(5 of 5)
The gut check for both Cahill and Kerry came in early December, when she made a quiet Sunday-afternoon visit to the Senator and his wife at their Louisburg Square town house in Boston and laid out the grim financial reality of their situation. "It was very clinical," she recalls. "Here are the facts. Here's what we need." What they needed was a lot more money, and they weren't going to get it unless Kerry took out a mortgage on the very house in which they were meeting. The problem wasn't that he couldn't swing the $6.4 million loan. It was that he would be sending a message to the political establishment that John Kerry was scraping bottom and no one was willing to throw him a life preserver. "That was obviously a moment when you decide that you believe in what you are doing enough to really put some high stakes on it," Kerry says now. "I did, and I think she knew it."
It turned out that every bet they made has paid off--at least so far. Visit Kerry's campaign headquarters these days, and those desperate times of less than three months ago seem like something from a misty past. One morning last week found the campaign's finance chief, Louis Susman, wandering through the buzzing hallways and asking if anyone could spare him a phone line. Which is why one of Cahill's next jobs is to find a new headquarters--say, one where she won't blow the circuit on the computers when she plugs in her space heater. Kerry still has to win the nomination, and Cahill takes nothing for granted. "The thing that is so clear about this election cycle is that you just have to keep on keeping on, because who knows what is going to happen?" she says, flicking into the trash one of the Nicorette gum wrappers that Shrum is always leaving around her office. "It's the completely unglamorous fundamentals."