1988 U.S. presidential election

The 1988 U.S. presidential election is both a political turning point and a measure of how differently Kelly Kelleher and The Senator understand power. Kelly works for Michael Dukakis’s doomed campaign and takes its defeat as a devastating moral shock; The Senator, who had been among the leading Democratic contenders, reads the same contest more coolly, withdrawing before the loss and declining a place on the ticket. Years later, their contrasting responses surface during a Fourth of July walk, while the novel’s intersecting account of the election and a fatal car accident sets public spectacle against private consequence.

The campaign and its defeat

Kelly volunteers for Dukakis during the presidential campaign, working at headquarters in Cambridge. Until the contest’s final weeks, she does not grasp that the campaign is doomed. When she sees or hears George Bush, she considers his hypocrisy, crudeness, piety, and appeals to white fears of Black people so apparent that voters must reject him. Her coworkers, like her, seem not to understand the force of the coming defeat, even as national polls indicate it and Dukakis himself appears defiant, rueful, and glassy-eyed.

The election’s result is not merely a campaign loss for Kelly. When the votes establish a landslide, her confidence in what the public must see collides with what the public has chosen. She nearly stops eating, goes several nights without sleep, and experiences despair as seemingly impersonal: in the streets and eventually Boston Common, she looks at people as misshapen, animal, fleshy figures. She breaks down crying and calls her mother to come get her, saying that she does not know where she is. The episode gives the national result an intimate scale, showing political defeat as a shock that disorients Kelly’s body and sense of reality.

Her father, Artie Kelleher, responds to her work for Dukakis with anger, shouting over the telephone that she has wasted her time and energy on him. The family exchange also registers their political division: Kelly had earlier challenged her father’s support for a candidate she condemned in extreme terms, while her mother answers Kelly’s question about her own vote by asking how Kelly presumes to know it. The election therefore exposes the limits of Kelly’s certainty not only about the electorate but about the private convictions of people closest to her.

The Senator’s choices and political judgment

The Senator had been one of three leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. Out of political prudence, he withdrew and released his delegates in favor of his old friend, the Massachusetts governor. Dukakis in turn asked him to join the ticket as running mate; The Senator politely declined. He was not without future ambition: the narrative points to a later presidential election, and another beyond it, noting that he was eleven years younger than George Bush and still in the prime of his career.

Years later, Kelly interprets these decisions as evidence of The Senator’s canniness. At the Democratic convention, he had refused the vice-presidential nomination, leaving that position to Lloyd Bentsen rather than accepting what she calls the second-best place beside the absurd Dan Quayle. In her account, he would pursue the presidential nomination itself or nothing. More importantly, she recognizes that he understood the Democrats’ prospects were poor that year, while Dukakis did not. Kelly had been blind to the likely outcome despite her conviction that the Reagan years’ hypocrisy and cruelty would make defeat impossible.

That recognition changes the emotional register of her memory. On the Fourth of July, walking with The Senator past miniature American flags planted in the sand by children from Buffy’s neighbors, she makes her old heartbreak an amusing anecdote at her own expense. The Senator does not laugh. He answers with his own memory of Adlai Stevenson’s defeat by Dwight Eisenhower, saying that he had nearly wanted to die and had loved Stevenson. Kelly is startled by the admission: the seasoned politician’s attachment to another man complicates the image of him as a calculating strategist. His political knowledge has not made him immune to grief or admiration.

Different readings of the same result

The contrast between Kelly and The Senator is not simply idealism set against cynicism. Kelly’s political commitment is intense enough to make the defeat feel like a collapse of moral expectation; she believed that the country would recognize what she saw in Bush. The Senator’s choices, by contrast, suggest a practiced distinction between personal ambition and a campaign’s actual chances. He withdraws before the loss and refuses the vice-presidential offer, preserving the possibility of pursuing the presidency later rather than taking a subordinate position in a failing contest.

The novel presents this difference retrospectively, through Kelly’s recollection during a later conversation rather than as a continuous campaign narrative. The historical result is already settled, and Kelly can now tell the story with humor, but that retrospective ease does not erase the earlier breakdown. Nor does The Senator’s better political judgment turn him into an unemotional observer: his response to Stevenson’s defeat reveals the depth of his own political feeling. Their exchange holds calculation and attachment together, showing that political experience may sharpen a reading of electoral odds without extinguishing grief over a lost cause.

Election, spectacle, and the surrounding narrative

The campaign and its aftermath sit within a larger narrative that juxtaposes the public rituals of American politics with a private catastrophe. On the Fourth of July, the island’s festivities include parties, firecrackers, and the St. John family’s large American flag. The flag’s continued presence becomes a measure of national identity, while fireworks and patriotic celebration proceed alongside Kelly’s struggle to survive in the submerged Toyota. The election memory belongs to this same pattern: a national outcome once experienced as unthinkable has become history, even as an individual life remains vulnerable to events no public ceremony can contain.

The account also refuses to treat The Senator’s political calculation as separate from the consequences of his conduct. On the night of the later accident, he has been drinking, drives impatiently along an unpaved road, and the Toyota leaves the road and overturns in Indian Creek. A reconstruction of the route identifies Old Ferry Road as an unmaintained road that should have been officially closed; an estimate based on the skid marks and vehicle damage suggests that, without losing control on the hairpin curve, the car might instead have struck the bridge railing and fallen into the water. That alternative is speculation, not a definitive finding. The detail matters because the narrative distinguishes the physical conditions and possible causal accounts from what The Senator later tells himself and others.

After escaping the sinking car, The Senator reaches a roadside telephone booth and calls Ray Annick. He first uses the name of a legal associate, Gerald Ferguson, then identifies himself and says there has been an accident and that the girl is dead. He immediately fears that he will be accused of manslaughter, blaming Kelly as he describes her as drunk and emotional and says she grabbed the wheel. Ray cuts off the account, tells him not to discuss it by telephone, and asks where he is so that he can come get him. The scene shows the rapid movement from bodily panic to concern about legal and political exposure; it does not establish the legal truth of The Senator’s version.

The election’s significance consequently extends beyond the campaign’s winner. Kelly’s post-election despair and later self-mockery register how national politics can enter private life, while The Senator’s decisions reveal ambition operating through forecasts, refusals, and the management of risk. Set against the flag, fireworks, and the fatal accident, their memories also expose the distance between the enduring symbols of national continuity and the uncertain fates of the people who live beneath them.