Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

It was the toughest thing that I’ve ever had to do.

I turned the corner from the living room to the deck attached to the back of the house of my friends and campaign supporters Mary McDermott and Bill Jongeward on Election Night, and all I could think was, This is the end of the world. About 100 people who had volunteered on my city-council campaign in one capacity or the other had gathered for what was supposed to be my victory celebration, and we thought it was all but a foregone conclusion. Even ardent supporters of my chief opponent had been telling me in the days leading up to Election Day that they were thinking that I was a shoo-in, and the response at the polls all Tuesday long was, I had thought, anyway, overwhelmingly positive.

Which made our stinging defeat that much harder to bear. We were beaten by a two-to-one margin. Thumped. Taken out behind the woodshed. It wasn’t even close.

So when I walked out onto the deck to what sounded like wild applause, it was all I could do to keep myself from breaking down in front of everybody. Because as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t earned that applause. Obviously I had done something wrong to have run what everybody said had been “the perfect campaign” only to lose and lose big time.

I did what came naturally. I fell on my sword.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve let everybody down,” I said, holding my head as high as I could.

***

I soon realized - OK, it wasn’t soon; unless soon is a few weeks - that it wasn’t the end of the world. I’d lost an election. So what? Like I’m the only person to ever lose an election. Right?

That’s when I got this crazy idea. I’d talk with some people that I know who’d also lost elections, and ask them how they got through it. People like Mark Warner, who lost his first race back in 1996 when he ran for the U.S. Senate against John Warner, and refers to his loss to the other Warner in ‘96 as “the race where I got my silver medal.” Creigh Deeds got his silver medal in 2005 with his so-close-they-had-to-do-a-recount loss in his run for attorney general against Bob McDonnell. In the end, Deeds was 323 votes short out of about 2 million votes cast statewide.

“Some people said, Would it have been easier to lose by 40,000 votes? I don’t think so. I’m proud of every daggone vote I got,” said Deeds, a Bath County state senator who is running for the 2009 Democratic Party gubernatorial nomination.

That didn’t make it any easier to swallow the taste of defeat for Deeds. “It’s kind of like you’re a kid on the playground, and the bully picks on you, and hits you in the stomach, and you fall down. You’re hurting physically, your feelings are hurt, you’re embarrassed, because everybody on the playground, including the pretty little girl, saw you get hit and fall down, your diaphragm stops working, you can’t breathe, and you have two choices. And one of them is not a choice. One of them is to die - to lie on the ground and pretend the world has gone away. And of course it doesn’t go away. The other is to pick yourself up, straighten yourself out, and walk on, and get stronger, and get smarter,” Deeds said.

For Tracy Pyles, a longtime member of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors, who lost to Chris Saxman in his bid in 2001 to win the 20th District seat in the House of Delegates, the hardest part to falling short was “feeling like I’d let everybody down.”

“A lot of people worked very hard for me. And asking people to work was one thing. It’s tough for me asking people to work just to begin with. I don’t think people ought to waste time helping me out, but I couldn’t do it on my own. So asking people to work, and then putting in hours and trying for me and taking it to heart, and letting them down - that was the worst part,” Pyles said.

Staunton City Council member Bruce Elder, who also lost to Saxman, in 2005, in the 20th House District, had similar feelings - but Elder, echoing Pyles, echoing Deeds, echoing my own thoughts, said he wouldn’t trade the experience from that campaign for anything in the world.

“Running for election put me in touch with so many places and so many wonderful people that it was a terrific experience for me. I really enjoyed it,” Elder said. “As much hard work as it was, I enjoyed the experience of talking to people about any number of different subjects that sometimes I had never given any consideration to. I’ve always had a passion for history, and I learned a lot of local history in traveling around and talking to folks and visiting farms and small towns and so forth and meeting with people in their work environment.

“It gave me a new appreciation of the Valley we live in. It also gave me an appreciation of some of the challenges that we face together.”

Elder must have gotten something positive from ‘05. He ran for city council the next spring, against the advice of at least one fellow local pol. “I sat down with (former city councilman) Dick Robinson, and he asked me that very question. He said, Are you ready to put yourself through that again? And I told him, Sometimes you learn a heckuva lot more losing than you do winning. There are folks out there who have never lost, and having not lost, they haven’t had that humbling experience that comes with that, and that learning experience that comes with losing,” Elder said.

Deeds, too, obviously, since he’s running for governor, wasn’t scared off from running for statewide office again in ‘09 by what happened in ‘05.

“There were seeds in this campaign in that defeat,” Deeds said. “I still have some embers in the ash of that campaign that I was able to blow on and rekindle into a fire. But frankly the real seeds of this campaign were there before 2005. That was just a speed bump for me. That 2005 campaign was just a speed bump.”

***

It was something else that Deeds had to say about the subject that will stick with me forever.

“Losing an election is not the end of the world. It’s certainly not the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life. There’s lots of people in this world who have to go through things a whole lot worse than that. If losing an election is the worst thing that I have to go through in my life, I’ll have been lucky. And I can tell you right now, it’s not the worst thing,” Deeds said.

He definitely has that right. The sun came up in Waynesboro for me the next morning, and the next, and the next. I’ve gotten back in the routine of running a small business and balancing that with the hundred other things that keep me occupied on a daily basis. I’ve even added to them with my new role as chair of the Waynesboro Democratic Committee.

I went that route because, like Creigh Deeds, like Mark Warner, like Tracy Pyles, like Bruce Elder, I’m in this for the long haul.

Being a writer, an analogy popped into my head not long after my loss that will eternally define where I stand on this. The analogy involves bungee jumping, which I’ve never done. But I can imagine that the rush that comes from bungee jumping is in large part fueled by the fear of what might happen if something goes wrong. I mean, if the thing was 100 percent foolproof, and there was absolutely no chance that something could go wrong, it would be a pointless exercise, wouldn’t it?
Well, I’ve never jumped off a bridge with a bungee cord attached to my feet; but I now know exactly what it feels like. And I ain’t scared of it anymore.

Filed under: 1-July 2008 Issue