What Does Kay Want?
She’s the most popular vote-getter in Texas history. She has a U.S. Senate seat, a Republican leadership position, and at 59, the children she has always longed for. Yet she can’t forget the bitter disappointments of the past. What does she really want? Exactly what she has always wanted. Everything—except psychobabble.
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Their decision to adopt was certain to raise eyebrows. Many adoption advocates say that the small pool of children available for adoption should be going to younger parents. Yet she and Ray began getting their names to licensed adoption agencies. Perhaps because of their prominence, and certainly because they were willing to pay the $20,000 to $30,000 fee, the Hutchisons, after two years of waiting, received a call about a little girl who was from another state. Then, later that year, when they were only a few days from having their adoption of Bailey legally certified by a court, they got a call from another agency, asking if they would like a little boy.
They said yes—and just like that, they were brand-new parents twice over. Kay began changing diapers and lugging around a satchel filled with sippy cups and teething rings to go along with her satchel full of briefing papers. In her immaculate Washington office, decorated with grand sofas and noble wingback chairs, a gilded mirror, and an oil painting of William Barret Travis, she placed a bright green Graco playpen next to her battleship-size desk. Instead of getting work done on planes—she used to be renowned on those Dallas-to-Washington flights for putting her head down over her papers and never looking up until the airplane pulled up to the gate—she worried about whether Bailey or Houston would spill milk or jelly on her designer clothes.
"You have to admit," I said, "that a lot of people are curious whether you can handle both lives—the life of a senator and the life of a new mom."
The senator sighed, put down her fork, and gave me a look, already sensing that I wanted to head into that "psychobabble" territory. "You know, hasn’t everyone read a lot of those stories about women who can work and raise a family at the same time?" she asked. "Is it really that interesting anymore? Many mothers have been in my position, you know."
BUT, OF COURSE, NO OTHER mother with toddlers has been in this position: in the U.S. Senate at age 59. A month after our lunch, she let me travel with her from Dallas to Washington so that I could watch her work, and during the three days I was with her, she was in frenetic action from early morning until late in the evening. On the first Monday I was with her, for instance, she:
(1) walked three miles around her Dallas neighborhood at about five-thirty in the morning, (2) woke her children, gave them breakfast, dressed Bailey and took her to the airport (Houston stayed home with the nanny), (3) walked Bailey up and down the aisles on the flight to Washington, (4) jumped with Bailey into a staffer’s car at Ronald Reagan National Airport and cooed at her child while talking on a cell phone, (5) dropped Bailey off at her Washington home where her baby-sitter waited, then headed to the Russell Senate Office Building, (6) literally ran up two flights of stairs to her second-floor office, where she talked for a few minutes to staff members, (7) strode quickly from her office to the main Capitol building, at least a quarter of a mile walk, passing up the subway reserved for senators because she likes to get in aerobic exercise whenever she can, (8) participated with other Republican Senate leaders in a meeting about the upcoming Homeland Security bill, (9) strode quickly back to her office, again passing up the subway, (10) conducted more meetings in her office and made phone calls, (11) spent a few minutes playing with Bailey, who had been brought up to the office by the baby-sitter, (12) met with various legislative aides, a group of intense policy wonks who spend their days in an office across the hall reading the fine print of bills and watching C-SPAN, (13) and finally, at about seven, went to dinner with Bailey and select members of her staff at Tortilla Coast, a Tex-Mex restaurant on Capitol Hill.
That dinner was the first moment I had had a chance to talk to her since the flight that morning. I brought up her constantly pressing schedule, and she was about to answer, but then, as if on cue, she was distracted by her chief of staff, who was speaking in stern tones into his cell phone. He was talking about an anonymous senator who was trying to hold up one of Kay’s bills, which was scheduled for a vote that evening. Suddenly, she leaped up and headed to the car to return to the Senate chamber, followed by staffers. She stopped only to give a quick good-bye kiss to Bailey, who was taken home by her administrative assistant. At the Capitol, she disappeared into the Senate cloakroom, working with aides to make sure there would be no more parliamentary "holds" put on her bill. She waited on the Senate floor until her bill was passed by unanimous consent and then gave a ten-minute speech about its provisions, which would impose tighter security requirements for cargo shipped on passenger flights to prevent another terrorist attack.
By that time of night, I was the only visitor sitting in the gallery. Across from me, the press gallery was empty. There was no other senator on the floor to listen; they had all gone home for the evening. Kay could have just as easily handed her speech to a clerk, who would have had it inserted into the Congressional Record and made it appear as if she had given a speech. But by giving the speech, she ensured that the bill’s purpose would receive more prominent placement in the Record. "There is no point in carefully screening every piece of luggage if the cargo placed aboard the same flight is not inspected at all," she declared, punctuating her remark with a clenched fist, which she swung from left to right. I looked at my watch. It was 9:45.
None other than Tennessee senator Bill Frist, the new majority leader, told me that Kay’s work ethic is legendary in the Senate. "I’m considered a workaholic, and it’s nothing compared to what she does," he said. Her nickname around the Senate is the Needle, a phrase coined by deposed majority leader Trent Lott a few years ago during a tax-cut fight, when she kept needling him and other Senate leaders to eliminate the marriage-tax penalty, the part of the tax code that resulted in two-wage-earner couples having to pay higher taxes if they were married.
Her husband, Ray, cheerfully described his wife as "one of the great nitpickers." This attention ranges from her hair—she has an almost mystical ability to know when one strand is out of place—to the activities of her staff. Whenever she has a free moment, she is typing notes to her staffers on her BlackBerry, a handheld Internet messaging device. One day when I was following her around in Washington, she stood with the other Senate Republican leaders at a press conference in which a ceremonial phone call was made to President Bush to inform him that the Homeland Security bill was finally going to pass. The news media and several photographers had gathered for the occasion. As the phone number was being dialed and flashbulbs were going off everywhere, Kay, standing right behind the speakerphone, took a moment to glance down at the BlackBerry in her hand to see if she had any new messages.
Kay is such a perfectionist that she will sometimes go to astonishing lengths to make sure she gets tiny things right. This past summer, she was asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch for a baseball game between the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros. She cornered Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Detroit Tigers who is now a senator from Kentucky, and asked him to teach her to pitch. In a hallway outside the august Senate chambers, they threw a baseball back and forth, Bunning showing her where to put her fingers on the seams and how to follow through. When she returned to Dallas for the summer recess, she had a staffer come to her Dallas home and practice throwing with her in the front yard. On the night of the game, she walked out on the field and fired a perfect strike. Fans began chanting, "Sign her up! Sign her up!" Bunning happened to be throwing the first pitch for a Reds game that summer, but he missed the strike zone high and outside. "I told Jim that the next time he needed pitching tips to call me," Kay recalled with a sly grin.
What is perhaps most impressive about her nonstop schedule is that she is one of the few commuting senators. When Congress is in session, she comes back to Texas every weekend, no exceptions, and usually one day of that weekend she makes a public appearance somewhere in the state. During his senatorial years, Phil Gramm rarely made public appearances when he came home. A lot of Texans never laid eyes on him except when they watched television. Kay, on the other hand, attends an almost ridiculous number of ribbon cuttings and chamber of commerce dinners. "She doesn’t have a normal hobby like golf or tennis," said former chief of staff Franz, who is now a Washington lobbyist. "She works. But she works because she likes it. On a down day, she likes to get into a small, cramped airplane, travel around the state to little towns, meet constituents, and talk issues."
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