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In pulling it off, the 49-year-old woman with a shock of prematurely white hair has brought back into fashion the fundamentals of politics--the organization and discipline that seemed quaintly last century when stacked up against the technology and passion and money that Dean had going for him. But it's her personal toughness that the politicians who have relied on her talk about more than anything else. Vermont's Senator Patrick Leahy credits that quality with pulling him through his most difficult race ever. He hired Cahill to run his 1986 re-election race when, after barely winning his first two Senate runs, he found himself up against four-term Governor Richard Snelling, one of the state's biggest vote getters. It was Cahill's first chance to run a big race, and it was getting national attention because Leahy had been pegged as one of the most vulnerable Senators in the country. "She just told me what I was going to do and gave me that look, and I said, 'All right,'" Leahy says. "To this day, people consider it the best-run campaign in Vermont history." When Snelling hired an ad firm known for its attacks, Cahill put up pre-emptive ads lamenting the prospect of negative campaigning in a state known for civilized politics. "The poor guy got so flustered, he didn't know what to do," Leahy recalls. "People were coming up to him saying 'We don't do this in Vermont.'"
Toward the end, the exhausted Leahy wanted to coast, pleading he didn't need to make yet another trip to a small town he had already been to half a dozen times. "Why am I dragging myself down there again?" Leahy protested. "I'm going to win anyway." Cahill cut him off: "Do you want to win, or do you want to win big?" He trounced Snelling on Election Day by 29 points. Four years later, Cahill engineered an equally unlikely landslide for Rhode Island's eccentric Claiborne Pell.