Politician Page 6

  On the way home, as I agreed with Cheri about the senator’s insensitivity, I also thought about how, in the course of the evening, Senator Kerrey had referred many times to Edwards’s bright future as a national leader. It was hard for me to believe that a guy who had served less than a year in the one and only political job he had ever held was being described as a future star of the Democratic Party. It was so fast. But I also recalled what I had seen the first time I saw Edwards speak. Maybe, I thought, my intuition had been right.

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  erious talk about John Edwards running for national office began long before the press and the public became aware of the possibility. It started in June 2000, when Vice President Al Gore came to North Carolina. As they planned the trip, Gore’s people knew only that they wanted to get him into the graduation ceremony at Tarboro High School, which served one of the areas most affected by Hurricane Floyd. Besides that one stop, they wanted a second setting for what they called “an education event” and a third for “a tech event.” The selection was complicated by the Secret Service, which required we consider sniper locations as we reviewed sites. I helped them settle on Broughton High School in Raleigh for a question-and-answer session with students and the North Carolina State University technology center, where Gore talked about the Internet. (I also pushed for these locations because the senator’s children had gone to Broughton and he graduated from State.)

  Senator Edwards and I accompanied Gore for the full day. It was my first experience with a motorcade operated by the Secret Service, and I got a sense of their readiness when the driver of a stopped car pulled onto the highway. Suddenly the rear windows of a black Suburban popped open and two agents, their firearms visible, leaned out. The stray car was surrounded by motorcycle cops, and the motorcade proceeded at full speed. (For fun I called my parents and told them what was going on.)

  At each stop that day, the vice president excelled at meeting people one on one but put them to sleep with his public performance. The senator, in contrast, knew how to work a crowd. He knew when he had them, knew when they were getting bored, and knew when to wrap things up. At the last stop, when the crowd applauded the end of Gore’s talk, I happened to be standing near two Secret Service agents. As Edwards and Gore waved to the crowd, one turned to the other and said, “If you ask me, the wrong one’s running for president.”

  A few weeks later, the senator told me that he had gotten a few feelers from Gore’s people, who said he was being considered for the job of running mate. Some of the hints came from Harrison Hickman, the political pollster and consultant who had helped Edwards beat Lauch Faircloth and just happened to be one of Gore’s closest advisers. Edwards also shared a friend with Gore in Walter Dellinger, a prominent law professor at Duke. Both men knew how well the charismatic Edwards performed, how he could take apart a tough issue and explain it in terms anyone could grasp and win them over to his point of view.

  In mid-July, on a day when I picked him up at the airport—Diet Coke chilling, AC blasting—and we stopped for some groceries, my cell phone buzzed while I was away from it. When I checked the message, I heard Warren Christopher’s soft voice saying he was trying to reach John Edwards. (Former secretary of state Christopher was helping to guide Gore’s vice presidential pick.) We took the groceries home and called him back. It was at just this moment that Emma Claire, the senator’s two-year-old daughter, decided to raise the volume on the television so she could hear every word of the song “I love you. You love me!” being sung by Barney, the purple dinosaur. I raced to turn down the volume but couldn’t find the remote control.

  Between Barney’s blaring voice and Christopher’s exceedingly soft one, Edwards couldn’t hear much of the call. Mrs. Edwards, who had been hanging on every confused word her husband said, pounced as soon as he hung up the phone.

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

  “Well, I think he was telling me I was one of two being considered.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “Well, the TV was so loud and I could barely hear him, but I think that was what he said.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him to repeat himself?”

  “I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Besides, I was pretty sure I got what he was saying.”

  He was right. Christopher had called to say that while other names might be suggested, there were only two people under consideration, and Edwards was one of them. He and Elizabeth were thrilled by the news, and they asked me to arrange a little celebration with their “dinner club” friends at a local chain restaurant called Tripp’s. I got on the phone and set it up, and by the time I was finished, I could hear him trying to temper his wife’s expectations. He reminded her that he was still an inexperienced politician with no serious national profile. Like Gore, he was from the South, and most presidential nominees try to balance the ticket with a partner from a different region. Also, Edwards had absolutely no standing with party insiders across the country.

  The man we believed was the other finalist, Dick Gephardt, had a political résumé as long as your arm. A member of Congress since 1977, he lost a bid for the presidential nomination in 1988 but became House majority leader the following year. He was from Missouri, which would give the ticket a Midwestern flavor, and he was both a policy wonk and a true insider with national party people. Everyone from New Hampshire to Iowa and beyond knew Gephardt, and half of them probably owed him a favor.

  The main thing going against him was his style—he was almost as low-key as Gore.

  When I got home with my news about the vice presidency, Cheri was shocked and a bit impressed. She had been skeptical about the senator. The idea that he might be moving up didn’t change her opinion completely, but it gave her a bit of confirmation about my judgment, proof that I had placed my bet on a pretty good horse.

  Days after Christopher’s call, Edwards went to meet with Gore at the vice president’s mansion on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. He did not think he had a good shot at the job, but he enjoyed the publicity he was getting. When I saw the senator next, he talked a little about Gore, saying he had been strangely shy and that there was no spark between them. He made fun of the vice president’s pointy-toed cowboy boots, which he wore with a suit, and he said he thought Gore was much too cautious. Eager to be his own man and distance himself from the Lewinsky scandal, Gore had all but banished President Clinton from his campaign. Edwards, who had used the president to great advantage while courting the black vote in North Carolina, thought this was a big mistake.

  But although he was lukewarm about the man he met, the senator was extremely impressed by the vice president’s official residence. Built in 1893, Number One Observatory Circle is a three-story building with a round tower and a high-pitched main roof with dormers. It looks a lot like the faux Victorian mini-mansions you see in pricey developments all across the South, except it’s the real thing. The senator thought it was a nicer home than the White House and would be the ideal place to prepare for a run for the presidency in, say, 2008. He didn’t say what he intended to do if he became president, but as I came to learn, most big-time politicians don’t think much about what they will do when they get to the top of the mountain until they arrive. Until then, it’s all about the climb.

  Of course, a place on the short list for vice president isn’t a guarantee of anything, especially if you are the guy’s in-state advance man. With this in mind, Cheri and I planned our future as if we were going to stay in North Carolina. She went off the birth control pill, and we hoped she would soon be pregnant. We had enough confidence in the future to buy a four-bedroom place on Lake Wheeler, on the south side of Raleigh, and start a major remodeling project.

  We moved in at the end of July and were still unpacking on Saturday, August 5. I put a television on top of a cardboard box and turned on CNN. At some point while I was passing by, I heard a newscaster
mention Edwards as they showed a video of the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and Julianna Smoot getting into his beat-up Buick in Georgetown surrounded by photographers. Minutes later, Julianna called to say that the Gore people had sent some sort of signal indicating Edwards was in. Then, almost in the same breath, she backed off a bit, insisting that while all the signs were positive, nothing was set in stone.

  For the rest of the weekend, the cable news shows speculated about Gore’s choice, which meant he enjoyed a bonanza of free publicity and everyone connected with the senator suffered with nail-biting anxiety. Most of the reports followed the themes that appeared in a Wall Street Journal article—“North Carolina’s Edwards Gets a Shot at the Gore Ticket”—that ran through the pros and cons. The one line in the piece that stood out to me was, “When Republican nominee George W. Bush chose balding, 59-year-old Dick Cheney for his ticket, Mr. Edwards’s youth became an even bigger asset.”

  The buzz had become a racket, and it was impossible to ignore the idea that John Edwards just might become vice president. (On Sunday, the Daily News in New York even published a story saying Gore favored Edwards and would take Massachusetts senator John Kerry if Edwards turned him down.) I had my own ambitions, and I thought about how well I had served the senator and the possibility that he might want me to work in the vice president’s office. For me, an offer to work in a Gore/Edwards administration would mean an instant jump from the minor leagues to the majors. And as much as my apolitical wife loved the life we were building in North Carolina, she said she would make the move and support me one hundred percent.

  I tried to temper my own expectations, the way the senator had tempered his wife’s on the day Warren Christopher called. Gore had other people under consideration, and presidential candidates always float a bunch of names to see how people react and to grab as much free press as possible. I also kept in mind that a jump to Washington would be disruptive. Cheri and I had just moved into a new house, and we were serious about starting a family. There was no sense in getting all worked up about something that might never happen.

  Gore would make his announcement on the coming Tuesday at his campaign headquarters in Nashville. The senator and I began another road trip on Monday morning, heading north to Asheville, where we would stay overnight before heading into the Great Smoky Mountains and three remote counties that we could check off our list. When we got in the car, he announced that he was going to share something special, something he hadn’t told anyone else. (I knew this wasn’t true, but I played along.) He then told me that on Saturday he had heard from one of Gore’s closest advisers, who said he was going to be picked for vice president. But then on Sunday, after the idea of Edwards for vice president was floated on the political talk shows, he got another call indicating the deal was not yet set.

  “Today I don’t know any more than you,” he said. But this didn’t make much sense to me. If he was going to be the pick, he would have been informed. So any hope we had was slender at best.

  All day long we kept waiting for the phone to ring with Gore on the other end, asking Edwards to come to Nashville. In the mountains the cell phone signals are so unreliable that we often lost service, so I would check every few minutes for messages. We heard from staffers and political advisers and Mrs. Edwards, but not Gore. At the events we held, where the crowds were suddenly massive and we saw more reporters than usual, the senator made sure I arranged to have him jokingly introduced as “the next vice president of the United States.”

  That night in Asheville, we stayed at the historic Grove Park Resort, a massive hotel built in 1912 out of local granite by a patent medicine huckster who filled it with Arts and Crafts furniture and decorated it with quotations from Thoreau and Emerson and others. A few special rooms feature theme decorations. The “Great Gatsby” is Art Deco. The “Swinging Sixties” has a flower power motif.

  As usual, I checked him into a suite and put myself in a regular room. Even though it was in the basement, it still cost hundreds of dollars for the night. Before dinner, we took a long run in the streets of Asheville and even cut through the parking lot attached to the building where my sports pub (now a Chinese restaurant) had, in the good times before bankruptcy, buzzed with life. At some point during the workout, I turned to the senator and said, “Doesn’t it suck?” He wasn’t sure what I meant, so I explained that I was talking about Gore and the all-but-obvious fact that he wasn’t going to be selected.

  In response, Edwards told me that his life experience, especially his son’s death, had taught him to control his expectations and never take anything for granted. He had thought about what Gore had to consider as he made his choice and concluded that John Edwards was not the ideal pick. Since he never had the job and never expected to get it, losing out wasn’t going to hurt. He also said something about how he had been a senator for only a short time and that the future would bring so many opportunities, it didn’t make much sense to get upset about this one.

  The next morning, as we drove west toward a meeting on the banks of an isolated reservoir called Fontana Lake, radio news reports from Nashville noted that Gore was going to make his announcement at noon. I began to feel like the one kid in class who wasn’t invited to a birthday party. When we got to the lake, we were met by half a dozen officials from local communities and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The locals complained about the TVA’s policy of drawing water out of the river to generate hydroelectricity. They thought it discouraged tourism and fishing and the economic benefits that come with visitors. I watched closely to see if the senator was bored or distracted, but if he was, he didn’t show it. He left the lakeside assuring his hosts that he would look into the problem, and they were pleased.

  Lunch was scheduled at a local school where the kids were on vacation, but we would meet with teachers and administrators. On the way there, we were shocked to hear that Gore had picked not Dick Gephardt, but Joe Lieberman, a senator from Connecticut with little national reputation and even less charisma than Gore. (We had heard rumors about Lieberman but had dismissed them as ridiculous.) In that moment, considering Lieberman’s and Edwards’s strengths, I believed that Gore had been afraid that if he picked Edwards, his running mate might outshine him. The senator insisted he never really expected to be picked and that he wasn’t very disappointed. He repeated what he had said the night before about all he had seen in life and how he had learned to roll with the punches. I kept thinking about how the whole country was focused on Gore and Lieberman.

  It was a punch to the gut. At that point, we all felt that Gore would win and any future hopes of a presidential run for Senator Edwards were a long way off. It was confusing working in politics at times like this; you want what’s best for your team, but you want what’s best for yourself, too.

  At the school, we were met by the principal and given the usual tour. Somewhere along the way, Gore and Lieberman called and I took the senator into an empty room to congratulate them and agree that he would contribute to the campaign in any way he could. When he came back, it seemed as if nothing had happened. He sat down with a small group of educators and listened carefully to their concerns about the funding and technology needs of rural schools. No trace of disappointment showed on his face, and he was completely attentive. Looking back on that day ten years later, I can say he was never more presidential.

  (Eventually, the senator told me what had happened with the Gore pick. According to Edwards, he had been anointed on the Saturday prior to the announcement, but the choice did not go over well among Democratic Party insiders and with various pundits. The next day, the Gore family met behind closed doors, and when the session ended Lieberman was in.)

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  ealistically, the nomination for vice president was too much to expect for a guy who had run for office only once and had served a grand total of nineteen months in the Senate. Knowing this, I found it easier to focus on the chores Cheri and I had to finish at our new house and enjoy what the summer had to offer. We w
ent to a Jimmy Buffett concert at an outdoor venue called Walnut Creek and attended a good friend’s wedding at a country club down in Charlotte. Cheri wasn’t feeling quite like herself, but I figured she was just a little run-down. Besides, we managed to have a great time at both events.

  I was free to relax because the boss was in great demand out of state. In the middle of the month, he attended the Democratic National Convention at the massive Staples Center arena in Los Angeles. He had a minor speaking role: five minutes and not in prime time. But he also got to visit state delegations, where he met dozens of people who could help him in the future, and he socialized with the glittery Hollywood wing of the party, which was out in force. No matter what you might think of the Democrats at any given moment, you cannot deny that it is by far the entertainment industry’s favorite party. Cher, John Travolta, Martin Sheen, Christie Brinkley, and many others turned out for the Democrats. Before he even left Los Angeles, the national media were describing John Edwards as a rising star and “the future” of the Democratic Party.

  I heard all about the Hollywood scene when the senator finally returned and we resumed our routine, crisscrossing the state to meet constituents and officials. The senator was practically giddy with excitement about the convention and wide-eyed over the people he had met and the things he had learned. Always eager to tweak his technique, he was especially proud of learning how to address a vast but distracted audience like the crowd at the Staples Center. The party’s media consultants had coached him on how to stop for applause lines and pretend that he had looked into the crowd and caught someone’s eye. This bit of acting is essential for anyone who wants to look good while addressing weary delegates in midafternoon, and John Edwards was delighted to report that he had mastered it.

  Others agreed with the senator’s self-assessment. A little more than a week after the convention, Senator Edwards was the subject of a column in The Wall Street Journal by the paper’s Capitol Hill veteran Al Hunt. The piece cited glowing assessments by big-name Democrats, but the comment that stuck out came from Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant who had tried to help Lauch Faircloth fend off the Edwards challenge in 1998: “Edwards is the Robert Redford of politics, a ‘natural.’ ” Of course, Castellanos was actually referring to the character Roy Hobbs, whom Redford played in a movie called The Natural, but his point was clear. John Edwards looked, walked, talked, and acted like a great leader, and he made it look effortless. And in a thirty-second sound bite age, these traits could be more valuable to a politician than decades of experience in public service.