Page 25 of 107 Days
It was a perfect summer day in Wisconsin: red barns against a rinsed blue sky, emerald fields ripe with the promise of a good harvest. I lived in Wisconsin for a while when I was a preschooler and my parents had teaching jobs there.
The beauty of the state on days like this brings back strong childhood memories.
I’d left a muggy, overcast Washington, DC, for my first full day on the trail with Tim.
When I boarded Air Force Two, I checked in with my team in the front cabin.
Sheila and my dedicated deputy chief of staff, Erin Wilson, were among those staffing me that day.
Then I headed back, through the cabin containing my Secret Service detail, for a few minutes of off-the-record chat, or OTR, with the traveling press.
These informal sessions before wheels up were useful for both of us.
They got to ask me anything and, as the different reporters who joined us covered diverse beats, the topics could be wide-ranging.
My responses were candid and would often inform the on-record questions they would ask me later.
For my part, I got a preview of the issues that might shape the day’s news cycle.
Pool reporters work hard, fast, and selflessly.
Since not every reporter can fit on the plane or in the West Wing, representatives of each media organization rotate the responsibility for being with me or the president, and send out the first quick drafts of what is going on for the use of all their colleagues.
They are on duty whenever we are engaged in public events, and in a campaign that can be a long day’s work.
Pool reports generally start with the words “Pool swept”—meaning they and their belongings have been checked by security—“and loading, rolling at” some ungodly hour.
They generally end late at night, with the word “Lid.” This indicates that there will be no more news that day, although not because I’ve finally gone to bed.
My day continues with briefings, prep, sometimes radio interviews, live or recorded. My personal “lid” often doesn’t go on until the very early hours.
On the way back from the OTR with the press pool to my cabin up front, I had a cherished ritual. I always high-fived the head of my Secret Service detail, who would stand as I walked by.
“Max!” I’d exclaim as our hands met in the air.
“Ma’am!” he’d crisply reply.
The Secret Service assigns code names to its protectees. Mine, aptly, was Pioneer. Doug’s, Playmaker. The kids, who also had Secret Service protection, were allowed to choose their own names, so long as they started with P . Ella, with her quirky sense of humor, chose Pickle. Cole became Pirate.
We landed at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport to be greeted by local officials and Girl Scout Troop #3307. I asked the girls about their summer plans, and one asked about mine. I said I was planning on going somewhere in ninety days, and we shared a laugh.
I got into my motorcade, but we weren’t pulling out. I asked Max why we weren’t leaving. That was when I learned we were being held up by J. D. Vance. He was out of his car and walking toward Air Force Two, in violation of every rule of security and protocol.
I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”
Had I known he was pulling that juvenile stunt, I would’ve been inclined to step from my car and use a word I believe best pronounced correctly. It begins with an m and ends with ah .
By now, I suppose, he will be well acquainted with that old plane.
It came into service for Al Gore in 1998 and it’s hard to replace, since Boeing no longer makes a jet as compact yet high-powered, able to take off and land at smaller airports like Chippewa Valley Regional.
Vance will have learned that the vice president’s seat resists adjustment when you want to move it, but flies unexpectedly forward at inopportune moments.
He’ll know that the door to the restroom doesn’t always stay closed, or may not even open.
Wrestling with that door as we were trying to fix America’s infrastructure problems, I knew this was one infrastructure problem I would not be able to fix.
When press would cover me hustling up the stairs to board, it wasn’t because I relished the luxury of that plane. It was the thought of the comfy Uggs I kept on board, when I could finally kick off my high heels.
It is probably just as well that I didn’t know about Vance’s sophomoric comment that day, since I was already annoyed.
As Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” He had dared to accuse Tim Walz of “stolen valor”—a grievous smear pieced together from the most threadbare scraps.
Walz entered the National Guard at seventeen and served for twenty-four years, including an overseas deployment to Italy.
He could have retired after twenty years but re-upped after 9/11 and continued to serve until deciding to run for Congress in May 2005, flipping a solidly red seat.
His unit was notified of a deployment two months after his retirement and actually deployed a full eight months after that.
Vance picked on Tim’s statement, when arguing for an assault weapons ban in 2018, that “these weapons of war that I carried in war” had no place on civilian streets.
Walz hadn’t seen combat during his deployments.
Neither had Vance, who served four years as reporter in the Marines’ public affairs department.
But that didn’t stop him from spinning Tim’s minor misstatement into a swiftboat-style slander.
He also implied that Tim’s retirement had been timed to avoid the Iraq deployment, even though it had been entirely driven by the timing of his run for Congress.
These attacks went against everything I knew and admired about the military code of honor. I was appalled that Vance would stoop so low to wound and rattle a fellow veteran, a better man.
Our motorcade turned down a dusty road toward a vast field colorful with twelve thousand people and resonant with the strains of the band Bon Iver finishing a live set.
Some people had abandoned their cars a mile from the field and walked the rest of the way.
Many held their blue Harris–Walz signs over their heads for protection from the brilliant sunshine.
A local farmer introduced Tim as “a lifelong Midwesterner” who “understands rural America.” Tim proved it as he spoke, connecting to the enthusiastic crowd and finding a Midwestern cadence in which to talk about reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and how Trump’s Republicans infringed on basic freedoms.
“Even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves… there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business,” he said. “I don’t need you telling me about our health care, I don’t need you telling us who we love, and I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re going to read.”
Then he took a sly swipe at J. D. Vance, who was over at an aviation equipment manufacturer in nearby Eau Claire, busy lying about Tim’s record.
“Just like all of us in regular America we go to Yale, and then we have our careers funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then you write a book about the place you grew up and you trash that place… We’re better than that.”
When I took the podium after Tim, the crowd was in high spirits. As I talked about Trump, a chant started: “Lock him up!”
I disliked that chant when Trump aimed it at Hillary, and I wasn’t about to encourage it at my rallies.
In the democracy I cherish, we don’t lock up people because they are our political opponents.
They are locked up if a jury determines they have committed serious crimes.
As a former prosecutor I know what it means to ask that someone be locked up; I know the seriousness of depriving someone of their liberty.
It’s not something I have ever taken lightly.
I carried the moral weight of it. I would never reduce it to a chant to please and entertain a crowd.
I held up my hand and interrupted the chants. “Well, hold on. You know what? The courts are going to handle that part of it.
“What we’re going to do is beat him in November.”
That evening, we held an even bigger rally in a large airport hangar at Wayne County airport near Detroit. The crowd spilled out of the hangar and across the tarmac where Air Force Two had landed. There were several giant screens for the outdoor crowd that couldn’t see the rally stage.
The size of the crowd unnerved Donald Trump. He would later post on Truth Social that “nobody” had been there and the crowd pictures were fake.
He was getting rattled.
Supporters gleefully posted their own photos from the rally.
Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, playfully posted a photo of herself addressing the crowd from the podium and thanked “whoever made the AI image” for being “kind enough to include me at the lectern. That AI crowd was really loud,” she wrote, “my ears just stopped ringing from their imaginary cheering.”
David Plouffe’s post on X was less tongue in cheek. “These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.”