pitfalls of fund-raising: Most of the corporate PACs avoided me,
and so I owed them nothing; the handful of PACs that did give, like the League of
Conservation Voters, typically represented causes I believed in and had long fought for.
Mr. Hull still ended up outspending me by a factor of six to one. But to his credit
(although perhaps to his regret) he never ran a negative TV ad against me. My poll
numbers stayed within shouting distance of his, and in the final weeks of the campaign,
just as my own TV spots started running and my numbers began to surge, his campaign
imploded when allegations surfaced that he’d had some ugly run-ins with an ex-wife.
So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support wasn’t a barrier to
victory. Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways.
Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums
of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once
accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to
take no for an answer.
But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself
spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge
fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people,
knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than
a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost
uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale
that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free
market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might
be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with
protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to
those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were
adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious
sentiment.
And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to
the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many
of the same ways—I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with
them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues
I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d
received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share
with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate:
the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural
parts of the state.
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy
donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above
the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and
frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d
entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for