The New York Times gets everything first. This happens because even in the Internet age, the Times stills sets the media agenda, especially where TV network news operations are concerned. This is why it’s always a good idea to give the Times an early exclusive on an important story, especially if you think it might spin things your way. On the next to last day of 2002, the senator got just this kind of treatment when the nation’s “paper of record” quoted unnamed sources to report that Edwards was going to announce the formation of his presidential exploratory committee-the first step toward a real campaign-and that he would be perceived by many Democrats as “the anti-Gore.” As the anti-Gore, Edwards was handsome, energetic, and quick on his feet. He was also, as the Times said, “a more authentic Southerner who could have far more appeal in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and the mother lode: Florida.”
By letting unnamed campaign “advisers” leak the story to the Times, we got a flood of inquiries from other press outlets around the world. Among them were requests for live interviews from the three major networks as well as CNN. At four o’clock on the morning of January 2, the Edwardses’ neighborhood was filled with production trucks from the TV networks, and the street in front of their house was lit up like a stadium set for a night game. When the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and I looked out from the window of Wade’s carefully preserved bedroom on the second floor, we saw truck drivers and technicians standing outside their rigs, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. A few of them said hello when I later went outside to clean up so every angle visible to the TV crews looked good.
When I finished my work and went inside the house, I helped some volunteers finish clearing away furniture (much of it was piled in a neighbor’s carport) so that the different networks could occupy separate rooms with cameras and lights and crews. The senator was thrilled by the prospect of all the media attention, but Mrs. Edwards paced nervously around the house. I tried to reassure her and reminded her that it was very important to just keep breathing. By the time she was called for the first interview-Good Morning America -she was a little less anxious than your typical deer in the headlights. Given my own fear of public speaking, I felt sympathy for her as she struggled to answer questions about her husband with both tact and openness. She got better as the morning wore on but never looked completely comfortable as she listened to the questions through an earpiece and tried to address the camera as if it were a person.
While the Edwardses were introducing themselves to America, I tried to help our press secretary, Mike Briggs, corral the growing media horde on the front lawn. The senator was scheduled to make a formal announcement and take questions at ten-thirty. At about ten-twenty, I noticed that several of the cameras were trained Von a side door, where some garbage cans were lined up. Concerned they might appear in a side shot, I jogged over to move them, and as I did, Edwards emerged from the front door and the cable networks like CNN went live with the shot. I scurried to get out of view and then stood to the side as he spoke before the microphones:
Well, good morning. Good morning to everyone. Today I filed my-the papers to set up an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States. I run for president to be champion-to be a champion for the same people I fought for all my life, regular folks. They are people like my own family, where I was the first to go to college and my dad worked in a textile mill all of his life, or my mother’s last job was working at the post office, to the people I went to school with, the people I grew up with, the families that I represented for almost two decades as a lawyer. And exactly the same group of people. They are the reason I ran for the United States Senate.
I think these people are entitled to a champion in the White House, somebody who goes to work every day seeing things through their eyes and who provides real ideas about how to make their lives better-not somebody who’s thinking about insiders or looking out for insiders.
The prepared remarks belonged as much to Elizabeth Edwards as they did to the senator, and they described perfectly the man they wanted to present to the voters. Among the various archetypes found on the American political landscape, “champion of the average Joe” fit the senator best, and this was the role he would assume as he considered facing a field of potential Democratic contenders that included half a dozen men with greater experience in politics and government.
Although Edwards talked about the economy, health care, terrorism, and education, the initial questions from the press were focused more on the nuts and bolts of politics. They seemed most concerned about how much money was in the campaign account (none yet) and whether Edwards would consider running as someone else’s pick for vice president if he didn’t grab the nomination. (He said he was thinking only about being president.) For me, the event was a perfect example of the main problem with media coverage of politics. While voters say they want to hear about issues, and pundits complain about the lack of substance in campaigns, reporters invariably highlight the horse-race aspect of elections. I don’t know if they are trying to impress people with their cynical insider perspective or they just think that issues are boring, but at the front lawn press conference, politics outweighed policy by a substantial margin.
No one in the campaign seemed surprised by the questions, and the senator was prepared for them all. In the next twenty-four hours, we would see that TV and print reporters boiled things down to the same few essential points. First, they said that in a media age a candidate’s image is more important than his résumé. Next, they said that Edwards had the look of a president but would need to prove he could connect with the common man. Finally, they co [nalncluded that Edwards was at least as attractive as any of the others who would challenge George W. Bush, so he had no reason not to throw his hat in the ring.
Besides affirming the news media’s limited interest in substance, the senator’s encounters with the press that day reinforced my understanding of politics as stagecraft. Once you get the TV trucks lined up and the camera crews running around, people tend to fall into their roles. Senator Edwards was certainly aware of his opportunity, and he went to great lengths to make sure the press had all the pictures they wanted. This included coming back outside after the initial press conference to take Emma Claire and Jack for a stroll in a neighborhood nature walk called the Greenway. The kids looked like walking props to me, but no one said a word about this.
I had my own brush with fame when this happened and CNN went live with a picture that included me standing with my shirt half-untucked and a baseball cap on my head. I didn’t even know I was being caught in the scene until my phone rang and I heard Cheri say, “Andrew, you’re on TV!” I got myself out of the picture as fast as I could.
The way I saw it, my job was behind the scenes, and if I ever appeared in the press, it meant I had made a mistake. The big-time consultants, policy wonks, and media gurus all knew the more powerful reporters by their first names and had their phone numbers on speed dial. They played a game that involved leaking information to make themselves look good and make others look bad. After the news conference, I turned to the job of preparing for a party that would start in the early evening.
Once the press departed, I spent the afternoon making sure that cleanup crews and food servers were on schedule and trying desperately to contact the caterer, who was absent without leave. I finally got through to him and discovered that his truck had broken down and he had run into trouble finding a replacement. He reassured me that he would make it to the house before the guests, and with no other option I just accepted his apologies and told him to hurry. With the next call came another minor disaster. We had sent out a worldwide fax to the press with our new contact information. BellSouth had activated our toll-free number, but it was working in only three states.
In the middle of these two small crises, Mrs. Edwards, greatly relieved that her interviews were over, walked over to smile and ask me how things were going. Under great duress, with a BlackBerry at one ear and a cell phone at the other ear, listening to elevator music on both, I considered the consequences of telling the truth. I answered her with, “Great, Mrs. Edwards, just great.”
The caterer finally appeared in a U-Haul truck about thirty minutes before the guests were scheduled to arrive. As they raced to get food and drinks set up, I noticed that the beer was warm and the finger food was cold. I prayed that nobody would get sick. Then my phone rang. It was one of the Edwardses’ neighbors. He had come home from work to find that his lawn had been torn up by one of the TV trucks. I told him we would pay for repairs and dashed off a note, to be copied and placed in all the mailboxes for blocks around, telling folks to call me if their lawns had been damaged so that I could arrange [co for landscapers to make things right. We made good on this promise, but eventually one of the senator’s neighbors made a public stink about how Edwards had shown himself to be a bad citizen by tearing up lawns.
Except for the grumpy neighbors, the response to the launch of the campaign was remarkably positive. We saw a surge in donations and received a flood of résumés and calls from people who wanted to work with us. I was most impressed by a young woman named Kayla Burman, who walked through the door of the office about a week after the announcement and asked how she could help. We were receiving hundreds of applications, including from people with two or three Ivy League degrees, and I was busy trying to figure out why a fax machine wouldn’t work. I thanked her, then told her to leave her résumé and wait for us to get back to her. She promptly burst into tears.
The crying got my attention, and as she calmed down, Kayla explained that she had driven to North Carolina from California, alone and eighteen years old, in a beat-up old car, because she believed in John Edwards and just had to do something to get him elected. Our top campaign consultant, Nick Baldick, was in charge of the payroll, so I didn’t have a paying job for her, but I asked her to volunteer in the office. She found a free couch to crash on for three months until we were able to pay her. By then, she had real skills and was a valuable part of the team. And no one had more enthusiasm.
The senator had repeatedly promised me that I could have any campaign job I wanted, but Mrs. Edwards told Cheri she was thinking about her, Brody, and Lauren Grace when she pushed to make sure I was named operations manager in Raleigh and didn’t go on the road minding the senator as his body man or setting up events as an advance man. She also told Cheri that she wanted me to be in North Carolina to help with her family while the senator was traveling. In the role of operations manager, I would be responsible for supporting the people in the field, as well as setting up and maintaining a national network of offices in key states. For the offices, I found the cheapest space possible-in old gas stations, warehouses, even an abandoned firehouse-and arranged for phones, Internet service, computers, and furnishings. The advance men and other traveling staff needed cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys, hotels, rental cars, airline tickets, and other support, which I was supposed to supply at the lowest possible cost. With over 150 full-time employees, scores of office locations across the country, thousands of volunteers, and over $30 million in expenditures in one year, it was like setting up a small company on short notice.
Once things got going, the people who required the most support and attention were on the advance staff, which numbered about fifteen at any one time. Advance men-and they are almost all men-are a cross between community organizers and rock-and-roll roadies who trash hotel rooms and run up big room service tabs. They can turn a parking lot into a rally site and arrange for a candidate to meet key people and speak to important audiences all day long. High-energy types, they tend to have extreme personalities. Typical was a mustached former advance man for President Clinton named Sam Myers, whom we called “Senior [ &#” because he asked that we hire his son, “Junior,” too. Beloved by the senator, Senior could manage an event with the creativity of the director of a feature film, and I can’t think of a time when anything went wrong with an event he handled.
Another of our stars was a wild man named Marc Adelman, who spent several hundred dollars a month on cell phone calls. I liked Marc and Senior and most of the other people we sent out across the country because they worked hard, performed their duties well, and always had entertaining stories to tell when they called in. But they were also high-maintenance people who wanted to crash in the best hotels, loved room service, and tended to violate the no-smoking rules so that we had to pay expensive cleaning charges. One of our guys even hit a moose while driving a van rented by the campaign in an isolated corner of some northern state. The accident was bad enough. The fact that he had failed to check off the box requesting insurance coverage on the car rental form made it a minor disaster.
As the person responsible for both the arrangements for our people in the field and the budget to pay for everything, in a good cop/bad cop routine, I played with Nick and Sam. I was supposed to impose some discipline on these folks, which wasn’t easy considering that we often changed plans on the fly and had to book travel on short notice, when the airlines and hotels charge their highest prices. The complexity of the job was mind-boggling. I mean, how do you get a handle on the cell phone budget when an organization has four hundred phones and people keep losing them?
Fortunately, in the early days of the campaign, we raced to the head of the pack in the competition for contributions, which gave us more cash to spend than anyone else. In just the first three months of 2003, the organization posted nearly $7.5 million in donations, a record that left people in the camp of the second-place candidate, John Kerry, saying, “We’re impressed.” The writers for the ABC News political report The Note went a little further with an article titled “Shock and Awe: John Edwards Sets a Blazing Pace.” Senator Tom Daschle, once a viable contender, promptly dropped out of the race.
The war chest was filled by a new fund-raising team who had replaced Mudcat Saunders and Steve Jarding after the senator found out they had promised we would make sizable donations to politicians and organizations in key states. (We couldn’t afford them.) The new group also employed some unorthodox techniques-according to gossip, one of them actually slept with a number of big donors-but they were obviously effective. They got a lot of help from trial lawyers like Fred M. Baron of Texas, who had become super-rich suing asbestos manufacturers and other companies on behalf of people injured by their products. A former high-school football player, Fred was extremely fit and young looking for his age, which was fifty-six. He had silver hair and a million-dollar smile, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses that made him look sort of professorial. The law firm he founded, Baron & Budd, was so big and successful that it pursued cases nationwide.
Although Fred provided invaluable connections to wealthy and powerful people, he made an even more important contribution to the campaign when he agreed to give the senator regular use of his jet. In the post-9/11 era, it’s hard to ove [;s rstate how important flying private is for a presidential candidate. With a private jet, you can visit four key states in one day and make it home for the night. If you fly commercial, you can only do half as many events and you won’t be home at the end of the day.
Fred was often on the plane with the senator, especially for fund-raising tours, which were conducted at a breakneck pace. In one three-hour period, they might rush from drinks with a small group to two separate dinners, drinks with another crowd, and then meet privately with a major “bundler” who would gather donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. These trips were exhausting, and despite being around a lot of food, the senator and Fred ate so little that they’d be starving come midnight. Under the stress, Edwards sometimes got irritated when his friend pushed him to stay on schedule. Fred, who was usually a happy-go-lucky guy, was a stickler for punctuality, and because he was not intimidated by Edwards-Bill and Hillary Clinton were his close friends-he would complain every time Edwards was late for an appointment. And the senator was almost always late. The irritation was mutual, and after hearing a few grousing remarks from Baron, the senator took to calling him Fred A. Baron (the A stood for “asshole”) whenever he talked to me about him.
I liked Fred, and his trial lawyer contacts supplied most of the low-hanging fruit-easy money-that we collected early in the campaign. Some of these fellows also got us into a little trouble with the Federal Election Commission because they tried to get around legal limits on their contributions by getting employees to donate and promising to reimburse them. These violations were resolved when the money was returned and a penalty was paid, but the effect of negative publicity around them lingered.
While Fred and the senator poured time and effort into amassing an intimidating pile of cash, an all-star group of professionals put together the machine that would be responsible for attacking the caucus and primary states. For 2004, Edwards relied on heavyweights who had previously served the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden, Bill Bradley, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and George McGovern. Senior advisers like David Axelrod of Chicago fashioned the campaign message. Consultant Nick Baldick guided the day-to-day conduct of the campaign, while Harrison Hickman handled polling. Our communications were run by David Ginsberg and press spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, who were veterans of the Clinton White House.
The first real action in the battle came in May 2003, when nine Democrats took the stage together for a debate in South Carolina, where the senator was almost a favorite son. The only thing this session established was a sense of who the serious candidates might be, and the list included Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Vermont governor Howard Dean, and John Kerry. Kerry and Dean, who were from states that bordered New Hampshire, were considered to be the front-runners, and they spent much of their time sniping at each other, as if it were a two-man race. After the debate, Senator Edwards announced that he was not going to run for reelection to the Senate, so that he could keep his focus on higher office. But even with this distraction removed, he found it hard to reach the voters with his message. As the months passed, it became clear that we weren’t getting much traction in our effort to catch up with Kerry and Dean. Donors noticed, too [s n, and since they were most interested in supporting the man who might actually get to the White House, we found it more difficult to talk them into writing checks.
As money became tight, I received lots of calls from field-workers who found that their campaign-issued credit cards were being rejected. (The worst moment came when the current body man, a young fellow named Hunter “Rock Star” Pruette, had his card rejected after dinner at a restaurant with the candidate himself.) On many nights I had to fax credit information to hotels at one or two in the morning so that our people could check in, and every day I engaged in a running battle to control spending. But no matter what I tried, the guys on the road were able to outfox me. For example, when I required them to double up in hotel rooms, they started listing the names of volunteers as their roommates. These people weren’t actually in the rooms, but the trick allowed them to get their way in the tussle over money.
The people who work in big campaigns are all, by definition, ambitious and competitive, and they are often highly manipulative. They also fall into camps that have very different perspectives on the candidate and the future. Outside consultants, professionals hired for their expertise, may care about the cause and the Democratic Party, but they are also concerned about their reputations, bank accounts, and future work. They want to win because it’s good for business. Campaigns also rely on thousands of volunteers who come and go. Most of these people never have any contact at all with the candidate. People like me, who had an established history with the candidate, hoped to continue with Edwards long into the future.
There was an odd feeling on our campaign, because very few staffers came from North Carolina and I was the only one who had worked for Edwards in the Senate. Nick Baldick, an established political pro who had had little prior contact with Edwards staffers, was hired to run the presidential campaign and given full control. (People who once ran things for Edwards in the Senate were either let go or given minor positions.) Baldick also brought in manuals left over from the Gore campaign and his own people, including an associate named John Robinson. Calling himself “J. Rob,” he arrived in Raleigh driving a little Mazda Miata sports car and lugging a huge amount of bad attitude. From the moment he set himself up in the office opposite mine, he tried to intimidate me (and everyone else) by barking orders, making mocking remarks, and sending a stream of text-message requests even though I was sitting ten feet away and always available for a talk.
J. Rob didn’t appreciate that besides managing all the demands of the campaign staff and the senator, I was still taking care of the personal needs of the Edwards family. Here J. Rob had something in common with my wife, Cheri, who also questioned the time I put into the care of the Edwards clan. But although I could understand the concern, I figured that as long as I didn’t screw anything up, J. Rob should leave me alone.
On a particularly bad day, when J. Rob kept on sending me annoying texts about problems I was working to resolve, I answered one of his messages with a wisecrack. Incensed, he got up from behind his desk and actually walked the vast distance across the hall to my doorway and glared at me. I was on the phone, so I covered the mouthpiece and said, “I &# [id,8217;m on a call.”
J. Rob was not accustomed to being sloughed off. He turned on his heel, and as he retreated into his office, he slammed the door hard enough to shake the walls. Soon after I completed my call he came back, stood in the doorway with his arms folded, and said, “You were sassing me.”
I leaned back in my chair and said, “No. I don’t think so. That’s the kind of thing a little kid does to his parents, so I wouldn’t say I was sassing you.”
“Well, I don’t care what the fuck you call it,” he shouted. “You work for me, and you don’t ever talk to me like that.”
With that, he turned away and went to retrieve a gym bag so he could change his clothes and go for a run. Now I was incensed. I got up, followed him, and growled, “Don’t ever fucking yell at me. I was here way before you got here. I’ll be here long after you are gone.” Completely fired up, I followed him to the elevator, took out my cell phone, and challenged him: “Why don’t we call the senator right now and see if he wants to fire me or you? I’ve got his number. We can settle this right now.”
Suddenly, J. Rob wasn’t so eager to yell back. He muttered something about calling his man Baldick, and when the elevator came, he got on it and disappeared. I noticed afterward that he stopped yelling in my direction and the flood of text messages slowed to a trickle. Two weeks later, Nick came to town for a meeting with key staff, and as we sat around a table we were asked to introduce ourselves. When it was my turn, I hesitated-as always-owing to my fear of talking in groups. J. Rob jumped in to say, “I’ll tell you something about Andrew. He hates it when people yell at him.”
Because the professionals had their own games to play-like the one between J. Rob and me-and their long-term careers to consider, they tended to get distracted and preferred a conservative campaign style. (Later I would realize that some of these guys wouldn’t attack an opponent in the primaries because they were worried about getting jobs with whoever won in the end. Unfortunately, Senator Edwards listened to these consultants and followed their advice too closely, almost becoming robotic.)
Despite their flaws, they were very good at their jobs, a fact that became obvious to me when it came time for us to shift from “exploratory” status to a genuine presidential campaign. First they arranged for an informal “announcement” on Jon Stewart’s program, The Daily Show, which would appeal to younger voters. Then they put together an event for the big formal announcement. The main event would be held in Robbins in front of the old textile mill, which had been shut down and stood as a massive brick emblem of the troubles in small-town America.
The plan called for the Edwardses to spend the night before the event at his parents’ home. Wallace, his father, and Bobbi, his mother, were salt-of-the-earth types who were so kind [o w that they sent us baby gifts, food when Gracie had surgery, and cakes for our kids’ birthdays. Mrs. Edwards did not enjoy spending time with them. When I arrived at their house in Raleigh to drive them to Robbins, it was six P.M., but she was far from ready, and she was arguing with the senator. (They didn’t seem to care if I stood there while they shouted.) We didn’t get out of the city until around eight o’clock, and on the way she said she wanted some strong cold medicine to take so she would be sleepy and ready for bed as soon as we arrived. I had to stop at three different stores but finally got what she wanted. As we pulled up to the house in Robbins, she was so out of it that the senator walked her to a bedroom, where she escaped for the night.
The next morning, the senator and I went for a run at four-thirty so his head would be clear enough to handle a string of live morning show interviews. Along the way, we passed his old high school and the mural of astronaut Charles Brady. As a youth, John Edwards had been the “golden boy” in his family and in his town. Sometimes I wondered if he had been loved too much back then and somehow got the idea that the rules might not apply to him the way they did to everyone else. I knew for certain that he was his mother’s favorite and that she had almost never disciplined him. “Johnny just never made any trouble,” she would say, and in her mind this was true.
Bobbi had breakfast for us when we returned, and as we ate he called her “Mama” and referred to his father as “Daddy,” sounding very much like the fine Southern boy he was. After we ate and showered, he said, “Hey, Andrew, let’s go check things out.” We got in the Suburban and, after getting lost, which was hard to do in such a small town, found our way to the factory. As we drove, the senator asked me what I imagined his old classmates might think of him. It astonished me to hear that at a moment like this, when he was about to announce a run for president of the United States, he was thinking back to the kids he knew in school. But I hid my surprise and said, “They’re proud of you. I’m sure of it.”
The big abandoned mill had been draped in red, white, and blue to serve as a backdrop for a metal platform that faced a parking lot, where a crowd of several hundred people had already staked out their places. Music blared from the sound system, and TV crews were busy setting up their cameras. Clearly, our campaign crew would deliver the excitement they had promised.
Back at the house, the senator, his parents, and Mrs. Edwards sat for TV interviews, and then we all left for the mill site. When we got there, two thousand people, including busloads from hundreds of miles away, cheered the senator as if he were Elvis. His big applause lines addressed the failures of the Bush administration and his promise to halt government’s neglect of working-class people. The biggest cheers came when he talked of growing up in Robbins and said, “I promise to fight for you.” At the end, his campaign theme song, “ Small Town ” by John Mellencamp, poured from the loudspeakers.
The song matched the candidate’s biography, which was at the center of his message. Edwards insisted that he was not, as his opponents might say, a rich, inexperienced guy with over [gusize ambition. Instead, he was a son of small-town America with the strength and independence, thanks to his self-made wealth, to stand against the entrenched political power brokers. For audiences who might hear him only once or twice, the way the candidate harped on small-town America in his appearances probably rang true, but for the staff of the campaign, who heard the words small town hundreds of times a day, the phrase and the song became more than a little irritating. When staff people gathered to watch him in a televised debate or speech, they often played a drinking game that required every player to drink a shot of something strong whenever the words “small town” or “I’m the son of a millworker” came out of his mouth. On a typical night, people would be howling drunk after half an hour.
Although this theme struck a chord with some voters and amused his aides and advisers, it was no substitute for a well-defined platform of ideas, and Edwards was criticized for a lack of substance. By November, polls showed him running a distant third or fourth, and both the press and political experts were saying he had a “gravitas” problem, meaning he seemed too young and inexperienced. When I caught him on television in this period, I detected little of the energy and passion I had seen at the Ocean Creek Inn and throughout his Senate campaign. That man was gone, replaced by a robot that looked like John Edwards but spoke like a man reading a briefing paper.
On many nights, my phone would ring and I would hear the senator on the other end. Sometimes he sounded petty and irritated by ordinary events. He especially hated making appearances at state fairs, where “fat rednecks try to shove food down my face. I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?” He sometimes called in the middle of a televised event. He’d say, “Hey, Andrew, I’m on TV talking to you. Turn it on.” He would then put on a serious face, pretending to talk about something important, and we would chat about basketball. When he asked, I also gave him some Ambien tablets from my own prescription, so that he could get to sleep on nights when he was just too wound up. These little conspiracies, which reminded him of the times we had spent together on the road, brought us closer together. And when, in these unguarded moments, he asked for my evaluation of the campaign, I didn’t hold back. I told him that friends, family, and longtime supporters were telling me that the John Edwards they knew had disappeared. They wanted him to speak more forcefully about the needs of working people and issues like health care and how the insurance companies were running amok. I was very critical of the “inside the Washington Beltway” people and told him they were overthinking things. “Go with your gut instincts,” I said.
With Christmas approaching, I was more involved with the preparations at the Edwards home than I was with my own family. While Cheri did the shopping and decorating at our house, many of the toys that needed my attention sat in boxes, but I put together an electric-powered toy Jeep for Jack, which I adorned with campaign stickers. I am sure that Cheri resented the time I gave to the Edwards family, but I was fully committed to the “never say no” work ethic. Cheri tried to understand.
When I picked Senator Edwards up at the Raleigh airport around this time, he was happy to be back in North Carolina but miserable about the state of his campaign. “Andrew, I am really sick of this shit,” he said wearily. “I’m not going to go down like this. I’m going to start being me. What the fuck do I have to lose?” As the third or fourth man in a race that had boiled down to six contenders, the senator had nothing to lose and everything to gain by a change in approach. I told him to start loosening up. He looked out the window at that familiar landscape and nodded in agreement.
Days later, I switched on CNN to see Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, who hosted the political talk show Crossfire at the time, reporting from New Hampshire. They had bumped into Senator Edwards as he came out of a restaurant in Manchester, and he’d instantly agreed to walk with them to the network’s bus and conduct an impromptu interview. Snow flurries came down and the TV guys protected themselves with heavy coats, while the senator, who wore only a light jacket, bustled along as if he had all the energy and time in the world and couldn’t feel the blustery cold.
As they walked, Edwards said he had been hearing from voters who were worried about health care, especially the power of insurance companies and “the lack of any cost controls on prescription drugs, adding, “They’re very suspicious about it.” Carlson, a conservative, wondered aloud if Edwards might depict President Bush as “a big spender” when it came to health care and win some support from conservative voters. While Begala laughed at the notion, the senator picked up on it.
“Yes, I think that’s correct. You’re right about that.”
By this point in the broadcast, the three men had reached the CNN bus and Begala invited the senator aboard. He took a look at the vehicle, called the CNN Election Express, and blurted out, “Oh, cool bus!” It was an unguarded little remark, and it made him seem sincere, like the guy I used to know. Watching this series of unscripted moments, I shouted at the TV, “Dude, there you are! Welcome back, man!”
As they took their places in a little studio inside the bus, Begala and Carlson seemed thrilled. They told Edwards he was the first candidate ever to visit and then began asking about his previous experiences in life. This gave him a chance to attack George Bush’s policies at length and to talk about growing up in a small town and having experiences most Americans might find familiar. Then Carlson played right into his hands, offering up observations about how Howard Dean (like John Kerry) came from extreme wealth. The senator then went on to explain that Dean was never going to grab the nomination, and he made a reasonable argument for how he could actually win it.
“What will happen is what always happens in these multicandidate races. There are going to be huge changes between now and the New Hampshire primary, the Iowa caucuses, the South Carolina primary. Voters are going to start to focus on who their candidate should be. And they’re going to care about a lot of things. And one of the things is… who, in fact, can compete with [n c George Bush everywhere, who will be the best candidate for the Democratic Party.”
Not long after this encounter, the senator called to catch up. When I told him I was delighted by his encounter with Begala and Carlson, he said the moment had revived him. “I saw those guys and just thought, Fuck it. I’m going to do and say what I want.” The result had given him a sense that if he could continue to present himself with genuine emotion and reached enough voters, especially in Iowa, he might just win the nomination.
With the heightened commitment came a new message, devised with the help of consultant David Axelrod. Edwards began to talk about “two Americas,” one where everyday people played by the rules but were buffeted by powerful forces beyond their control, the other populated by a wealthy and influential minority who wielded too much power and influence, especially in Washington. Following Axelrod’s advice, the senator emphasized hope for the future and resisted personal attacks on his opponents. He also tried to adjust his image a bit to address the complaint that he looked too boyish.
For the next month, the senator pushed hard and made steady headway. When Al Gore endorsed Dean, Edwards brushed it off with a wisecrack about how the Republicans have “coronations” but Democrats have elections. In both New Hampshire and Iowa, he discovered die-hard supporters, and polls showed he was rising in popularity as voters began to narrow their choices. The change was slow, however, and a week before the Iowa caucuses he was still in fourth place, almost twenty points behind Dean, according to one poll. That Sunday, he got some encouragement when he appeared on ABC and George Stephanopolous noted that a quarter of Iowa voters were still undecided, “and they like you.” Stephanopolous then played a video clip of a voter who said his one concern about Edwards was that he was a little too green.
“I’ve heard it all my life,” replied the senator. Then he talked in a way I had heard many times before, recalling how he was never expected to graduate from college or law school, and he wasn’t supposed to make it in his career as an attorney or as a candidate for United States Senate. At each step he had surprised people (and himself) by not just succeeding, but excelling. “My job is to convince them with my passion, my energy, that I can get this done.”
Unlike other candidates, Edwards promised Iowans he would never raise taxes on the middle class and that he would help everyone who qualified go to college, no matter their income. He raced around the state talking about hope, and as he had when he ran against Faircloth, he refused to be baited into attacking his rivals. “Cynics do not build this country, optimists build this country,” he repeated to crowds that were growing larger every day. By midweek, Howard Dean was sniping at him by name in his TV commercials, and he had earned the endorsement of the state’s most important paper, the Des Moines Register. The front-page article was titled “John Edwards, Your Time Is Now.” This endorsement was so important that the senator called me at one-thirty in the morning, s [theaying, “Andrew, this is huge.” Then he had me connect him by phone with his parents. The next day, John Kerry began attacking Edwards with snide remarks about his youthfulness, saying he was probably “in diapers” in 1969 when Kerry served in Vietnam.
In the brief exchanges we had on the phone during this push, Edwards sounded to me like a preacher at a revival meeting where everyone was catching the spirit and wanted to come to Jesus. Hoarse and exhausted, he was thrilled by the way people responded to his attacks on Bush and his optimistic message about a future with a Democrat in the White House. He understood that caucus participants were far more committed to the success of the party than people who voted in primaries and that they didn’t want to see their own guys shred one another. For this reason, he avoided making harsh attacks on his opponents. Grassroots Democrats seemed to appreciate his restraint. “We’re getting through, Andrew,” he crowed. “We really are.”
When the caucuses finally met, Edwards surged from fourth place with 11 percent to second place at about 32 percent. Unfortunately, John Kerry, who had also made a furious final week crusade, finished five points ahead and came out the clear winner. Howard Dean, who once seemed unbeatable, fell to below 20 percent and was then captured by TV cameras making a speech that included a strange-sounding victory howl that was instantly dubbed the “Dean scream” and subjected to endless mockery by pundits, comedians, and Internet commentators.
Inside the Edwards campaign, we knew that with another week’s time we could have passed Kerry and won Iowa. Instead, the Massachusetts senator with the long résumé and extremely sober demeanor got most of the press attention as the campaign shifted to New Hampshire. Kerry, who like Dean lived in a neighboring state, had a huge advantage over us, and we had only a week to try to close the gap. To make matters worse, we were running out of money faster than we were running out of time. As the senator dashed around the state, he discovered the crowds were smaller than they had been in Iowa, but we couldn’t afford to buy enough advertising to reach them through the media. On election day Kerry scored his second win, Dean made a comeback to claim second, and Edwards finished a distant fourth, just behind General Wesley Clark.
With his early wins, the fund-raising tide also turned toward Kerry, as donors who were eager to be with the winner rushed to show their support prior to March 2-called Super Tuesday-when ten states from Vermont to California would hold primaries. In Raleigh, I juggled money to keep Edwards on the road, and the staff was pared back. The senator’s mood and the feeling in our offices turned dark as it seemed that barring some disaster, Kerry was going to run away with the nomination.
Although it’s wrong to wish bad fortune on someone else, a feeling of hope rippled through the campaign when the Internet site DrudgeReport.com-run by a mudslinger called Matt Drudge-posted a story suggesting Kerry had had an affair with a tall, twenty-seven-year-old blond news reporter. We had heard similar rumors and innuendo for months and began following the story with so much intensity that another Web site measured the Internet traffic and announced that we had checked DrudgeReport.com a thousand times. When this got out, John Robinson went around the office telling people to cut it out. We were making ourselves look bad.
Soon after the supposed affair was reported, Alexandra Polier, who was supposedly Kerry’s paramour, stepped forward to say the story was a lie. I’d like to believe she told the truth, but in politics you never know. True or not, her statement killed the best chance we had at overcoming Kerry. In the last week before Super Tuesday, some commentators said the senator was keeping up the fight only to position himself to be the vice presidential candidate on a Kerry ticket and was therefore being too easy on him. Then Edwards took some swipes at the front-runner, trying to depict him as a Washington insider. It didn’t work. Kerry won every Super Tuesday state, except for Dean’s Vermont, by big margins. To our credit, Edwards finished second in all nine of those states and grabbed 41 percent of the Democrats in Georgia, the one state in the Deep South.
The talk of Edwards joining a Kerry campaign as the vice presidential nominee, which began even before Super Tuesday, flared for a moment after he decided to withdraw from the presidential campaign. (One of our supporters actually waved a handmade Kerry-Edwards sign at the gathering in Raleigh, where the senator announced his decision.) E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post said that Edwards had actually gained a great deal in his losing campaign and had positioned himself as a favorite in the veep sweepstakes. (Dionne complained, however, that Edwards had failed to challenge Kerry in a way that would toughen him up for the fight with Bush.) But while the pundits pointed to Edwards’s appeal and potential, not one of them mentioned the challenge the senator faced coming to terms with his loss-the first major defeat in his entire life-and figuring out what he would do next without an office to serve as his platform.