History is just a series of accidents in time
It was January 20, 2004, the night after the Iowa caucuses, and I was at the Raccoon River bar in downtown Des Moines with a couple dozen fellow Edwards staffers, drinking, reminiscing, and debating what we’d do next.
Up at the bar, I got to talking with a guy who happened to be from the same city as me. He was trying to recruit me to come work for a US Senate candidate named Blair Hull, essentially a shoo-in and the Next Big Thing in the Democratic Party.
Hull was an attractive candidate, the kind of guy it’s easy to campaign for. The Women’s Sports Foundation had named him “Title IX Dad of the Year” and he enjoyed the support of organized labor and Emily’s List. Plus, he was largely self-financed and had a double-digit lead.
I decided against joining the Hull campaign, opting instead to go back to school and finish my final semester. Things didn’t work out for Hull. A month before the election, his divorce papers were unsealed, revealing a history of domestic violence, the campaign unraveled, and he ultimately lost the Democratic primary to a little-known state senator named Barack Obama.