Eleven
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK.
In the world of television news, no iconography is more instantly recognizable than the inexorable sweeping second hand accompanied by the sound of the ticking clock that opens CBS’s 60 Minutes.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
In the five months since I first met 60 Minutes producer Patti Hassler, I had been through the full gamut of emotions. Initially, wary of the program’s reputation for hard-hitting interviews, I had been cautious.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
Then, once Patti won me over, I was desperately eager to make sure she had all the relevant materials necessary to understand what made EMILY’s List work. For months, I did everything possible to figure out how to shape the story, how to get her to understand all the pieces of what we do. I flooded Patti with information. I showed her how we reinvented fund-raising. I explained the $100 checks as a marketing initiative. I invited her to our events. I made key members of our staff available.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
We had done all we could to prepare for the show. As usual, Betsy came through. She found a company that would split our calls into sixteen different lines with a recorded message asking people to leave their names and addresses. We also prepared a massive direct-mail recruitment campaign—eight hundred thousand pieces or so—which would be ready to go the day after the CBS piece was broadcast. We even shipped boxes of the letters with West Coast addresses to Judi Kanter in San Francisco; she could take them to the post office there so they would be delivered faster.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
At 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 22, 1992, I was at my home in northwest Washington with Karin Johanson, waiting for 60 Minutes to begin. My mind was in overdrive. What if they changed their minds and did one of those Mike Wallace–style hit jobs? What if women had lost interest in the Thomas-Hill hearings? What if nobody cared? I knew my fears were baseless . . . but still.
Either way, this time the ticktock was for real. It ticked for EMILY’s List and for me.
Before I knew it, CBS’s Morley Safer was on the air, saying how outraged hundreds of thousands of women were about the Clarence Thomas hearings. Then, the camera cut to me at one of our Florida events. “I can tell you that the anger and the energy and the fury that came out of those hearings is going to turn into support for women candidates, and we’re going to have a record number of women elected in 1992 because of what happened there,” I said. The camera then panned across the room to show scores of attentive and excited women.
Then, back to Morley Safer. “The first thing you should know about EMILY’s List is that there is no Emily,” he said. “EMILY is one of those overly cute acronyms standing for ‘Early Money Is Like Yeast . . . It makes the dough rise.’”
I winced. Oh, no, I thought. Safer was more an avuncular type than an attack dog, but maybe he was coming after us just the same.
Then, he paused briefly, and continued. “But there the cuteness ends.” At that moment, I breathed a sigh of relief. After that one light dig, I knew we would be okay.
And, in fact, what happened next on 60 Minutes was beyond our wildest dreams. I had told Patti how we had used the $100 figure as a marketing tool to get women to write bigger checks, and there it was, being explained in the voiceover as, on film, one woman after another wrote checks. CBS even squeezed in a last-minute bit about our endorsement of Carol Moseley Braun.
And the next day, we were the watercooler story all over America!
We received sixteen thousand phone calls over the next week from people wanting membership information. Returns started pouring in from our massive direct-mail campaign. Our computer system needed to be upgraded and our check-processing system overhauled to manage the incredible growth.
It was exhilarating and exhausting. Finally, I pulled our small staff together to review how we were doing. “Look,” I said. “I don’t think it will ever be like this again in my lifetime. The members are signing up, and the political opportunities are mushrooming. So, we have to do all we can now to take advantage of this moment. Let’s work together to do the best we can. And we’ll clean up the rest after the election!”
Over the next year, my life was transformed. This was my fifteen minutes of fame. When my planes landed, TV crews greeted me at the airports as if I were a celebrity. In Houston, I was introduced as “the woman who changed the face of American politics.” I had never paid much attention to fashion, but suddenly, what I wore was important. I had to learn how to be in the media spotlight.
Most importantly, all of this was being converted into political action. EMILY’s List had closed the 1990 elections with more than three thousand members, but, in the immediate aftermath of the 60 Minutes segment, we shot up to eleven thousand members, with no end in sight. Women who had never participated in politics before were signing up. Women who once contributed to the Democratic Party were writing checks to us instead—because their own party had ignored them.
Now, with the rising tide of anti-incumbent, pro-woman sentiment, women were real players. “For the first time in my political life, and that’s twenty-five years, I feel that we are empowered,” said Hedy Ratner, an EMILY’s List fund-raiser.
Just a few months earlier, Carol Moseley Braun had been ignored by the Democratic establishment. But now that she had beaten Senator Dixon in the primary race, when she went to Washington for money and backing, she was hailed as a conquering heroine. Democratic power brokers including Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell of Maine and Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy were lining up to meet with her.
By this time, all six of the women we endorsed for the 1992 Senate races were considered to have a serious shot—quite an improvement from two years earlier, when the number was zero. Barbara Mikulski was thrilled with what was happening. “This is truly history in the making,” she said at one fund-raising event. “When you look at the women standing here on this platform, you know that the New World Order is here!”
As for the House of Representatives, the election was insane. Because of redistricting, there would probably be one hundred new members of Congress—roughly triple the number in an average election. At EMILY’s List, women would just call us up out of the blue, saying, “I want to run for Congress.” Even then, I knew I would look back on this year and tell young friends a generation later, “Well, it all started in 1992.”
One of the most interesting races was for a Pennsylvania Senate seat. Lynn Yeakel, a fund-raiser for Women’s Way, had been inspired to run for the U.S. Senate after watching Arlen Specter, her state’s Republican senator, browbeat Anita Hill. Yeakel was not by any means a one-issue candidate, but she repeatedly made the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill testimony a focus of her campaign. “To have ninety-eight men and two women in the Senate in 1992 is just simply not right,” she told CNN. “This is a year when women are going to step forward—or have stepped forward—and the voters are going to see us as agents of change, as real hope for fixing a system of government that is not working well, and that’s why this will be a year when record numbers of women will be elected to Congress.”
Another virtual unknown, Lynn had no electoral experience whatsoever and faced a strong opponent in the Democratic primary in Lt. Gov. Mark Singel. In March, about a month before the primary, polls showed that only 1 percent of the Democrats would vote for her. In any another year, EMILY’s List would have decided that Lynn did not pass the viability test.
But in the wake of Carol’s victory in Illinois, it was clear that these were unusual times. The dynamics had changed. We could help shape events—not merely respond to them. So, we endorsed Lynn, as did a host of women’s organizations. The money started flowing into her campaign, and on April 21, Lynn hit a grand slam, winning the endorsement of Pennsylvania’s four largest newspapers.
That same day, a poll showed Lynn closing in on Singel, running just 5 points behind him in a three-way race. Then, just three days later, she took the lead, 32 percent to 29 percent, and she never looked back. When the returns rolled in on April 28, once again it was as if the Year of the Woman had been officially sanctified by the electorate. Lynn Yeakel had come from nowhere to win the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Pennsylvania.
Similarly, in Washington State, Patty Murray, who had become a state senator, was running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Brock Adams, a Democrat who dropped his reelection campaign after eight women came forward accusing him of various acts of sexual misconduct. In a normal year, Patty would not have passed our viability test either.
It would be an understatement to say that Patty was not wired into the political establishment. Her father, who had once been the manager of a five-and-dime store, had been forced to apply for welfare when he was stricken with multiple sclerosis. Patty herself had been a preschool teacher and later taught a parenting class at a community college. Then, in the eighties, when Patty was an activist for environmental and educational issues, an unaccommodating state senator inadvertently provided her with the words that would launch a political career. “You’re just a mom in tennis shoes,” he said. “Go home. You can’t make a difference.”
To Patty, those were fighting words, so she transformed that patronizing put-down into her rallying cry. First, she was elected to the school board; then, the state senate. Now, after less than four years as a state senator, she was moving into the big leagues. “Look out world!” she told a cheering crowd. “Us moms in tennis shoes are going to take over!”
Patty’s campaign took up residence in a building built by Lou Graham, a flamboyant nineteenth-century madam who ran what was said to be “the best little whorehouse in Seattle,” and Patty proudly acknowledged its origins. “It’s a hundred years later,” she told a reporter, “and women still are having to sell themselves.”
Of course, it’s a cliché now for candidates to run for office as Washington outsiders. But Patty really meant it. In fact, it was such a fundamental part of her identity that, initially at least, Patty was wary of us at EMILY’s List as Washington insiders.
That was fine with us. But, in view of Moseley Braun’s and Yeakel’s primary victories, we still had to determine whether the “mom in tennis shoes” was on a path to victory. So, we did our own independent poll in Washington State, and we realized people were sick to death of politics as usual. When Patty talked about helping families, voters said, “That’s what I want. She gets what my life is like. I’m voting for her.”
In late April, we took the unusual step of endorsing Patty at a time when Democratic governor Booth Gardner and other Democrats were still considering running. “This is an incredible boost,” Patty told a reporter. “It sends a message to everyone else that this is a serious campaign. They make it clear they don’t endorse long shots.”
The very next day, whether it was because of our endorsement or other factors, Governor Gardner made his decision not to enter the race against Patty. I’ve always known that, in some measure, politics is about perception. We had said Patty wasn’t a long shot. Now, it was so.
MEANWHILE, IN CALIFORNIA, there was the possibility that for the first time in history, one state might be represented by two women senators. Former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein had been so impressive in her governor’s race two years before that she was already considered the front-runner to win the special election to fill the two remaining years of the seat that then-governor Pete Wilson had vacated after winning the California gubernatorial election.
But Barbara Boxer had a tougher election in front of her. For the Democratic nomination alone, she faced two strong candidates who had powerful advantages over her. In Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, Barbara had a foe who was far better known statewide, a huge plus in a state as big as California with its exorbitantly expensive media markets. And in Rep. Mel Levine, she faced a five-term congressman from Los Angeles who was part of the so-called Waxman-Berman Machine, named for two liberal Democrats from Los Angeles who controlled the most potent political operation in Southern California. This was the liberal California version of the old boys’ network, and it meant Levine would have no problems whatsoever when it came to money. In fact, he had assembled roughly $4 million for the primary, which would enable him to spend more than $500,000 each week in television ads. That was a number Barbara could not compete with.
California being California, a state with massive political clout, this primary was seen as a real test of the Year of the Woman thesis. As the New York Times put it, the outcome would “help answer the question of whether the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and the anger that many women expressed at the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, have made women significantly stronger as candidates.”
Barbara was hurt by the fact that, as a member of Congress, she was tied to a banking scandal in which it was revealed that the House of Representatives allowed members, including Boxer, to overdraw their House checking account without the risk of being penalized. But she compensated for that by telling the effective story that she was campaigning in the same outfit she wore when she and six other women members of Congress tried to enter the Senate to ask the all-male Judiciary Committee to hear out Anita Hill.
“Do you know what they told us?” she asked her audience. “Do you know why they wouldn’t open their doors to us? They said they don’t let strangers in.” Then, she paused for effect.
“And if they consider members of Congress to be strangers, what do you suppose they think about the rest of you?”
This strategy was effective, and, even after massive advertising by her opponents, by April 30 she had taken the lead by 26 percent to 24 for McCarthy and 21 for Levine. A key to her success, especially given Levine’s initial lead in fund-raising, was that she was able to collect $4 million in donations from fifty-two thousand donors, more than two-thirds of whom were women.
On July 2, Boxer cruised to a surprisingly easy triumph. Dianne Feinstein achieved victory on the same ballot, and the two women Democratic senatorial nominees immediately went on an extraordinary statewide victory tour to kick off their campaigns for the general election. At the first stop on their tour, at the Burbank airport, they basked in the glory for a few moments and each gave a speech. “It is a little awesome,” said Dianne. “I looked over at Barbara, and I had just a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There is something more than just politics happening. There really is. It is a kind of phenomenon.”
The Boxer-Feinstein duo was such an amazing spectacle that I was asked about it repeatedly by reporters, and it prompted my favorite speech line ever. “If one more reporter asks me if California is ready to elect two Bay Area, Jewish, liberal, right-handed, dark-haired, lipstick-wearing women,” I said, “the answer is, ‘HELL YES!’” In the five months since the 60 Minutes piece, there were hundreds of articles decreeing 1992 as the Year of the Woman—not to mention hundreds of articles mentioning EMILY’s List, more than in our entire history to that point combined. Our membership had already grown from some three thousand before the Clarence Thomas hearings to more than fifteen thousand. We were on the road to raising $5 million for candidates, which would make us the single biggest fund-raiser for candidates in the United States. And the election was still four months away.
The 1992 Democratic National Convention opened on July 13 in Madison Square Garden to nominate Bill Clinton and Al Gore as its presidential and vice presidential candidates. A few months earlier, I had met a wonderful woman in New York named Judy Loeb Goldfein, who was eager to work with us. So, I asked Judi Kanter to team up with her on an event designed to highlight the seven Democratic women running for the Senate. We called the event Faces of Change United States Senate (FOCUS), and we booked the biggest ballroom at the New York Hilton in Midtown Manhattan.
When the DNC convention opened, women played an unprecedented role. On the first day of the convention, July 13, People magazine threw a luncheon honoring me, attended by opera singer Beverly Sills, TV star Marlo Thomas, ABC’s Barbara Walters, and many more celebrities. Hillary Clinton joined Tipper Gore and our candidates for the Senate as we all celebrated an extraordinary year of triumph for women.
The next day, Tuesday, July 14, was time for FOCUS, where 450 people attended the $1,000-per-person VIP reception we hosted in honor of our seven senatorial candidates. Governors Ann Richards and Barbara Roberts spoke, as did Barbara Mikulski. “For six years I’ve been the only Democratic woman in the U.S. Senate,” Barbara said. “But thank God that is over, because help is on the way.”
Next, we all moved into the main ballroom, where more than three thousand men and women were standing. After being introduced by Glenn Close, I conjured up, with the help of a twenty-foot movie screen, a melodrama of sorts, introducing our heroine, Anita Hill; our villain, Clarence Thomas; one powerful image that “burned itself onto our political psyche: the picture of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee”; and finally, with the soundtrack from The Magnificent Seven playing, our “Magnificent Seven” senatorial candidates—Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, Josie Heath of Colorado, Geraldine Ferraro of New York, Patty Murray of Washington State, and Lynn Yeakel of Pennsylvania. “In November,” I said, “when the final speech is given, and the final call is made, and the final ad is run, and the final vote is counted, I think the world will be different. For you and I have done something extraordinary tonight. You and I have made the world a different place.”
Everyone was having a fabulous time, cheering, crying, and laughing, and it was stunning to hear people come over and ask, “Can I give you another contribution?” In all, we raised more than $750,000 that night, making it by far the most successful fund-raiser for women in history.
TWO DAYS LATER, on July 16, 1992, Bill Clinton formally won the Democratic nomination at a convention that was a real breath of fresh air. This time around, it was well-planned, relatively gaffe-free, and united—especially for a party that had a history of being divided. There was an air of optimism that was exemplified by the campaign theme song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” With Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore, the Democrats had at the top of the ticket two couples from the sixties generation in which the women were accomplished professionals in their own right.
Anita Hill’s spirit pervaded the convention. Along with EMILY’s List, the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Campaign Fund played an unprecedented role, in large measure because there were so many women candidates—strong women, real leaders, who belonged on the national stage. On the convention floor, Patty Murray’s team handed out red PATTY MURRAY FOR SENATE shoelaces, a creation from Randy Murray, Patty’s fifteen-year-old son, that worked perfectly with her slogan about being “just a mom in tennis shoes.”
As my fifteen minutes of fame ticked on, Jimmy Carter invited me to build a house with him for Habitat for Humanity. Then, three weeks later, as the Clinton-Gore campaign was getting under way, I was invited to join Hillary at the American Bar Association convention in San Francisco, where Anita Hill was scheduled to receive an award.
Even though she was consumed by her husband’s presidential campaign, Hillary still followed the Anita Hill saga closely. We all stayed at the same hotel. First, I met privately with Anita and was able to thank her for all she had done to help EMILY’s List. Then, finally, I met Hillary, who asked me about all of the Senate campaigns, not as a wife and prospective First Lady but as a savvy political operative inquiring in great detail about what was happening in all of our campaigns. I was impressed. Hillary was a real trailblazing activist for women in law and was going to be no ordinary First Lady. I’d heard so many great things about her. I was beginning to understand why.
ON SEPTEMBER 15, the primaries yielded spectacular results for us, with only one major disappointment—the Democratic primary battle in New York. Geraldine Ferraro, whom we had endorsed, had been leading by 14 points just three weeks before the primary. But Elizabeth Holtzman went after Gerry with no holds barred, focusing on the Ferraros’ tax problems and legal problems, even suggesting that Gerry’s husband had ties to the Mafia, and the result was a brawl between two women that ended up helping the leading male candidate, in this case New York State attorney general Robert Abrams. When the votes were counted, it was clear that the attacks certainly didn’t help Holtzman, who finished last with just 13 percent. But they also wounded Gerry so badly that Abrams squeaked by her and won by 1 percent.
In Washington, Patty Murray won her primary but now had a tough battle against her Republican opponent, Rep. Rod Chandler, a former TV anchorman and five-term congressman who mocked Patty by carrying around tennis shoes. “He was so convinced this ditzy woman in tennis shoes was not going to beat him,” said Karin Johanson. “He was completely disdainful of her.”
Patty’s great strength was her truly disarming ability to address basic human needs in a straightforward manner that contrasted sharply with Chandler’s conventional Washingtonspeak. “She’d say, ‘I know that when we discuss health care, there’s not going to be anyone at the table for Washington’s families. There will be somebody for the doctors and somebody for the insurance companies, but if you want someone for Washington’s families, that’s me.’ And she did it in a terrifically articulate way,” said Karin.
Chandler relentlessly attacked Patty as a risky, inexperienced candidate. By mid-October, he had pulled into a dead heat with Patty and was outspending her by more than two to one. But finally his condescension backfired.
On October 14, as the second televised debate between the two was drawing to an end, Patty criticized Chandler for ignoring the concerns of families and instead voting for a congressional pay raise. Rather than deliver a conventional closing statement, Chandler responded to her critique by singing the refrain from the Roger Miller hit “Dang Me,” a country ditty about an unrepentant philanderer who leaves his wife and child: “Dang me, dang me / They oughta take a rope and hang me.”
When he finished, a hush fell over the audience, which just sat there in horrified, stunned silence. Then, Patty gave her terse rebuttal. “That’s just the kind of attitude that got me into this race, Rod,” she said.
There was nothing more to say. Nor was there any need.
ON ELECTION DAY, Tuesday, November 3, I stayed after work at our offices with the staff, Judy Lichtman, Betsy Crone, Joanne Howes, Marie Bass, Karin Johanson, and several others as the election returns came in. There was still considerable apprehension, but, whatever the outcome, it looked like there could not have been a more celebratory moment for the Founding Mothers. A year earlier, before the Thomas-Hill hearings, we had three thousand members. Since then, our membership had exploded to twenty-four thousand. And we had no fewer than twenty-nine newcomers running in the House and six in the Senate on election night. EMILY’s List members had contributed more than $6 million to candidates and more than $4 million to help us run the organization. We had become the nation’s biggest funder of federal campaigns. All of that would have been absolutely unimaginable a year earlier.
If you’re a whaler, I suppose the worst part of a wild, wild Nantucket sleigh ride must be the moment when your quarry gets away. Now, as the returns came in, we would find out whether or not we got our whale.
Because EMILY’s List was now a huge part of the story, reporters kept calling me throughout the evening, and Deborah Davis Hicks, our press secretary, sent me one phone interview after another as I watched the returns from a fourteen-inch portable TV across from my desk. But because California and Washington State were three time zones behind ours, results would not come in until the polls closed there at 8:00 p.m. Pacific time—11:00 p.m. Eastern time.
In regard to the presidential race, there was every reason to be upbeat. The Clinton-Gore mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid,” had played very well indeed, and when the polls closed, at 8:00 p.m. in most states, electoral votes rolled in for Clinton across the northern part of the Eastern Seaboard—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and more. At 9:00, Dan Rather announced that Clinton already had secured 238 electoral votes, with just 32 more needed to win the White House. California alone would put him over the top, and Clinton was heavily favored there.
Then, in Illinois, with the first senate race to be called in the entire country—a spectacular victory, with Carol Moseley Braun winning by 10 points and becoming the first African American woman elected to the United States Senate—we were already making history.
With so many races, there were bound to be some disappointments. In Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter had bombarded the airwaves with ads portraying Lynn Yeakel as an elitist blue blood whose father had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while in Congress, and played up her minister’s criticism of the Israeli government so as to turn her into an anti-Semite. Never having campaigned before, Lynn didn’t quite know how to handle the constant barrage of attacks, and Specter won by just over 2 points.
Then, at 11:00 p.m., I was in my office ending a phone interview with a reporter when I looked up at Dan Rather on the TV. “The polls have closed on the West Coast,” he said. “CBS projects that Patty Murray will be the new senator from Washington State. CBS projects that Dianne Feinstein has won her Senate race in California. CBS projects that Barbara Boxer will be the new senator from California.”
Down the hall, I heard my friends and colleagues in the reception area cheering and the sound of champagne corks popping. I ran out and hugged them. “Wow! Did you ever think? Hooray for EMILY’s List!” It was one of the best moments of my life. We had done it!
Counting Carol Moseley Braun’s victory, we had added four women to the United States Senate. And in the House, no fewer than twenty-one new Democratic women supported by EMILY’s List were elected. That number was particularly remarkable when you remember that there were only twelve Democratic women in the entire House just three elections earlier. That meant there would be thirty-five Democratic women serving in the new Congress—almost triple the number in 1986. American politics would never be the same.
EMILY’s List had grown from a tiny, marginal group of women to a major political fund-raising operation. And, of course, we now had Hillary Rodham Clinton in the White House, a First Lady who we believed would be a new national leader for issues important to women and families.