Politician Page 12

  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 on 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 concluded 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 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 himsel
f 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.

  T

  he 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 overstate 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 pr
eviously 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, 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.