Game Change

by John Heilemann

  We will do this, Obama said, but he was adamant that certain ethical boundaries not be breached. A few months earlier, his campaign’s opposition research department had prepared a memo linking Clinton’s campaign contributions from Indian Americans to her husband’s India-related investments and speaking fees. The headline on the document referred to her as “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab).” When the memo came out, Obama was angrier at his team than he’d been at any time during the campaign.

  Now he reemphasized that such behavior was verboten. I told everybody at the start of this, he said, that I would not change who I am in this campaign. That I will come out the other side the same person I was on the way in. Don’t any of you do anything that’s going to embarrass me or make people think that I’ve changed who I am in order to win. If I ever catch anyone digging into the Clintons’ personal lives, you will be fired. But I’m perfectly happy having a debate with her; I need to have a debate with her about who can actually change Washington, and that’s the debate we should have.

  The plan was now set. The following month, Obama would be appearing with all the other candidates at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines. That would be the perfect place to unfurl the new strategy in earnest. There was precedent for the event providing a stage for a campaign relaunch. Gore and Kerry had come into the J-J on the ropes in Iowa and turned in revivifying performances. The campaign would pull out all the stops to turn the event into a display of its organizing muscle. And Obama would devote the time required to crafting a knockout address—an idea that instantly appealed to him. He thought of himself as a big-game player, the kind of guy who rose to the occasion. He liked the pressure, he loved the spotlight, he reveled in the intensity of the moment. If the solution to a political problem was a speech, hoo boy, he was good to go.

  But the J-J was in November, more than a month away, too long to let the new approach to the Clintons sit dormant. Obama had been agitating to spend some more time with national reporters—and this seemed the moment to strike. He would accept a long-standing interview request from The New York Times as a way of setting up the next debate in Philadelphia at the end of October. Obama’s communications wizards had determined that the media narrative that emerged from each debate was dictated by the first two questions and answers. And the easiest way to influence those questions in Philly was to have Obama take a few pokes at Hillary in the Times a day or two beforehand; such catnip would be impossible for the moderators to resist.

  As Obama rose to leave the meeting, he brimmed with confidence again. “We’re going to win this,” he said brightly. All year long, he had been dancing around Clinton. Now he was ready to engage. He would bring many hidden advantages to this fight, not least the receptivity of the press to an anti-Clinton message. But he would also have one thing on his side that was plain for everyone to see: an ally of convenience whose determination to sink Hillary was every bit as great as, and even more rabid than, his own.

  Chapter Seven

  “They Looooove Me!”

  JOHN EDWARDS NEVER EXPECTED to be the third wheel in the 2008 campaign. The race was going to be Hillary versus him. That was how he saw it from the start. She would be the front-runner, of course; he knew that. He wasn’t naive. But as sure as night follows day, there would be an alternative, an anti-Hillary, and he would be it. And once he had her one-on-one, he was certain that he could take her. He thought she (and her husband) represented the arrogance wrought by power. He believed she lacked the common touch, had no feel for regular people, working people—which, needless to say, he possessed in abundance. He mocked Hillary in meetings with his advisers: “There’s Main Street’s candidate!” Obama he didn’t give all that much thought to. At least, not at the start.

  Edwards came off the blocks much earlier than the other two, and his decision to run was free of the ambivalence they felt—the weighing of pros and cons, the doubts, the dark nights of the soul. Before the dust had settled on 2004, he was planning for 2008. On the day that Edwards and John Kerry conceded defeat to Bush and Dick Cheney, he discovered that his wife, Elizabeth, had breast cancer; a few days after that, he was on the phone with his pollster and close friend Harrison Hickman, gaming out the race four years hence, talking about tailoring his message to take on Clinton from the left. In early December, Edwards called his political team over to his place in Georgetown—the six-bedroom row house on P Street that he and Elizabeth had bought two years earlier for $3.8 million—to discuss how to spend the next couple of years in the optimal fashion.

  Having given up his Senate seat to run for president, Edwards was unemployed. He needed to beef up his foreign-policy credentials, so he would make some trips abroad. He would court labor, schmooze donors, and nurture his connection to Iowa, where he had finished a surprising second in the 2004 caucuses. He also said he wanted to set up some kind of antipoverty nonprofit. The plight of the poor wasn’t a slam-dunk political winner, but Edwards declared that it was something he cared about, and his advisers knew it was no bad thing for a candidate to embrace what moved him. They also knew it would rhyme with the neo-populist stance he would strike in his challenge to Clinton.

  The pathway was clear to Edwards: beat Clinton in Iowa, survive New Hampshire, then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he carried in 2004. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, “I am going to be the next president of the United States.” Some of them dismissed his outsize confidence as pro forma, but others took it as a sign of something deeper—a burgeoning megalomania.

  He was not the same guy who’d come out of nowhere and beaten the incumbent Republican, Lauch Faircloth, to become the junior senator from North Carolina in 1998. Back then, everyone who encountered him was struck by how down-to-earth he seemed. He had fewer airs about him than most other wealthy trial lawyers, let alone most senators. He was the son of a textile mill worker, the first in his family to attend college, optimistic, cheerful, eager, and idealistic. The first time he met Hickman, the pollster asked Edwards, as he did every candidate whom he was considering working for, what one word his intimates would use to describe him. Most politicians said impatient, aggressive, or ambitious. Stretching the word with his southern drawl, Edwards said, “Niiiiice.” And it was true—disarmingly so.

  Some of his friends started noticing a change after he was nearly chosen by Al Gore to be his running mate in 2000: the sudden interest in superficial stuff to which he’d been oblivious before, from the labels on his clothes to the size of his entourage. But the real transformation occurred during the 2004 race. When Edwards caught fire in late 2003, he started getting a rush from the larger crowds, and lost interest in smaller rooms or individual meetings. “Why am I doing this trip? There’s no big event,” he griped to his schedulers. After emerging as Kerry’s main challenger, he waged the most open, relentless campaign to get on the ticket of any potential VP in the modern era. That success swelled his head, and his experience during the general election seemed to inflate it to the point of bursting. He reveled in being inside the bubble: the Secret Service, the chartered jet, the press pack following him around, the swarm of factotums catering to his every whim. And the crowds! The ovations! The adoration! He ate it up. In the old days, when his aides asked how a rally had gone, he would roll his eyes and self-mockingly say, “Oh, they love me.” Now he would bound down from the stage beaming and exclaim, without the slightest shred of irony, “They looooove me!”

  The loss on Election Day and Elizabeth’s diagnosis set him back on his heels. For a few months, he was closer to his old self again, but soon enough, what one of his aides called “the ego monster” returned. Once, Edwards had been warm and considerate with his staffers; now he was disdainful, ignoring them, dismissing their ideas, demanding that they perform the most menial of tasks on his behalf. He made his schedulers find out what movies were available on different flights so he could decide which ones to take. He would fly only first class or on private planes he cadged from do
nors. At the same time, he started blowing off his most generous contributors, failing to return their phone calls and refusing to see them.

  As Edwards’s mistreatment of his staff and supporters got worse through 2005, some of the people closest to him interceded, trying to set him straight. “You can’t talk to people that way,” Hickman scolded him after one off-putting display. You didn’t get any smarter just because you were on the national ticket, he went on. People are attracted to the nice John Edwards, and for a lot of them, you’re not that John Edwards anymore.

  Edwards bridled at the criticism, disputing the idea that solicitousness was required to win. “Kerry didn’t do any of that and he got nominated,” Edwards observed. Other times, he reacted with anger. “I don’t know where that’s coming from,” he said to Hickman at one point. “You have to consider the source,” Edwards rationalized. “A lot of these people are hangers-on.”

  One of the lessons that John and Elizabeth took away from 2004 was that they had relied too much on aides, advisers, and consultants. The political people hadn’t helped Edwards; they’d hurt him, gotten in his way. If they’d just let John be John, he might have been president. Edwards had a phrase he used all the time to describe the problem: “the valley of staff.” In his next bid for the White House, he and Elizabeth agreed, they would circumvent the handlers, while John forged his own path. It wouldn’t be a campaign at all in any conventional sense, they said. Instead, it would be—he would be—a “cause.”

  The denizens of the valley of staff were astonished by the narcissism that seemed to have infused their candidate. Distraught and dispirited, too. But for a long time, they continued slaving in the service of the illusion at the core of Edwards’s political appeal: that he remained the same humble, sunny, aw-shucks, son of a mill worker he’d always been. The cognitive dissonance was enormous, sure, but they were used to that. Because for years they’d been living with an even bigger lie—the lie of Saint Elizabeth.

  EVEN BEFORE THE CANCER, she was among her husband’s greatest political assets. In one of the focus groups conducted by Hickman in Edwards’s Senate race, voters trashed him as a pretty-boy shyster—until they saw pictures of Elizabeth, four years his senior. “I like that he’s got a fat wife,” one woman said. “I thought he’d be married to a Barbie or a cheerleader.” The Edwardses’ eldest son, Wade, had been killed in a car crash in 1996; for a long time, Elizabeth went to his grave site every day and read softly to the tombstone. She gave birth to their youngest daughter, Emma Claire, at age forty-nine, and their son Jack at fifty. The combination of her suffering, resilience, and imperfections made her a poignant figure. But it was the illness that elevated Elizabeth to a higher plane, rendering her iconic.

  She learned she might be sick on the Friday before Election Day in 2004. Her chemotherapy treatment started almost immediately. John was at her side throughout it, and everyone remarked on his warmth and attentiveness, and on the closeness of their bond. She confronted her illness with bracing courage and wry humor, emerging quickly as one of the most outspoken and widely admired cancer survivors in history. By July, she was shopping a book proposal on her ordeal, and by October, she’d struck a deal.

  No one in the Edwards political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant, they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman.

  With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. The daughter of a navy pilot, Elizabeth had lived in Japan when she was a girl and considered herself worldly. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a particular book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”

  As far back as the 1998 senatorial campaign, she had been prone to irrational outbursts that perplexed and worried John’s advisers. The first time Hickman witnessed an explosion during that race, he attributed it to the strain of her being pregnant with Emma Claire and her lingering grief over Wade. But a close friend of the Edwardses from law school informed him otherwise. “She’s always been this way,” the friend said—the sharp manner, the cutting comments, the sudden and inexplicable fulminations.

  During the 2004 race, Elizabeth badgered and berated John’s advisers round the clock. She called Nick Baldick, his campaign manager, an idiot. She accused David Axelrod of lying to her and insisted he be stripped of the responsibility for making the campaign’s TV ads. She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team. She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets? I want to talk to persuadable voters!” she snarled at the schedulers.

  Elizabeth’s illness seemed at first to mellow her in the early months of 2005—but not for long. One day, she was on a conference call with the staffers of One America, the political action committee that was being turned into a vehicle for John’s upcoming 2008 campaign. There were forty or fifty people on the call, mostly kids in their twenties being paid next to nothing (and in some cases literally nothing). Elizabeth had been cranky throughout the call, but at the end she asked if her and her husband’s personal health care coverage had been arranged. Not yet, she was told. There are complications; let’s discuss it after the call. Elizabeth was having none of that. She flew into a rage.

  If this isn’t dealt with by tomorrow, everyone’s health care at the PAC will be cut off until it’s fixed, she barked. I don’t care if nobody has health care until John and I do!

  The health care call immediately attained wide infamy in the Edwardses’ political orbit. The people around them marveled at Elizabeth’s callousness—this from a woman whose family had multiple houses and a net worth in the tens of millions. (They marveled as well at the tight-lippedness of their operation, the loyalty to John that kept any of the stories about the other side of Elizabeth from seeing the light of day.) Yet no one called her out on her behavior, least of all her husband. When she demeaned him, he pretended not to notice; when people complained about her behavior, he brushed them off. His default reflex was to mollify her or avoid her. No one doubted that, as her condition improved, the increase in John’s travel had a lot to do with steering clear of his wife.

  THE REGENCY HOTEL on Park Avenue in Manhattan was the preeminent clubhouse outside Washington for Democratic politicians and those who loved—and funded—them. Its restaurant, 540 Park, served the city’s most storied power breakfast, and its bar, The Library, was a prime site of lubrication and transaction between supplicants and benefactors. The Regency was Edwards’s hotel of choice when he was staying in New York.

  One early evening in February 2006, Edwards was hanging out in the bar, having a glass of wine with one of his donors and his young traveling aide, Josh Brumberger, when a woman sitting at a nearby table with some friends recognized him, walked over, and introduced herself. “My friends insist you’re John Edwards,” Rielle Hunter said. “I tell them no way—you’re way too handsome.”

  “No, ma’am. I’m John Edwards,” the candidate replied.

  “No way! I don’t believe you!”

  Brumberger saw this kind of thing all the time. Women were always hitting on his boss. He and Edwards had a well-oiled system in place for dealing with these
situations tactfully and politely.

  “He is John Edwards,” Brumberger interjected, “and I’m sorry, but we’re in the middle of something. Thank you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Hunter said, and retreated to her table.

  From the get-go, Brumberger thought that she was trouble. Everything about her screamed groupie. She looked like a hybrid of Stevie Nicks and Lucinda Williams, in an outfit more suitable for a Grateful Dead concert than an evening at the Regency. A few minutes later, after Edwards departed for a dinner around the corner, Hunter came back over to Brumberger and started quizzing him on his job. “I think I can help you guys,” she said, and handed him her business card. The inscription read, “Being Is Free : Rielle Hunter—Truth Seeker.”

  After Hunter left, Brumberger sat there chuckling, having another glass of wine with one of his colleagues from Team Edwards, who had joined him. A little while later, he looked up through the window and clocked Hunter and one of her friends cornering his boss on his way back from dinner. “Holy shit, that crazy lady just cut him off!” Brumberger yelped and sprinted outside, where he broke up the scene, leading Edwards back into the hotel.