The oval, as usual, smelled of the nearby eucalyptus groves, and as we took a last look I remembered my first trip to Stanford. A little more than three years before, I had visited the campus for the first time at the end of a cross-country road trip in our old Plymouth Fury. My brother, a college friend of mine, and I camped just off the oval in an A-frame tent that we hid behind hedges and eucalyptus trees for the couple of days we were there. Each morning we took the tent down, sneaked it as discreetly as possible into the trunk of the car, which was parked at the oval, and found our way to a shower in the open athletic buildings’ locker rooms. We were a little rough from the road and drew some attention, but campus police and preppy students let us be for the most part. The weather and campus were glorious.
I didn’t meet Lisa on that trip. We first saw each other on the third day of law school at a packed mixer for new students in a dorm basement. Almost none of the class members knew one another yet, but that didn’t stop their measuring whatever there was to measure, working on a pecking order, and forming tribes—as if we would all perish if there were no outsiders to distinguish from the insiders. Pretty quickly my vague dream that this would be a gathering of mostly like-minded future public interest lawyers evaporated.
I was an hour in, mildly disappointed. I looked around and was wondering how much more I could take and what conversation to strike up next, when I saw her. She was looking around, too, maybe tired or also disappointed. I kept watching from a distance. She had gray or blue eyes, freckles, auburn hair pulled back. She was wearing a woven silk batik top from somewhere else. I couldn’t place where. The rest of her clothing was worn denim. I was rapt even before she caught my eye. Strangely, when she did, I found I was already smiling. Stranger still, she seemed to brighten a little and smiled back at me. She walked over, holding my eyes. I looked at her for a moment, trying to cipher whether we were really responding the same way to the people in the room. I took a chance:
“They’re not all who you thought they would be, are they?”
She paused. “No. Not really. Why do you say that?”
“I spoke to one whose family owns all the oil in Oklahoma or something.”
“Yeah. A lot of name-dropping.”
“Where are you from?”
“All over. I’m an Air Force brat, so all over. And I just got back from the Peace Corps.”
“Where? I’m jealous.”
“Thailand.”
We talked until the mixer ended. Within days we were friends, taking study breaks together in the law library that usually lasted longer than planned. A couple of days later I fixed her bike’s flat tire in five minutes. Broke skills. She made me a better dinner than I could make. Our study breaks at the law library were filled with sunny political talk and rookie critical commentary on what our classes revealed about how the law skewed the game in favor of wealth and power and against marginalized people. Some of our more corporate classmates grinned when they overheard bits of our self-righteous talk. We didn’t care. By November we were together.
Lisa had left rural Thailand right before law school, but it would be awhile before she was really back in the States. For a few months, she couldn’t shop in peace in the posh Palo Alto grocery stores. We would lock our bicycles, go inside, and face redundant rows of cans and boxes, different brands of the same kinds of food. For a while, it overwhelmed her.
“You okay?”
“Too many choices. Too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Who needs all this? We didn’t even have a grocery store. We didn’t have fifty kinds of everything. People just had enough, even if it took more time. It was fine.”
Thailand was not Lisa’s first time living as an outsider in another culture. From ages six to eight, she lived with her family in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her father was the pilot to the American ambassador at that time. Her two years in the Peace Corps came after college. She was the only American living in the village of Chonnabot. Most of her days were spent working in villages of houses built on stilts, surrounded by rice paddies. She traveled among sixty villages in her zone. Each village faced different challenges and reflected a slightly different culture. She got to them on her putt-putt motorcycle, teaching nutrition to subsistence farmers. Every village had its poo yai ban, literally its village big man. In theory, the poo yai ban ran the town and was the key to a Peace Corps volunteer’s access to the people; custom required deference, which Lisa gave. Lisa always met the poo yai ban first, bowing respectfully with her hands joined in a prayerful pose. But she soon learned the villagers held the power, not their supposed leader. In fact, the poo yai ban ran things when the villagers allowed it. The lesson was clear: Establish trust with people above all else, no matter how long it takes and by whatever route, and they will come around—even on something as central to their lives as their food. She learned to speak Thai. She tolerated the fingers of the Thai matriarchs feeling the texture of her hair, even the one who tried to rub freckles off her skin claiming they were dirt, while opining to the other women that Lisa was blind because her eyes were blue. Even after Lisa reminded the Thai women that she had arrived on a motorcycle, they tested her vision by holding up fingers for Lisa to count, just to be sure. Lisa ignored their racist comments about other South Asians, for example the frequent Thai claim that eating Vietnamese food caused infertility, despite Vietnam’s ample population growth. Lisa ate with appreciation whatever the village people served her, even if it was more and different food than she wanted, including the insect larvae and silkworms that were local delicacies. Connecting with people in the villages was a rewarding grind, the price she gladly paid to save villagers and their babies from the dirty water and dietary gaps that caused fatal diarrhea, iodine deficiencies, and other diseases of malnutrition. Gaining people’s trust was what it took to win.
Sometimes Lisa and other American Peace Corps volunteers in Thailand would meet on the weekend in Bangkok to speak English and reconnect for a brief escape. Evenings were spent in the red-light district. There was no cover to pay to enter the bars. Drinks were cheap and there was good music. Sometimes Lisa would listen in on sex workers in Thai, venting their amused contempt for their European customers.
She completed her law school applications with a manual English-alphabet typewriter she found tucked away in a village hospital. When her Peace Corps service ended, she took a break before law school by trekking solo for three weeks in Nepal, despite the dangers. After Afghanistan, Thailand, and a childhood of moving to new schools every couple of years, she knew whom to walk with and when it was necessary.
Now, three years later, Lisa and I were driving away, leaving law school behind. We hit the highway on our five-day drive to Philly in a car full of what we could carry, excitement, high hopes, and quiet fear. We had a couple of tapes for the drive. One was U2’s Joshua Tree, which was just out. The album was an Irish band’s idea of America, especially of the open American Southwest, where we were headed first.
U2 was a nostalgic favorite from my college days. I had never heard of them before I saw them play for a hundred or so people at the International House at the University of Chicago on their scruffy first American tour. That was about six or seven years before we started our drive east. I think the concert was free and the band was just looking to warm up for paying gigs in clubs in Chicago and elsewhere over the next nights. All four of the band members and most of us in the crowd were about twenty years old, standing on a tile floor—no lights, no stage, no alcohol—with nothing separating us, awash in sound. The show’s DIY theatrical peak came when Bono used a pint glass to throw water through the air and onto the small crowd as if he were carrying out a vaguely religious rite or foreshadowing his later stadium theatrics. I remember making fun of them and their prospects after the show. Twenty-year-olds do that to avoid thinking about their own chances of success. But the band grew on me and I followe
d every album they put out through college, usually by helping to wear out someone else’s copy.
The other tape was more obscure: Michael Hedges, a brilliant twelve-string guitarist and singer who would die ten years later when his car skidded off a cliff on a slick California road. The soundtrack of our seemingly endless, beautiful coast-to-coast trip became U2’s Joshua Tree, including its anthemic, aspirational “But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and Michael Hedges’s intricate guitar, most memorably on his version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which asserted the lyric “There must be some kind of way out of here,” even as we were driving away.
When we graduated from law school in June 1987, the financial aid officer quipped that we were “at the top of our class in student loan debt.” Our classmates were being pursued by big law firms that offered them perks like moving expenses, signing bonuses, and immediate pay at five times the salary Lisa and I were going to get. Our salaries wouldn’t start until September, after we survived the summer and hopefully passed the Pennsylvania bar exam. We were among the 10 percent or so of our law school’s graduating class who were pursuing public interest law; the other 90 percent were headed for big firms that represented power, at least for a while, often with a pit stop at a judicial clerkship.
Our big-firm classmates and even some members of our family weren’t shy about criticizing our decision to get expensive, fancy degrees with fat loans that in their view were incompatible with public interest law compensation. Parents, even adventurous ones, are supposed to steer their kids away from risks. And ours were good parents. We repeatedly heard, expressed in different ways, that we would need to soon “grow up and get a real job.” Some of our corporate-bound classmates joked about how soon we would “sell out,” missing the self-descriptive irony in their own words. But we smiled through it all; we thought we would find what we were looking for. We had been side by side since we met, and still were as we drove east, looking through the same windshield.
Lisa’s years overseas, as well as her life as a school-hopping military brat, would serve her well when she decided to run for judge, a truly foreign adventure. She had no political background and no Philly connections. There were about sixty different political fiefdoms in the city, like the villages she had visited. They’re called wards. Each ward had its ward leader, its poo yai ban, who fronted power when the power was actually with the ward’s voters if they chose to take it. Some ward leaders helped her. Others she went around to get to the people. When Lisa visited each ward meeting, she knew how to endure invasive comments and unnecessarily familiar touching. There was that neighborhood’s food to appreciate, even when the stainless chafing dish of beef in gravy looked bland, slippery, and silvery gray. She already knew what was required to win.
She was a great insurgent candidate who could talk to anyone and disarm a room one stranger at a time. Her years of representing employees and workers in civil rights matters provided material for easy conversations with committee people in a working-class town. Her lack of political connections and experience hurt but also meant that no one held a grudge against her and no one took her candidacy as seriously as they soon learned they should. On the campaign trail, she left nearly every room better off than when she came in. Very few candidates can claim that.
My reputation for representing protesters and criticizing people who kicked them around—especially our politically powerful DA at the time, Lynne Abraham—militated against my taking any public role in Lisa’s campaign for fear it would hurt her. It helped that Lisa’s and my last names were different, so our connection to each other was not widely known in political circles.
During Lisa’s first run for judge, she figured out that in Philly, judges are elected by voters who know virtually nothing about the candidates. Knowing that became key to our guerrilla campaign strategy. We knew voters wanted to elect fair judges despite knowing nothing about the many unfamiliar names. We had to get their attention in a few moments and make our pitch, a role the political parties’ people usually played. The Democratic Party’s power in a Philly judicial election at that time was its ability to extract money from candidates with the promise that the party would push certain candidates on election day through its vast network of ward leaders and their minions, known as committee people. The party’s committee people—its poll workers—were indeed ubiquitous, and of wildly varying ability. The judicial candidates, almost always political novices, cheerfully paid the party tens of thousands of dollars and relied on the party’s promises of election day support that the party sometimes broke, especially for candidates who weren’t insiders, who weren’t connected, or who hadn’t “paid their dues.” Lisa—who spent her whole career helping marginalized people—hadn’t paid her dues by the party’s standards, wasn’t connected, and was no insider. As expected, the party did not support her. More than one source claimed that the boss said: “She cares more about civil rights than patronage!” Even as the party was declining to support her on election day, it hadn’t yet grasped how strong she was becoming without their help. We formed a rebel army of our own volunteer poll workers for election day to give her a chance.
After Lisa schooled me on the realpolitik of how the party steered the vote—and got me intelligence on every ward where her record might appeal to the voters—I grew intrigued, and then slightly obsessed. In the evening, when the boys were occupied or sleeping, I quietly reviewed oversized computer printouts from the election commission’s obsolete printers that itemized vote totals by polling place. We prioritized high-turnout locations before enlisting Lisa’s satisfied clients, her family and friends, fellow lawyers, and our many activist allies to try to do a better job than the party did of steering voters on election day.
I became her invisible field organizer. Key to our plan was matching volunteer poll workers to places where they could be most effective. It mattered that our volunteers were persuasive, verbal people who believed in Lisa, rather than party functionaries pushing candidates they barely knew for the few dollars they were paid. I held sessions for novice poll workers to role-play the twenty-second pitch they would make as voters walked up to the polls. Since we were up against the party, with its much greater resources, another key to our plan was secrecy. The party boss had connections to Kavanaugh Printing, the major union print shop in a town where union printing was required in politics. The legend was that the boss’s connection to Kavanaugh allowed him to divine the candidates’ political strategies, their funding, and their plans from the orders they placed for campaign materials with the shop. To avoid giving up our plans, we printed our campaign literature at a different union print shop, Curtis’s Printing, which was not connected to the party or its boss, hoping they wouldn’t know what we were doing and might think we weren’t even trying.
I had learned from my activist friends about limiting the damage that any one spy, one leak, or one mole could cause. Our volunteers didn’t need to know how many other poll workers we had, where the others were being placed, or even who they were. In the days leading up to the election, I spoke to them myself, one at a time. They didn’t even need to know exactly where they were going until late. They got their unique packets of materials (printed maps, campaign literature to hand out, emergency numbers and instructions) delivered to them at the last minute.
The first time Lisa ran, the party beat her only by exceptional effort. One week before that election, the party boss figured out she was on track to win without official party support. She had gained the support of some of the more powerful independent ward leaders and most of the unions based on her having represented workers for years. Some of them must have talked. Even in some wards that opposed her, some of the more independent committee people were defecting, offering her help when the ward leader wasn’t looking. The party boss worked the phone for days right before the election to make her lose. Some of her support in wards and labor called he
r to apologize for backing out on their promises of support. It was nothing personal—the boss just needed to elect candidates the party had selected to be their insiders, and who had paid for their insider status in free work, generational connections, money, and unquestionable loyalty that extended the reach of patronage to their judicial staff—or all of the above. The boss needed to show that candidates who won had followed his party’s rules, a notion that she would have dented by winning without the party’s support. The party’s funding required it; so did its patronage.
Two years later, Lisa ran again. But this time the party supported her from the beginning, mostly to make sure its weakness was not exposed but also because she had remained diplomatic the last time around, even when she’d been targeted and was denied a win. The party wisely preferred to embrace her candidacy the second time rather than see her and her army gain strength and win without their support. She had laid a foundation of support the first time. She was just too damn strong on the campaign trail, and her novice ground game was too big and too stealthy for the party to be sure it could beat her again. If the party opposed her, it risked discrediting its main asset: the illusion of its unassailable power. The party knew that maintaining the public perception of dominance was its highest priority. Even with a promise of party support, we saw no reason to sit back on election day. Three times as many volunteers as we had at the polls previously showed up pushing for Lisa, to the surprise of the party leadership. Many of them were organizers or activists or lawyers who were organized in groups with humorous, dramatic names they selected, like “Quaker Death Squad,” “Flying Monkeys,” and “Pants Brigade.” Lisa won by a wide margin.
For the People Page 16