I hugged and high-fived and shook hands with a few people in HQ. Someone said my boys were already at the party. Core campaign staff walked the two blocks to the party location together, trailed by the faint smell of whiskey. Our party was going to be at Philly’s brand-new LGBTQ-friendly independent living senior home. Any doubts that the victory was real ended when I passed the threshold of the automatic doors and was hit with the sound of four hundred people’s exuberant cheering, yelling, chanting, and laughing. I walked down a wide, clean hallway swirling with loud, smiling, laughing, mostly young people. To the right was a glass-front conference room full of happy people watching TV screens and socializing. I heard a loud cheer and stopped to look through the plate glass at the television inside, to where they were staring.
It was on the screen. The Associated Press called the DA’s race in our favor at 9:07 p.m. Polls had closed at 8:00 p.m.; we won in an hour. We had grabbed more votes than the next two finishers combined. We had turned out fifty thousand additional, unexpected voters, from all parts of the city. Our election was different: 19 percent of all voters cast their votes. It was the highest turnout for a primary in a Philly DA’s race in at least twenty years. This 19 percent wasn’t nearly as good as it needed to be for an engaged electorate, but it was a big step in the right direction. In one section of West Philadelphia known for its pockets of activism and radicalism that opposed even voting in elections, voter turnout was nearly 70 percent, up from about 30 percent in the last similar election cycle.
Six months earlier, Donald Trump had won all of Pennsylvania by a mere forty thousand votes. And yet here, in this one city, and in an off-year election, we had pushed out so many excited new Black and brown and millennial and unlikely voters that, had they voted the previous fall, they would have changed the outcome of that presidential election. It really was the movement we had hoped would show up. It was something we had wanted to be true so intensely that we had guarded against becoming unrealistic, irrational true believers. But the numbers told the tale: It was true and it was real. I was astonished that we had wished this aspirational dream into reality; I felt like I was floating. Everything slowed down. It was like walking through water in an aquarium.
I looked where we were headed—to the left, through another wall of glass to an outdoor spring garden filled with excited people who were inadvertently trampling flowers (which, of course, we would replace the next day). We passed through more glass doors out into the clear night air of the roofless, starry courtyard. The people behind us were pushing forward in a wave, coming into the garden with new arrivals and local television cameras and reporters. I heard the DJ playing Dead Prez.
The plan was for the stage where I was to speak to be left empty. But it was nearly full, having been invaded by politicians looking for their photos on the cover of the paper the next day, wanting to be in on the win. The least supportive ones seized the stage first. When they couldn’t be talked off the stage, others climbed on after them. So many of the volunteers, activists, friends, union leaders, and politicians who had done the most work were either standing at the back of the overflowing stage or couldn’t even get up onto it. The crowd roared, and I couldn’t stop smiling. I had to stand at the very front of the stage, leaning backward into the surge of people behind me for balance, hoping that at least the heels of my dress shoes wouldn’t slip off the edge and drop me into the crowd mid-speech. The DJ played the Clash’s “Clampdown” as I found a fixed place to stand and the music came down.
News cameras lit up the night illuminating an expanse of cellphone cameras held overhead. My speech was quick and excited: I expressed my gratitude to all the volunteers and staff who had worked so hard with little or no credit. I heard myself say, “This is not about one person; this will never be about one person.” I didn’t offer a platform or policy that night; we had done that for ninety-eight days. We were all together, appreciating the moment. Chris Woods, the six-foot-four head of a mostly Black healthcare workers’ union that had been instrumental in supporting our campaign, took the microphone and led the crowd in chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” The chant is a standard. It includes everyone and reminds us all of the source of democratic power. It was the perfect chant for the evening.
I thanked and hugged people as I headed back into the thicker air and stuffed hallways of the building, slowly making my way to the street exit—to a cooler, quieter, less populated, and more sober environment on the sidewalk outside. Reporters followed. One asked me about the FOP president’s churlish response to our win. I responded: “I hope he has a good night.”
For the first time in hours, I saw my sons; they were on the sidewalk socializing a block away. More than anyone there, they knew how unexpected this moment was. My being DA was no long-standing dream, nothing I had stalked my entire life or had even suggested I hoped to do during their childhood, high school, college. None of us saw it coming, which made it all the sweeter as a validation of the unknown possibilities of life. We hugged before they took off for the party and I made my escape from Center City to our three-bedroom “starter home” in the greener Northwest, also home of the Mighty 50th Ward and Marian Tasco, who had shown once more they were the power. In a city where seven of every eight voters register as Democrats, becoming the Democratic nominee meant the general election was already won. Lisa met me on the street corner and we held hands, walking away quietly through the darkness of antique Philadelphia streets to our car, already knowing the outcome of the general election was as good as determined.
We got home but couldn’t sleep and didn’t feel the exhaustion anymore. The job I’d campaigned for would soon be mine. Our lives were changing for good. We sat at the oak table in our small kitchen talking, laughing, and reliving the day, the night, and the entire campaign. Our boys were home much sooner than expected, telling us of their adventures campaigning and attending the party that day.
The next day, I found out that the campaign workers and volunteers, canvassers, and activists were expelled from the senior center shortly after I left, but would wear out the bars all over Center City and elsewhere until closing time. Some of them didn’t find their beds until dawn. The next morning, a political cartoon in the Inquirer showed the Frank Rizzo statue lying flat on its back while two young Philadelphians walked past. One said: “What happened?” The other responded: “Larry Krasner got elected district attorney.”
Months later, before the general election, I was asked to speak to a well-intentioned, moneyed group of mostly centrist Democratic donors that included law firm partners and high-level executives. Some represented old money. Although overwhelmingly their crowd had been behind my Democratic Party’s opponents or agnostic, I viewed the invitation as an opportunity for a little love between the centrist power base of the party and the progressive future DA. Never mind their lack of support and skipping our victory party. The face-to-face meeting also gave Brandon and me the chance to persuade and maybe cultivate donations in the future for other candidates their centrist voters and our progressive voters could get behind. Brandon and I went with a couple of charts and diagrams, knowing we weren’t a perfect match with this group but hoping to work together where we could agree.
The donors’ meeting was in a vast but minimalist white conference room on the thirtieth floor of a downtown skyscraper. A law firm, of course. We stood in front of the assembled power brokers to tell the story of the campaign, pointing at large boards with colored maps of the city showing the primary election results and the astounding increase from 12 percent to 19 percent voter participation this election cycle. They listened politely.
After a quiet but cordial response to our presentation, one of the donors asked: “It seems like much of your success in the election and what energized your voters had to do with your platform and your message. We have a couple important races coming up statewide where the candidates may need some help. Can you tell us who your
consultants were? Who did your polling?”
I stopped myself from smiling, gave a side-eye to Brandon, and said: “Our platform and the message really were the things I thought and believed after thirty years of doing criminal defense and civil rights work. We didn’t have any money for consultants or polls at that point even if we had wanted to do them.”
The donor who questioned me smiled politely and lightly shook his head as if to say, “Maybe I’ll find out who you hired later.” Right before we left, the voice of a centrist party patriarch, too ill to attend, boomed from speakers built into the ceiling. He said nice things about our campaign while we were in the room. Right after we left, the patriarch told the donors not to give us any money, according to a friend who texted us from the room. They didn’t.
Our primary election was a case study in the popular backlash that forms a movement when a system exercises power against the people it should serve. The people take their power back. It was inevitable in Philly. When the inner circles of politics and the justice system ignored those affected by their decisions—parents of people suffering addiction, communities devastated by the unnecessary disappearance of too many of their young men, employers burdened by excessive supervision of their employees under probation and parole, parents of children in underfunded public schools, victims whose real needs were subordinated to the chief prosecutor’s politics—they were spitting in the faces of a family member or friend of virtually every voter. No matter how hard incumbents and their patrons try, no voter suppression tactic can disenfranchise every voter, especially when those voters organize in a movement. The broken old system—and its unmasked hostility to the people who put it into power—is what made our campaign necessary. It’s why we won.
CHAPTER 15
Changes
Sign of the times mess with your mind
Hurry before it’s too late.
—Prince, “Sign o’ the Times”
The May primary was six months before the formality of the general election in November. Swearing-in and taking power came even later; they would start with the New Year. At fifty-six years of age, more than half a year’s delay felt to me like wasted time I didn’t have. I was eager to start my new job and carry out a movement’s plans for what we knew was coming. But I was soon reminded that all plans are contingent, that there’s less time than we think. We have to move swiftly, as soon as we can.
Shortly after the primary, a powerful electoral insider whose unfiltered outburst during the primary of “Anyone but Krasner!” and “How can this be happening?” was checking the numbers. He was looking for a way to beat me in the general election. He was wondering if he could do the unthinkable—beat his own majority party’s candidate in the general election in a one-party town. No one would even have considered it for a more conventional primary victor, but our win was considered so unlikely by some political insiders that it felt fake. However, when the insider and his insider crew met and looked at the numbers carefully, they gave up. Our primary win was just too strong, especially given the huge increase in voter turnout. Political insiders progressed through the stages of grief and reached acceptance.
But some exasperated haters and a few journalists weren’t ready for acceptance just yet. They were wistfully hanging on to the notion that my general election minority party challenger could pull it out somehow. It made the general election a little more suspenseful for some, and motivated me to keep campaigning. For months, I found myself blinking twice to make sure what I saw was really happening. We were getting ready to win a general election. We had already won the primary. But our real challenges were coming from outside of politics.
In August 2017, my father-in-law, Ed Rau, died slowly of congestive heart failure in his late eighties. He said goodbye to family and friends and his beloved golden retrievers, with Lisa and others by his side. My last words with him were by phone. In September, Lisa’s groundbreaking feminist aunt, Kate Millett, also died. She was in her eighties, and died in Paris after several years of enduring dementia that had no regard for her brilliant mind or its legacy.
In October, we got the happy news that Mike Lee’s healthy baby boy was born. Mike quickly nicknamed cheerful, helpless little Winston “Steppin’ Razor” after Peter Tosh’s fearsome protagonist who warns, “I’m dangerous, dangerous,” just “like a steppin’ razor.”
In November, a few days before the general election, my younger son, Caleb, just two years out of college, was flying back to Philly from the West Coast. He had helped out and lived through his mother’s election battles as a child and a teen. He had just helped out with my primary election six months prior. He was coming again for the general election to help out and to be present for what we knew we had already won.
When Caleb graduated from college with great grades and a degree in “music, science, and technology,” he applied for dozens of tech jobs but got none. Without a computer science degree or another, more conventional degree in tech, he was unemployed at first, before taking a job in a coffee shop that barely paid his bills. With typical diligence, he honed his coffee-making skills before finding a tech job for an audio start-up. The job was close to his childhood passion for music, first on keyboards and then in electronic music, and for recording and modifying sounds. Years before, he had recorded the crackling hiss of ice melting and the crunching sound of people walking in dry leaves, and changed the found sounds’ speed and tone and timbre until they were unrecognizable. Sometimes he blended the found sounds he collected with electronic tonal music. He performed original music as an electronic DJ and musician at coffee shops, parties, clubs during high school, college, and afterward in San Francisco, sometimes even producing shows with his fellow musicians.
His audio tech job combined his love for music, recording and mixing found sounds, with a fascination with hearing and acoustics that he developed during college. At some point, Caleb learned he has “golden ears.” He hears things—squeaks, buzzes, frequencies, echoes, in a recording or a pair of headphones or an audio speaker or an MP3 recording or a vinyl album—that most of us cannot hear. He flew home wearing earbuds he helped build at the start-up. They canceled the droning of the jet’s engines while allowing the wearer to hear music, among other things. Flying home, he knew the start-up where he worked was tanking, after its well-funded and seemingly unstoppable rise. He was facing unemployment again, golden ears or not, because his résumé was still more about music than engineering. He was fretting about how long he could last on credit while he tried to land another job and hang on to his apartment and the career he wanted in a pricey city.
After landing in Philly, Caleb helped with the election during the day. When he was done, he quietly disappeared. I spotted him a couple of times, in the dark in some quiet room, his face illuminated by the glow of his laptop monitor and cellphone screens, rewriting a survival budget, absorbing the latest emails and texts from his panicked co-workers, or fielding possible job inquiries coming from larger tech companies looking for talent that knew the start-up was folding.
The night before the general election finally came, we were home. The house was busy until late. We were confident but still working. Lisa was around but more withdrawn than usual, and quiet. So was Caleb. Before I was around, he noticed she had been crying. He got her to tell him what neither of them was going to tell me yet. Lisa’s beloved oldest brother, Steve, who was also Caleb’s godfather, had just told her he had stage 4 cancer. It was totally unexpected. Doctors said he had only a few painful months to live, at age sixty-two. They decided they would tell me when election day was over; it was a blow I didn’t need before the polls closed.
I’d met Steve after suddenly losing a job I wanted in my mid-twenties, a situation parallel to Caleb’s now. A Reagan-era spending cut had eliminated my summer job at the Philadelphia U.S. Attorney’s Office at the last minute. I was lucky to quickly wrangle a summer job in the Twin Cities, at th
e Hennepin County public defender’s office late in the hiring cycle, which meant I needed short-term housing in a place I’d never been. After Lisa made the introduction, Steve agreed to split his St. Paul apartment with me over the summer.
Steve turned thirty that summer; I was twenty-five. He was an up-and-coming big law attorney in Minneapolis. I was still a kid in law school. Steve’s sartorial preparation for big law started in his teens, when he worked in a men’s clothing store. He always had, or maybe developed before I knew him, an eye for rich wool suits, cotton shirts, and silk ties and patterns and colors in all of them that somehow brought out the colors in his gray-green eyes, which were almost the same as the shifting colors in Lisa’s bluer grays. Women were drawn to him, especially his future bride that summer. As soon as I arrived, he schooled me through buying and tailoring a summer suit I could afford. It was the second suit I had owned, and was below Steve’s pricey taste, but he knew it was what I needed.
Some work mornings, Steve risked both our lives by driving us to our Minneapolis offices in his serially dented car. Invariably, he was immaculately dressed. I still remember him at the wheel, steering the windy St. Paul river road, balancing a hot mug of coffee in one cuff-linked hand while holding a lit cigarette in the other, and somehow adjusting the radio while he told stories and laughed his way through them. At least once a commute he punctuated the trip by cursing out another driver with childlike glee, usually after he somehow managed to lower his window. Steve’s joyous extroversion meant he drove and maintained eye contact with his passengers, at least the worried ones in the front seat, while talking about his adventures in big law, in college, or in his childhood. The summer he turned thirty, Steve’s life was a romp of well-paid hard work and hard play. About once a week he took me along on his night shift, mostly to make mischief in bars where people were fistfighting in the parking lot or to find St. Paul’s best greasy cheeseburger at midnight.
For the People Page 26