"When I told Chris that I wasn't quite ready to drop out of Wellesley in the middle of my first semester, he didn't push me, but he said that before I made up my mind for sure, I had to at least hear Clinton speak.
"So when he spoke at the University of New Hampshire, I brought about ten people up. He just glided into the room, and everyone was silent. I was floored. He was the first politician I had ever heard who seemed personally to understand the value of a good education. He talked about lots of things that I really believed in, and then he started talking about the national service program. Our eyes locked for a moment. I started to cry, and instantly there was a connection.
"After that, I had a very hard time concentrating on college. This campaign seemed like the most important thing in the world to me then. I called up my parents and I said, 'You're not going to believe this, but I just met this guy who is going to be president.' They just started getting gray hairs again. I don't do things the easy way.
"I started going up to New Hampshire every weekend. I was so drawn to that life, and I felt that I needed to see what it was like without school hanging over my head."
On January 3, 1992, Tracy moved to New Hampshire to spend her winter vacation working full time for the campaign. "I lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the Clinton hotel. It used to be a hotel or a dorm or something, and there were fifteen of us there during the week. But during the weekends it would swell to three hundred, even though the house only held fifty. So people were all over the floors and the beds.
"We would get up at six or seven every morning and spread out to these little towns all over the state to knock on doors and distribute literature. Then at eleven at night we would all come back and crowd around the television to watch the news and talk politics.
"My three weeks ended, and they asked me to organize Hillary's speech at Wellesley [Hillary Clinton is a Wellesley alumna]. Some of my friends from New Hampshire had already made the decision to leave school. I was toying with the idea, but I wanted to be really sure, so I came back and signed up for classes.
"My first day of classes, I was in physics, listening halfheartedly and writing notes about what I needed to do for the Hillary event. The semester before, I had been so excited about my classes, even when I was working on the campaign, and I realized that something really bad was going on.
"I called my parents right after class, and I told them that I had just sat through a class and not absorbed a word of what the professor was saying. My mother listened to everything, and then she said, and I'll never forget this, 'I don't ever want you to be somewhere and wishing you were somewhere else.'
"My parents came up for Hillary's speech, and it was an absolutely huge success-the best speech I had ever heard anyone give. The place was packed, and it was on the front page of every newspaper. She spoke about her generation, how they lived through the 70s and the greed of the 80s, and how it was their turn now. Their turn to take responsibility for the country and to fix things.
"When we were in private afterward, I told her that I had decided to leave school to come help them do this, and she said, 'You know, we're trying to fix education here. Bill will be unhappy.'" But Hillary didn't forbid her to join the campaign, and the next day Tracy and her parents negotiated a tuition refund from Wellesley.
Tracy then returned to New Hampshire. "I worked in the field office all the way through to the end of the primary. We were doing basic grassroots stuff. We were getting people out to hold signs, organizing walking routes for the weekend volunteers, sending out videos of Clinton. We were seriously after every single vote.
"The night of the primary was incredible. If we had had another two days, he would have won. That night, he gathered all of us and told us, 'No matter where you go from here, if you go home or if you come to Maine with us, you should never forget what we came here to do.' It got real quiet, and then everyone started to chant, 'We won't forget, we won't forget,' and he leaned forward, came off the platform, and hugged everyone there."
To recover from all the last minute New Hampshire campaigning, Tracy slept for two straight days. She then hit the road to manage field offices in Maine, Maryland, Michigan, and New York. The other Democratic candidates dropped out one by one, until only Jerry Brown [the former governor of California] was left. Tracy said that she was sure from day one that Clinton would surmount the odds that were stacked against him.
After Clinton amassed enough delegates to clinch the nomination, Tracy wasn't sure what to do next. "Toward the middle of April, I called Chris, who by then was handling all the money for scheduling and advance workers at campaign headquarters in Little Rock, and he needed an assistant. [The advance people are in charge of doing everything possible to make the candidates look good on television and ensure that their public appearances go smoothly.] They flew me down, and a few days after I got there, he was promoted, and I took over his job," she said.
"So I was the money chick, just this kid running around to all these departments, trying to make sure there was enough money to cover the expenses of all the people out on the campaign who were doing advance work. Between me and the deputy director of advance, we were responsible for a staff of 120," she said. "I learned a lot about interoffice politics. We were in the tiniest office at first. We had this T shaped table with all these people crammed around it. I had this little corner, with my calculator and my phone and all these binders, and I had to climb over the table half the time to get out."
The campaign paid her $1,000 a month, enough to live in a shared apartment in Little Rock. "We would work from 7 A.M. till 11 P.M. every day and be so wired by the end that we couldn't go to sleep. So we would go out for food and beer, dance for a couple of hours, and then go back to our apartment to sleep before we started all over again the next day," Tracy said.
But after two months of number crunching, Tracy had an epiphany. "It was so exciting to be a part of it, but what I eventually realized was that he didn't need me to get elected. In New Hampshire, it felt as if he needed every one of us giving everything we could to get him elected, but I no longer felt needed. This was not a local thing anymore; this was serious. It couldn't be as informal as it was in New Hampshire. Otherwise, he would have lost. But it was no longer as much fun."
After making the decision to return to school, Tracy finished up by going to the Democratic National Convention. "We flew in to New York and I was carrying a suitcase with about $200,000 in campaign checks, $50,000 in paychecks, and $30,000 in traveler's checks, all to be delivered to advance staff and various campaign people. It was really heavy."
Tracy enjoyed every minute of the convention. "It was the biggest party I had ever been to, that is, until election night, and then until the inauguration," she said. Following the inauguration, Tracey returned to Wellesley in September.
She threw herself into school with the same fervor that marked her stay in Little Rock. "I became this pumping student. I was taking five classes and three labs, and I set out to get a 4.0 and I did it. I became incredibly focused and efficient, and I completely credit that to my having taken time off," she said.
Read more about how Tracey went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and what she pursued after graduation, when you pick up Taking Time Off, by Colin Hall and Ron Lieber. You'll also get tips for planning an adventure of your own!
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