As I made my way through the

A few days before the election, I went down to New York for a long-planned fund-raiser. I wondered if anyone would come, even if only to see a dead man walking. As I made my way through the Sheraton Hotel kitchen to the ballroom, I shook hands with the waiters and kitchen workers, as I always did. One of the waiters, Dimitrios Theofanis, engaged me in a brief conversation that made him a friend for life. My nine-year-old boy studies the election in school and he says I should vote for you. If I do, I want you to make my boy free. In Greece, we were poor but we were free. Here, my boy cant play in the park across the street alone or walk down the street to school by himself because it is too dangerous. Hes not free. So if I vote for you, will you make my boy free? I almost cried. Here was a man who actually cared about what I could do for his sons safety. I told him that community police officers, who would walk the blocks and know the residents, could help a lot, and that I was committed to funding 100,000 of them. I was already feeling better, but when I walked into the ballroom, my spirits soared: seven hundred people were there, including my Georgetown friend Denise Hyland Dangremond and her husband, Bob, who had come from Rhode Island to show moral support. I went back to New Hampshire thinking I might survive. In the last few days of the campaign, Tsongas and I had a heated disagreement over economic policy. I had proposed a four-point plan to create jobs, help businesses get started, and reduce poverty and income inequality: cut the deficit in half in four years, with spending reductions and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans; increase investment in education, training, and new technologies; expand trade; and cut taxes modestly for the middle class and a lot more for the working poor. We had done our best to cost out each proposal, using figures from the Congressional Budget Office. In contrast to my plan, Tsongas said that we should just focus on cutting the deficit, and that the country couldnt afford the middle-class tax cut, though he was for a cut in the capital gains tax, which would benefit wealthy Americans most. He called me a pander bear for proposing the tax cuts. He said hed be the best friend Wall Street ever had. I shot back that we needed a New Democrat economic plan that helped both Wall Street and Main Street, business and working families. A lot of people agreed with Tsongass contention that the deficit was too big for my tax cuts, but I thought we had to do something about the two-decade growth in income inequality and the shift of the tax burden to the middle class in the 1980s.