while Charlie and I and Hank and other members of the campaign staff wound our way among the tiny towns up in the northern part of the state, Cornucopia and Moose Junction and Manitowish; if we stayed in a Holiday Inn as opposed to a no-name motel, it seemed like a luxury. (Early in the campaign, Charlie had started traveling with his own down pillow, which I folded in half each morning and set in my canvas bag.) Given our schedule, the opportunity to visit with friends was rare, and I felt that it would be restorative for all of us and especially for Charlie. I’d noticed that the more days in a row he spent campaigning, the more impatient and cranky he became— that morning at a power plant in New Richmond when a single mother of three asked him why she should believe he knew anything about working families, he’d snapped, “If you don’t think I do, then maybe you shouldn’t vote for me”—but even just a short break could do him a world of good. That Saturday afternoon, we’d flown back to Milwaukee from Eau Claire on an eight-seat prop plane. Though initially I’d had grand plans of making a real meal, all I had the energy for was spaghetti, but the evening turned out to be great fun, Howard and Petal and Charlie and Ella and I sitting in the kitchen instead of the dining room, talking and laughing.
Ella was in the middle of reading
for English, and I was rereading it myself—I took it with me as we campaigned, and I’d made a copy of her syllabus so that I could read the same pages each night that she did and we could discuss them on the phone if I wasn’t there (I had always loved
). It turned out that when Howard had read it in ninth grade, he’d been required to memorize the first five lines in Greek and still remembered them:
Then they announced that Petal was thirteen weeks pregnant—they’d been trying for years—and we were, they said, the only ones they’d told besides their families; they didn’t know yet if it was a boy or girl, so we debated names for both. Ella suggested Ella, Charlie suggested Charles, and when I didn’t suggest Alice, Howard said, “Why so bashful, Al? Can’t you keep up with these egomaniacs?” After dinner, we went into the den to play hearts, and Ella shot the moon; the night had taken on the festive air of a slumber party. Charlie was the first to turn in—ever since he’d started jogging in the morning, he went to bed by ten if he could—and when he was asleep, Petal and Ella and I went to the attic so I could find my old maternity clothes to give Petal. Most were hopelessly outdated.
The next morning, Howard went running with Charlie, and then Howard and Petal took off for Madison around the same time we left for church. Not for the first time, there turned out to be a local news camera waiting for us after the service at Heavenly Rose—this was in October—and Charlie stopped and spoke to the reporter for a few minutes while Ella and I waited in the car. That evening, Charlie was giving a speech in Green Bay, and I was staying in Milwaukee but meeting up with him Monday in Sheboygan, where six hundred area Republicans had paid a hundred dollars each to attend a luncheon with us. It was following the lunch, over twenty-four hours after it had happened, that Charlie told me: During their Sunday-morning run, Howard had said it would be a huge favor if he could set up a meeting between Charlie and his brother, Dave, who was the CEO of a large engineering firm hoping to win a contract with the state. Between the two of them, Howard said, Dave’s firm was vastly more qualified than any of the ones currently doing business with Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation. “You think that’s why they came to see us?” Charlie asked.
“I’m sure it’s not,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. Charlie and I were sitting in the first row of the conversion van, headed to the town of Little Chute, where Charlie was to give a speech to a bunch of dairy farmers, and I told myself that no one else in the van was listening to us. At that moment, our driver, Kenny, was in the front seat; a speech-writer named Sean O’Fallon was in the back row, wearing headphones and typing on his laptop; and Hank and Debbie Bell, a strategist, were in the second row, having a noisy and impassioned debate about whether the Garth Brooks song “Friends in Low Places,” which had just come on the radio, would be a good one to play before Charlie’s rallies. With the song’s reference to places “where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away,” it seemed clear to me that using it would be a disastrous idea, which was the argument Hank was making—he said it was practically baiting the media to uncover Charlie’s 1988 DUI, then still a secret—while Debbie was insisting that it was such a beloved song and so perfectly captured Charlie’s unpretentious personality, as well as the Wisconsin way of life, that the alcohol references didn’t matter; plenty of voters liked Charlie better because of his struggles.
Sitting next to me, ignoring the Garth Brooks argument, Charlie seemed melancholy rather than irritated when he said, “I guess this is how it works now, huh? We ask everyone we know for money, and everyone we know asks us for favors.” He chuckled, though not happily. “I’m a high-class hooker.”
“If that’s how you see yourself, I don’t know why you’re running,” I said. “A governor can be a great force for good, and anyway,
is an oxymoron.”
“Now, hold on just a second.” Charlie grinned, this time for real. “Who’re you calling an oxymoron?”
“Seriously,” I said, “if you get elected, and it looks like you will”—this was not simply optimism on my part; his polling numbers were in the high fifties—“you’ll have the opportunity to improve the lives of lots of people. Isn’t that why you’re running?”
All these years later, I see the question of why Charlie ran for governor, or for president, as moot—our lives have become what they’ve become—but at the time, it mattered to me, it felt like an important puzzle that could be solved if I examined it thoroughly. I suppose I believed that if I understood Charlie’s impetus, I might agree that running for election was a good idea. “Because he feels called to lead,” Hank would tell reporters. Charlie himself, refusing to be serious, would say to me, “For the same reason a dog licks his balls—because I can.” Because he wanted to prove that he was as smart and ambitious as his brothers, journalists speculated, or because he wanted to avenge his father’s own humiliating presidential run in 1968, and while neither of these possibilities reflected particularly well on Charlie, they were more flattering than my own theory, which I shared with no one: because of his fear of the dark. Because if he were governor, and then president, he’d be guarded by state troopers and later by agents, he’d never be far from people specifically assigned to watch out for him; he might be assassinated, but he wouldn’t have to walk down a shadowy hallway by himself. (Indeed it seems clear that I fear Charlie’s assassination more than he does. Before he officially entered the presidential race the first time, I felt compelled to tell him about my peculiar, guilt-ridden relief when Kennedy was shot. Wouldn’t it be a perfectly symmetrical kind of punishment for having had such thoughts, I said, if my own husband became president and was killed similarly? To which Charlie replied, without a second’s hesitation, “You know that’s bullshit, right? That’s hocus-pocus teenage- girl thinking.”)
The reality of why Charlie ran, I imagine, was a combination of factors, including ego: He did feel some sense of public service, as he defined it; he did feel some sense of “why not?”; he did want to prove himself to his family and to prove his family to the world; he did want the perks. Such motives, inglorious as they are, do not offend me;
