The Politician (7 page)

As flaws go, Edwards’s fear of looking stupid and his ambivalence about his past were small. He presented himself as someone who understood the strain people felt as they lived paycheck to paycheck and said he found it easy to imagine what the flood victims experienced. He often said to me, “There but for the grace of God.” I admired him for putting his arms around people and reassuring them. The Edwards staff worked overtime to help the victims of the disaster, and he returned to the area several times to check on the progress of the cleanup.

These inspections became part of an ambitious project—you might call it “The Hundred-County Campaign”—that I proposed to him a few months after joining the staff in Raleigh. The project, which called for the senator to visit every county in the state no matter how small and isolated, grew out of the basic notion that if he was going to accomplish anything in Washington, he would need the voters’ support, especially in the next election. And while incumbency is usually an advantage, in the past thirty-five years no one in his seat had ever served more than one term. One of these senators, John East, had committed suicide. Another, Terry Sanford, was ousted when a close friend turned on him and ran for the same office. The job seemed jinxed.

I presented the idea of the hundred-county campaign with a written proposal that included a color-coded map showing where the senator had already spent time and where he had never shaken a single hand. I argued that with a deliberate effort he could get to all these places, where many people didn’t even know who he was, and raise his political profile while doing some official business. Mrs. Edwards absolutely loved the proposal, and since she was the senator’s closest adviser, it got the green light. The project would consume much of my time and put the senator and me in a
car together for lots of long road trips. My job involved finding people and places to visit—we stressed education, medical care, the military, and law enforcement to beef up his standing on these issues—and all the logistics of getting him around. I poured days into the task of making sure everything went smoothly. In those days before people had global position systems in their cars, this preparation included actually driving the entire route, timing out the distances, and noting the directions down to a tenth of a mile on the backs of business cards. Sometimes I ran so short on time that I would have to make these test runs in the middle of the night on dark, windy, unlit country roads. I would often get lost, be forced to backtrack, and then find myself driving like one of the Dukes of Hazzard so I might get home in time to get a few hours of sleep.

The next day, I would have my Suburban all prepped with maps, cell phones, newspapers, briefing folders, Diet Cokes, water, and food, and we would attack the schedule like an army on the move. At each stop I’d reach into the backseat and grab a plastic plaque with the United States Senate seal and a roll of Velcro tape and make sure the plaque was fixed to the podium where he would speak. I tried to stage the events to capitalize on his trial lawyer’s skills. This meant keeping his formal remarks short, leaving plenty of time for questions and answers, and surrounding him with people. But while I followed a set routine, the senator would often deviate in a way that would charm the crowd and let him connect with people in a more direct and emotional way. A classic case in point occurred at a school in rural Greene County, where the staff had begun to turn around a long record of poor performance. They had done this with a new program that involved building discipline and pride and used many unconventional techniques, especially songs, to help students learn.

As he often did, Edwards began his improvising by suggesting that the event be expanded. Feigning irritation with me, he said, “Andrew, we shouldn’t be seeing just a few folks and leave everyone else out. Can’t we bring everyone into someplace like the auditorium and get ’em all involved?” The principal of the school, eager to please the senator, loved his
suggestion and announced that everyone should come to the cafeteria for a special assembly. You could feel the excitement ripple through the building as kids filed into the hallways. But I also noticed that these were the quietest, best-behaved children I had ever seen. No one ran. No one shouted. And they took their seats in the cafeteria without any ruckus at all. Walking with one of the teachers, I noticed there were no locks on the lockers and no graffiti on the walls. “We don’t need locks—these kids learn trust,” he told me. “And they learn pride. There is no graffiti.”

When everyone was gathered together, the principal gave the kids a chance to show the senator what they knew. One small girl got up from her seat, and a hush fell over the room. Then she started to sing:

Two, three, five, seven, and eleven,

Thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, too,

Twenty-three and twenty-nine.

It’s so fine,

Only two factors make a number prime.

When the little girl finished this first verse, every kid in the room joined her for the rest of the song, singing out prime numbers past one thousand. The performance took eight or nine minutes, but it was a breathtaking and inspiring thing to hear. These kids had a fraction of the resources of similarly sized schools and a hundred times the spirit. At the end, Edwards moved into the crowd and knelt to give the girl who had started the song a big hug. Whatever he might have said during a speech or question-and-answer session could never have the power of that gesture. Most important, it was moments like this (and there were many of them) that made me feel that my assessment of him as a leader was correct.

As we left the school, our hosts followed us to the car and waved goodbye. If anyone on the school staff had started the day with doubts about the senator, my bet is that they were resolved by the time he left. The same could be said for students who would go home and tell their parents about
the assembly or cast their own votes in future elections. We were also happy to note that we had visited yet another county on the list. As we drove away in the Suburban, I said something like “Well, that’s another county,” and the senator responded by high-fiving me and saying, “Check!” with a wave of his arm, mimicking the gesture one would make to draw a huge checkmark on a blackboard.

On the day we visited Green County, we were close enough to home to sleep at our own houses. However, many of these expeditions were two-or three-day affairs, and we’d find ourselves spending nights at hotels and having three meals a day together. The first hotel I ever booked for us turned out to be a disaster. Located near Camp LeJeune, the Onslow Inn was very affordable and in the right spot. Unfortunately, every room reeked of mold and mildew. We stayed but the senator was miserable and he complained loudly.

In the days we spent touring the state, we talked about family, politics, our personal histories, marriage—like me, he said he loved his wife and was completely faithful—and everything else you can imagine. The subject of the senator’s son Wade came up often, and he frequently asked me to drive by the cemetery so he could visit his grave, which was marked by a ten-foot-tall marble statue of an angel emerging from the stone, with what appears to be Wade’s face cradled in her arms.

If we had company in the car, like a national reporter, the senator often discussed cases he had worked on as a lawyer, and whenever we passed a courthouse, he became nostalgic about performing in front of juries and judges and the thrill of winning a big victory for a deserving client. (He always gave some credit to Elizabeth for these victories, because she always studied his cases, offered advice, and even helped him with his closing arguments.) He would start to tell a story to a reporter, then stop and say, “Oh, have I told you this one, Andrew?” I would shake my head no. Then I would smile to myself and settle in to hear about another of his great legal conquests, for the twentieth time.

One of his favorite stories from his practice was about a case he tried in
a small town close to Robbins. It was the first time his mother came to watch him work, and she was bursting with pride. Near the end of the trial, she ran into the jury foreman at the grocery store. She had known the man for years, and he told her, “We just think the world of your son.” Even I knew this was probably grounds for a mistrial, but the story ends with a victory for Edwards.

At other times, we talked about University of North Carolina basketball (college ball is a religion in the state), and we planned routes for our daily jogs. Edwards was thoroughly addicted to running and would get cranky on the days he couldn’t have an hour or more to change clothes, cover a few miles, shower, and cool down. I would join him, and as we pounded down city streets or dug our way across the sand at a beach, we would talk. Invariably, he’d say something about how much he preferred to be home in North Carolina and how disappointed he was by Washington and the life of a United States senator.

You’re forgiven if you can’t muster empathy for someone who complains about holding a prestigious elected office that brings him into the circles of power and requires him to be praised and honored wherever he goes. (Cue the world’s tiniest violin.) The life of a senator is not digging ditches. But if you do it well, it can consume your every waking hour, and the travel back and forth to your home state can become exhausting. Senators spend an inordinate amount of time fending off lobbyists and begging for political contributions, which most find to be degrading. Finally, as a freshman, a senator has hardly any power. In his first years, Edwards was permitted to take up one real issue, a proposed “patients’ bill of rights,” and he got lucky when his colleagues allowed him to put his name on the bill beside that of John McCain, who really did believe in working across party lines to get things done.

The legislation Edwards and McCain proposed would have given Americans more say in their own medical care, making it easier for them to access services and giving them more power in dealing with health insurance companies. In the long run, the idea would be adopted by both the House
and the Senate, but it was eventually vetoed by President Bush. In the short term, it gave Senator Edwards a very popular issue to talk about, and it brought him more attention from the national media than anyone else in his Senate class. Edwards couldn’t have risen so fast without some help, and as time passed I would learn what a powerful friend and mentor he had in Senator Ted Kennedy, who was coming to believe himself that Edwards might be a future president. In a party that was short on charisma, the old war horse saw promise in John Edwards and was going to do whatever he could to promote him.

More help would come from Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who saw great potential in Edwards and came to Raleigh in the fall of 1999 to attend a fund-raiser. Because I had to pick him up at the airport, I asked Cheri to take care of things at the Angus Barn steak house, where the event would be held, and she did. Kerrey, who insisted on carrying his own bag when I met him, couldn’t have been nicer. He had just gotten a BlackBerry phone and was beguiled by its capabilities. “Look at this,” he said, showing me the screen. “I just texted my whole staff.”

Although he was a war hero who had run for president himself, Kerrey was unpretentious and undemanding. He drew a good crowd to the donors’ cocktail party, where he made my boss sound as though he were already a key player in the United States Senate. Afterward, when Edwards asked him to share a dinner in the restaurant, he turned to me and said, “Andrew, why don’t you and Cheri join us?”

For a local staffer with just a few months on the job, the invitation was like being asked to move up to the grown-ups’ table at Thanksgiving. And unfortunately, I discovered what a lot of young people learn when they join the adults: It’s not as great as you expect it will be. On this night, the Edwardses tried a little too hard to impress their guest, which was embarrassing, and then the senator put his foot in his mouth when he asked Cheri about her job as a nurse. Somehow he managed to get onto the subject of her salary and then insulted her by blurting out, “Jesus, how the heek do you survive on horrible pay like that?”

The comment bothered me on several levels, including the way it contradicted everything I had heard the senator say about how he respected working people. Cheri left the restaurant more than a little steamed. She actually made a very good living, just not relative to someone who made $10 million a year. Cheri never forgot it. I decided it reflected a flaw in a man who otherwise possessed a great many positive qualities, which balanced it out.

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.

S
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.)