Game Change

by John Heilemann

  Edwards’s advisers had warned John about the perils of the new house from the first time they saw the blueprints. It was a two-building complex totaling 28,200 square feet, with an indoor basketball court, swimming pool, and squash court, two theatrical stages, and a room designated “John’s Lounge.” Staring at the designs, Baldick said, “Is there any foliage to cover the house?” At which Hickman cracked, “Are you kidding? They clear-cut a whole forest to build it!”

  But the house was a cancer thing, a gift to Elizabeth at the time when the disease first appeared. When John’s advisers pointed out that such a gaudy manse might be a political liability for an aspiring neo-populist, he said, “It’s Elizabeth’s project” and “I can’t deny her this.” When the place was ridiculed in the media—by Jay Leno, among many others—Elizabeth responded that her new home was “not grand” but “functional.”

  The hedge fund was John’s deal to be a “senior adviser” to Fortress Investment Group, in New York, from which he reaped a minor fortune. Edwards signed on in October 2005 without even telling his team he was doing it. He justified it by saying he needed the money. (The Edwardses burned through cash at an astounding rate, on everything from real estate to Internet shopping, to which Elizabeth was apparently addicted, filling their house with unopened boxes containing items she’d bought online.)

  By December 2006, John had left Fortress. But the damage was done—especially since he kept some of his money in the fund, which was implicated in a welter of foreclosures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and a ton of subprime lending, two damning facts that became subjects of considerable media interest in 2007.

  Edwards already had an image problem when it came to his hair, due to a bootleg YouTube video, set to a sound track of “I Feel Pretty,” that caught him fussing with his glossy coif before a TV interview. But now there was a story that he’d received two $400 cuts from a posh Beverly Hills stylist who later revealed that he’d once charged Edwards $1,250 for a session back in 2004.

  The instinct of Team Edwards was to make a joke of John’s follicular follies, but Elizabeth had other ideas. The story drove her to distraction—to the point where, over the summer, she shot a homemade response video in the backyard of their beach house, with her and John boasting about how little they paid for her engagement ring.

  She sent the staff the video and told them to post it on the campaign’s website. Cooler heads eventually prevailed.

  The Edwards campaign was certain that the Clintonites were driving the three Hs, planting the stories in the press at the national level and in the four early states. And it was true: frustrated by the media’s indifference to its attempts to stoke negative coverage of Obama, the Clinton operation was pushing the hedge fund and the haircuts. (In fact, the Obamans were also hawking the stylist story.)

  The Edwardses saw the effort as a sign of respect, an indication that Hillary was feeling threatened by John. Their advisers tried to spin journalists that the three Hs were nothing more than a preoccupation of the media, that voters didn’t give a damn. But, in fact, the campaign’s research suggested otherwise, especially regarding the house. Fair or not, the impact on Edwards’s image was undeniable. The three Hs reinforced doubts about his substantiveness, and, more damaging, his authenticity.

  Problematic as all that was, however, it paled beside another threat that returned as the summer turned to fall. Suddenly, it appeared that a fourth H might be added to the list—an H that could have stood for “honey” or for “hussy,” but either way stood for “Hunter.”

  ROGER ALTMAN PICKED UP the phone in his thirty-eighth-floor office on the East Side of New York and found John Edwards on the line. Altman, the former deputy treasury secretary who was then secretly planning Hillary Clinton’s White House transition, was chairman of the investment group Evercore Partners. Since 1999, Evercore had owned a stake in American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer—and it was that connection that prompted an agitated Edwards to call Altman one day in the first week of October.

  There’s a story about to come out in the Enquirer, Edwards said, which is going to allege that I had an affair with a woman who used to travel with my campaign. The story is untrue and outrageous, he insisted. It’s going to be extremely hurtful to my family. Could you please do something to stop it?

  Altman barely knew Edwards, but could tell he was upset. “I haven’t heard a word about this,” Altman said. “I’ll look into it, but there’s really nothing I can do.”

  He had some sympathy for Edwards. The Enquirer had been a thorn in Altman’s side for years, especially when it published embarrassing pieces on his powerful friends. So he called David Pecker, the Enquirer’s publisher, and asked him about the story. We have evidence, Pecker told him. “This thing could have a big impact on this guy, so let’s be triply sure,” Altman said. Pecker replied that he already was.

  A little later, Altman’s phone buzzed again. This time it was Elizabeth, in tears.

  You must do something about this, she begged. It’s cruel, it’s unfair, and it’s untrue. This is way too much for me. I can’t take it. It’s killing our family. It’s killing me.

  Altman was torn up by Elizabeth’s distress. He knew, of course, that she was ill. He considered her the victim in this sordid episode. But Altman’s hands were tied. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Edwards,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  The Enquirer story didn’t come completely out of left field for the Edwardsphere. Back in April and May, there had been whispers that Hunter had reappeared, with rumored sightings of her at hotels where Edwards was staying. (Once, an advance staffer sent up to his boss’s room to retrieve something had come upon a woman matching Hunter’s description.) Then, over the summer, a reporter from the Huffington Post began digging into the sudden disappearance of the webisodes from the One America site. The HuffPo story, published in September, was mild—full of insinuations but no direct allegations.

  There was little that was elliptical about the Enquirer story that hit the streets on October 10, however. “Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught in a shocking mistress scandal that could wreck his campaign” was the lead, and the article went on to cite a “bombshell email message” in which the other woman “confesses to a friend she’s ‘in love with John,’ but it’s ‘difficult because he is married and has kids.’”

  The next morning, John and Elizabeth were scheduled to fly out of Raleigh to separate destinations—he to South Carolina, she to Iowa. But when the traveling staff arrived at their home, they found Elizabeth out of sorts, disconsolate, still in her bathrobe. She had drafted a blog post that she wanted to have published, defending her husband from the accusations against him. This kind of tawdriness was something the Clintons would be involved in, she wrote, but not the Edwardses.

  The staff persuaded Elizabeth that posting such an item would do more harm than good. But she was livid about what she saw as the campaign’s feeble response to the story. After pulling herself together, she and John set off for the private aviation terminal at the airport—but partway there, their car pulled over, and John got out and jumped into the staff car, saying in an exasperated tone, “I can’t ride with her.”

  At the terminal, the couple fought in the passenger waiting area. They fought outside in the private parking lot. Elizabeth was sobbing, out of control, incoherent. As their aides tried to look away, she tore off her blouse, exposing herself. “Look at me!” she wailed at John and then staggered, nearly falling to the ground.

  John tried to bring down the temperature, remaining calm and impassive, but his apparent standoffishness only seemed to infuriate and disorient Elizabeth more. Finally, after talking to her doctor on the phone, Edwards sent his wife home and flew off to South Carolina. There, outside a barbecue joint in Summerton, Edwards was asked by a reporter about the Enquirer story; he offered a paean to Elizabeth—“I’ve been in love with the same woman for thirty-plus years, and as anybody who’s been arou
nd us knows, she’s an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I have ever known”—coupled with the blanket claim that “the story’s just false” but no denial of the specific allegations it contained.

  Out of view, the Edwards campaign was in damage-control mode, going into overdrive to dissuade the mainstream media from picking up the story, denouncing it as tabloid trash. Their efforts at containing the fallout were remarkably successful. The Enquirers expose gained zero traction in the traditional press and almost none in the blogosphere. Edwards’s relief was palpable, as was his gratitude to the small coterie of aides who had corralled the story. “It’s John,” he began in a voice mail to one of them. “I just wanted to call and thank you for everything you’ve done in the past few days. It hasn’t been easy, I know that, and I want you to know how grateful I am for everything you’ve done. We’ll get through this together. Don’t worry, man.”

  The next voice mail in the staffer’s queue was from Elizabeth, who vented her fury that the story had appeared in any form, suspicious that the very aides who had kept the matter from mushrooming had somehow enabled the affair.

  “You’re to have nothing more to do with this!” Elizabeth hissed. “Nothing more! You stay away from our family! You are poison! You’re dead to us!”

  FOR JOHN EDWARDS, the narrow escape should have been hair-raising, his wife’s humiliation chastening. But instead of being tossed into turmoil or depression, Edwards seemed as resolved and optimistic as ever about his prospects. To his way of thinking, he was as plausible a nominee in October 2007 as he had been ten months earlier—and the outside world agreed.

  He had much less money than Clinton or Obama, that was true. But he had enough to hold his own in Iowa, and that was all he needed. He was consistently rated in the top tier alongside Clinton and Obama, the rest of the field dismissed as a jumble of interchangeable long shots. The press corps credited his Iowa-only strategy and saw him as having a decent chance there. Obama’s poor standing in the national polls seemed to confirm Edwards’s long-held view that the upstart was a passing fad.

  How to get past Hillary was the question. At the urging of Trippi, Edwards had recently adopted a harsher tone with the front-runner, attacking her for being too close to corporate power and tainted by the special-interest corruption in Washington. At a debate in Chicago sponsored by the AFL-CIO, Edwards fired a populist broadside at a recent appearance of Clinton on the cover of a national publication—with her smiling face above the headline “Business Loves Hillary!”

  “I want everyone here to hear my voice on this,” Edwards declared. “The one thing you can count on is you will never see a picture of me on the front of Fortune magazine saying, ‘I am the candidate that big corporate America is betting on.’ That will never happen. That’s one thing you can take to the bank.”

  To Edwards’s eye, his punches seemed to be landing on the mark. When he ran into Clinton backstage at the event, her hostility was evident—which delighted him. “She won’t look at me,” Edwards told his aides triumphantly. “I’m getting under her skin.”

  But Edwards knew that even if he beat Clinton in Iowa, she would be a resilient foe. He began to ponder the possibility of a novel, and radical, anti-Hillary strategy: teaming up with Obama to run on a joint ticket against Clinton after the caucuses. He raised the idea with Hickman early that fall.

  “Who’s going to be number one and number two?” the pollster asked. Edwards replied, “He would be my running mate.”

  The idea was far out, certainly, but no less odd than pretty much everything about Edwards’s situation as he hurtled into the Iowa homestretch. Rielle Hunter was hanging over his head. His wife was apparently on the verge of a breakdown. But Edwards was undaunted. All he needed was a little help. If he could just get Obama to lend him a hand, everything in the end might, just might, turn out golden.

  Chapter Eight

  The Turning Point

  THEY TOOK THE STAGE in the auditorium at Drexel University just before 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 30: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Obama, Richardson, and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. The candidates in various combinations had appeared at more than a dozen previous debates or forums. Their interchanges had been informative (on occasion), entertaining (less often), and almost entirely free of impact on the basic contours of the race. Clinton was the comfortable front-runner, Edwards and Obama her obtrusive challengers, and the rest irrelevant also-rans.

  But the debate at Drexel would be different. Looking back on it later, the candidates and their advisers would all agree: what happened that night in Philadelphia changed everything.

  Dominating debate after debate had bred a certain complacency in Clinton—and a distinct disdain for Obama. After many of them, Hillary would privately lambaste Obama for comparing his meager record to hers and Dodd’s and Biden’s. (Every now and then onstage, the three of them would share furtive eye-rolls over Obama’s self-regard.) “What an asshole,” Clinton, employing her favorite profanity, grumbled to her aides. “Am I the only one who sees the arrogance? Does that not bother people?”

  Hillary knew that Obama intended to play offense at Drexel. The Sunday before the debate, The New York Times had run a front-page story based on the table-setting interview that Obama and his team had planned weeks earlier. In it, Obama claimed Clinton was being less than truthful about her positions. That she was acting like a Republican on foreign policy. That she was too divisive to win a general election or unify the country. “We have to make these distinctions clearer,” he said. “And I will not shy away from doing that.”

  The Obama plan worked. The initial question of the debate was directed at him by moderator Brian Williams; the topic was the Times story. But Obama bobbled the ball, backing away from his charges. “I think some of this stuff gets overhyped,” he said.

  In the opening segment of the debate, Edwards’s attacks on Clinton were repeated and razor-sharp, while Obama reverted fully into his passive, prolix, professorial mode. Edwards wondered what the hell was wrong with him. Puncturing Clinton was their mutual objective, with time running out, but only Edwards was wielding the blade. During the first intermission, he pulled Obama aside and stared him in the eyes. “Barack, you need to focus!” Edwards implored. “Focus! Focus! Focus!”

  The next segment opened with Hillary answering a question about her electability and appropriating a phrase of Obama’s about the need to “turn the page” (she applied it to Bush and Cheney). Obama thought, She stole my line! And was mocking him in the process! That did it. He finally pounced.

  “I’m glad that Hillary took the phrase ‘turn the page,’” he said sarcastically. “It’s a good one.” After smacking her for refusing to release records of her time as First Lady held by the National Archives, he went on: “Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is that’s a fight they’re very comfortable having. It is the fight that we’ve been through since the nineties. And part of the job of the next president is to break the gridlock and get Democrats and independents and Republicans to start working together to solve these big problems, like health care or climate change or energy. And what we don’t need is another eight years of bickering.”

  What ensued then was one of the more extraordinary group assaults in the history of presidential debates. It was seven on one—five candidates (Kucinich refrained) and two moderators pounding on Clinton mercilessly.

  With just eight minutes left on the clock, Clinton had withstood the fusillade—at least she was still standing. Then, the other moderator, Tim Russert, asked her if she supported the idea of giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, as New York’s Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer had proposed.

  Clinton ducked Russert’s query, saying she sympathized with Spitzer, then pivoted to stress the need for comprehensive immigration reform. But when Dodd declared his opposition to the plan, Clinton jumped back in: “I did not say that it shou
ld be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it.”

  “Wait a minute!” interjected Dodd. The senator from Connecticut considered Hillary a friend; all year long he had held back from going after her, against the advice of many of his advisers, who were virulently anti-Clinton. But this rigmarole that she was spouting struck him as absurd. “You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it.”

  “No, I didn’t, Chris,” Clinton replied, and started squabbling with Dodd. Voices escalated. Eyebrows arched. The back-and-forth got heated. Finally, Russert stepped in and asked Clinton to clarify her position: Did she support Spitzer’s plan or not?

  “You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha,” Clinton said, gesticulating with both hands. “What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem. We have failed and George Bush has failed. Do I think this is the right thing for any governor to do? No. But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this? . . . He’s making an honest effort to do it.”

  Watching the exchange on TV in the staff room, Clinton’s aides felt as if they were witnessing a car crash in slow motion. Grunwald pleaded with Hillary’s pixelated image on the screen as if she were trying to advise her candidate telepathically. Okay, that’s enough, she cried. No! No! No! Stop!

  But it was too late. Williams tried to segue to a new topic, but Edwards wouldn’t let go. “Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes,” he noted, “and I think this is a real issue for the country.” Obama nodded vigorously and Williams asked him why. “I was confused on Senator Clinton’s answer,” Obama said with a smirk. “I can’t tell whether she was for it or against it.”