The Politician (23 page)

Despite the obstacles he might face, John Edwards believed he would occupy the Oval Office in January 2009. To get there, he would need some way to remain in public life and maintain an organization that could provide the base for a run at the nomination. I would continue to work for him as a sort of personal assistant, which meant I accepted some very unusual assignments. One required me to make good on a promise that Elizabeth made to a young woman who asked her for help getting trained to drive trucks.
Elizabeth had said she would help. I wound up driving the woman, who had been Wade’s friend at school, more than an hour each way, at least a dozen times, so she could get to class. These round-trips always started before dawn.

I was not happy serving as a chauffeur so that Mrs. Edwards could fulfill a personal pledge of charity, but I did it because I believed in John Edwards and wanted to be part of his long-term effort to win the White House. No out-of-office Democrat had won the nomination in modern times. But there were some advantages to being freed from the Senate. He wouldn’t be forced into voting on legislation related to issues like abortion and gay marriage that Republicans crafted in order to paint Democrats as lacking commonsense or morality. Freed from this trap, he could present himself as a person of faith, who held moral Christian views, and this was critical to him being elected president. We began the effort by creating two organizations: a PAC called the One America Committee and an institute at the University of North Carolina called the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

The PAC, which was named by Mrs. Edwards, would fund a small staff in Washington and pay for the senator’s travels and other expenses. The antipoverty center would support research and education and host conferences that would bring together experts on jobs, education, housing, health care, and other issues that would become the core of the senator’s 2008 campaign. He would draw only a modest stipend from this organization, but he did ask me to try to get the university to grant him certain benefits—tickets and parking for basketball games, for example—in exchange for lending his name and presence to the school. He didn’t receive these wish-list items, but he did get a beautiful office to share with his wife. However, she never actually worked there, and on the rare occasions when he was at the center, he did mostly political work, including fund-raising.

In choosing a populist, antipoverty focus, Senator and Mrs. Edwards threw out the advice of prominent consultants like Bob Shrum and
David Axelrod, whom they blamed for the timid Kerry-Edwards campaign that failed in 2004. They were determined to run the next campaign themselves and as they saw fit, and they thought it didn’t matter if poverty was not a popular cause with a majority of Americans. They believed that people just wanted to see that a candidate stood for something important, as had Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms, and was strong in his resolve. (You might not agree with them, but you knew what they stood for.) They also thought that the issue would appeal to the small number of intensely political folks, especially labor leaders, who participate in the Iowa caucuses and can give a contender the momentum to win the nomination.

Edwards dreamed of getting more political legitimacy from an independent grassroots movement that would demand that he run for president. Since no one in the country was actually building such a movement, he explored the idea of creating one, on the Internet, but in a way that he could deny having anything to do with it. I attended a meeting with the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and a consultant named Zack Exley, who they hoped might pull off this trick. (Exley had been a major force in the online efforts of the liberal activist organization called
MoveOn.org
.) It was a giddy session, with lots of excitement about how they could start an online petition to make it seem as if thousands, if not millions, of people were begging Edwards to run. However, in the end, the Edwardses decided Exley wanted to have too much influence on the campaign. The senator would have to find support the old-fashioned way, by meeting people face-to-face and winning them over.

Once the plan was set, the Edwardses embarked on a schedule of visits to homeless shelters, union halls, universities, and other places where he gave speeches and joined forums that allowed him to remain in the public eye. He used his appearances to test ideas for his platform. One of his favorites was a College for Everyone program that would fund the first year of study for poor students willing to work ten hours a week. When he wanted to test the idea in a pilot demonstration, I raised a million dollars to fund a College for Everyone trial in Greene County, a poor community in eastern North Carolina.

Money is the fuel that runs every think tank, every political action committee, and, for that matter, every aide to an out-of-office politician. I worked hard to fuel-up all three of the Edwards organizations, raising more than $4 million, which freed him from having to spend much time on the phone asking for cash. Sometimes the hardest part of this job involved getting the senator and Mrs. Edwards to participate. For example, when I recruited a Chapel Hill businessman named Michael Cucchiara, one favor he asked for in return for his donation was that I get tickets for his wife to see
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
He also asked for dinner with the Edwardses.

As everyone knows,
Oprah
tickets were a tough get, but I managed to score some through her friend Gayle King. Cheri went to the show with Mrs. Cucchiara. She received a video camera from Oprah, who gave them to audience members willing to film themselves doing something positive in their communities. Cheri raised $30,000 for soldiers at Fort Bragg.

Getting the Edwardses to drive across town for dinner with the Cucchiaras was much harder than finagling the tickets to
Oprah
. I finally had to pitch a fit to get them to do it. Despite this kind of resistance, I helped to get the three Edwards organizations rolling and then maintained them with a flow of cash. Fred Baron purchased a jet, which he remodeled according to the senator’s specifications and then gave to him to use.

While most of his expenses and staff were covered by the money I raised, and favors from supporters like Fred, Senator Edwards wanted to continue to generate personal income as a matter of both financial security and pride. His political contacts and experience made him an attractive commodity for influence-and information-based operations like law firms, lobbying outfits, management consultants, and investment houses. Always alert to opportunity, he went to the industry with the most money—finance—and got a part-time gig with a hedge fund called Fortress Financial for a salary of roughly $500,000 per year.

As he did with the poverty center, the senator put very little time into his Fortress job, but it allowed him to become an investor in exclusive funds generally closed to newcomers. He put $16 million into Fortress, which
before the economic collapse of 2008 used a variety of creative and controversial schemes to deliver high rates of return. If you think that hiring on with a hedge fund that avoided taxes by incorporating offshore accounts conflicted with Edwards’s political concerns about “two Americas,” rich and poor, you aren’t alone. The irony wasn’t lost on his critics, and they would eventually catch up to him; but before they did, he would profit handsomely. He added to this income by making speeches about poverty, some of which netted him up to $55,000 apiece. One of these appearances was in the United Arab Emirates, where he was accompanied by a new body man, Josh Brumberger, who later told me that the service at the seven-star luxury hotel in Dubai was “the kind of attention Edwards always wanted.”

With his need for a political base and personal income met, the senator next turned attention to his home and his appearance. Using my name to register under, he checked into a hospital for extensive dental work and plastic surgery to remove a mole from his upper lip. The new teeth were susceptible to stains, so after he got them he switched from Diet Coke to Diet Sprite and diet orange soda. Still holding to the routine, I bought these drinks by the caseload and had them waiting whenever I met him with the car, but at this time I also began a quiet exercise in rebellion by making sure the left armrest for his seat was always lowered when he got in. It may seem like a small thing, but he preferred to have it raised so he could move around in the seat. I put it down and smiled to myself whenever an annoyed look flashed across his face before he pushed it up. I also took silent pleasure in waiting for the moment he would demonstrate that he had become truly spoiled rotten by voicing a complaint about this tiny inconvenience.

The senator got lots of opportunities to complain to me during this time because I was his only North Carolina–based aide, and he needed to be home as much as possible as Mrs. Edwards planned the construction of her dream house in Chapel Hill. The process began when they put their house in Washington up for sale and bought more than a hundred acres to accommodate a sprawling house, as well as a barnlike athletic building housing a basket ball
court, racquetball court, exercise room, and indoor swimming pool along with living quarters. Emma Claire and Jack got adjoining tree houses, complete with working windows, measuring more than one thousand square feet each. Mrs. Edwards, who added rooms for Christmas ornaments and gift wrapping to the plans, had found inspiration for this project at John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s estate in Pennsylvania, which is a beautiful collection of rambling old structures set amid rolling farmland.

As the Edwardses’ lifestyle became ever more extravagant, I began to feel incredulous. His big issue was poverty, but he was flying around in a private jet, building a gigantic estate, drawing big checks from a hedge fund, and booking speeches for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. In frustration, I once said to Mrs. Edwards, the architect, and the builder, “The press is going to eat him alive on this.” They laughed and dismissed my concerns. The guy who once drove a beat-up Buick for appearances’ sake told me it was impossible for him to cut back on the house because his wife was sick with cancer and it was her dream.

As the employee who never said no to the senator and Mrs. Edwards, I simply accepted extra assignments related to the new house. One of the first required me to drive a rented truck to Washington, D.C., where I struggled to back it down the narrow alleyway behind their house. The entire Washington campaign staff had come on Mrs. Edwards’s order to load stuff she couldn’t trust to a moving company. I drove back the same day, and after finishing in the early hours of the morning, instead of thanks, I received a grilling about buying beer and pizza for the volunteers who met me to unload.

In time I would realize that my relationship with the Edwardses had grown so close, so familiar, that they felt comfortable asking me to do anything they might imagine, and without expressing much gratitude. During the construction of the mansion, I became Mrs. Edwards’s assistant and informal project manager in charge of chasing down the architect, harassing contractors, and keeping track of appliances, flooring, and other essentials. I helped pick out and purchase most of the furnishings and devoted days to pushing stuff around until it was all positioned perfectly.

Fortunately, when you are working for a presidential candidate, you don’t have to call a 1-800 number to get service. Instead, you call the CEO of the phone company or electric utility and get immediate attention. This power was especially helpful as I worked through to-do lists written by Mrs. Edwards for me and other PAC employees. These were many pages long and required us to set up everything from the room designed for the sole purpose of wrapping Christmas presents to outfitting a project area with arts-and-crafts supplies.

A few problems were beyond even the Edwardses’ power and influence. When the fellow who lived across the street from the Edwardses put up a
RUDY GIULIANI FOR PRESIDENT
sign, I even posed as a real-estate speculator to see if his land was available. (Elizabeth was also bothered by the “slummy” buildings and auto repair shop the owner, Monty Johnson, kept on the land.) Monty’s asking price—more than $1 million—was so high, she decided she would just put up with the irritation of seeing Rudy’s name every time she left the house. She often joked about burning down an abandoned house that was on the property.

I, meanwhile, resented having to deal with her neighbor and all the other extra work related to the house, especially the more menial labor. However, I didn’t say anything because these assignments all seemed to flow out of a relationship that was far more complex and personal than the usual employee-employer arrangement. I believed I would work for the Edwardses for many years to come, and to make my commute easier, I began pushing for us to move closer to their house. Cheri resisted when I suggested building our own new place but eventually agreed. I felt confident taking on the expense because I was making a very good salary, which I expected would grow whether the senator was elected president or not. We bought some land and we hired the same architect and builder that the Edwardses had and began a misadventure similar to the plot of the 1986 movie
The Money Pit.

Of course, as this all happened I couldn’t see that I had allowed myself to be trapped in the Edwardses’ orbit. Cheri worried about how entangled
my life (and hers) had become with theirs, and though she tried to be supportive, it was a source of conflict in our marriage. However, when she tried to talk to me all I heard was that she objected to the amount of time I put into my job, time that could have been spent with my family. I didn’t understand her other major point, which was that I had come to identify too closely with the Edwardses at the expense of my own priorities and hopes. After so many years, I no longer saw them clearly. In fact, I was willing to imagine they had positive qualities they didn’t actually possess and overlook their flaws and mistakes, because I needed them to succeed.