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’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 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 oversize 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 st
rong 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.
W
ith 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 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.
F
or 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, saying, “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.”
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