(3 of 5)
Cahill grew up in a part of Boston where politics "comes with your mother's milk," says Father Robert Drinan, the former Congressman of antiwar fame. He hired Cahill to answer phones in his office in 1976, when she graduated from Emmanuel College, a Catholic institution that was still all women at the time. The daughter of an Irish immigrant autoworker at General Motors' Framingham factory and a first-generation Irish-American homemaker, Cahill attributes her bossiness to being the eldest of six children (three boys, three girls) and says she honed her political reflexes at a dinner table at which "you were expected to have an opinion and you were expected to be able to defend it." When the Roman Catholic Church ordered Father Drinan and all other priests out of politics, she stayed on doing constituent work and organizing campaigns for his successor, Barney Frank, and then went on to a string of political jobs that included a stint running EMILY's List, a fund-raising powerhouse that trains and raises money for women candidates. She also ran Bill Clinton's White House liaison operation, handling various constituency groups, including business. While working on China trade policy, she met her future husband Steve Champlin, a lobbyist for the Duberstein Group, but the two didn't really start to get to know each other until they found themselves with time to kill at the Seattle airport after the riotous WTO talks of 1999. Their courtship played out in a uniquely Beltway fashion. She asked him to the White House Millennium Ball. ("Not too much pressure," she laughs.) In less than a year, they were married.
When Cahill landed at the Kerry campaign, it needed a battle plan--and a peace plan. Fighting within the campaign had become so bad that the factions had drafted dueling versions of Kerry's announcement speech. The feuding provided plenty of material for reporters, to the point where focus groups in New Hampshire started telling pollsters they couldn't see handing the country over to someone who couldn't even run his own campaign.
Cahill's first act was to remove the candidate from the free-fire zone. "The best thing she did was take away John Kerry's cell phone," says an adviser. That's not quite true, but almost. "It's really important to him that his daughters be able to reach him," Cahill says, "but I did definitely cut down on the calls where when you don't like a decision, call John and reopen it. That doesn't happen anymore."
One way that Cahill brought about a truce was to bring in a cadre of Kerry's longtime Boston operatives. They had been shut out by her predecessor, Jim Jordan, who had made no secret of the fact that he regarded most of them as small-time hacks. They held Jordan in equal regard and let Kerry know at every back-channel opportunity. Jordan had also butted heads with media consultant Bob Shrum, who has rarely been on the losing side of an internal battle.