The Politician (15 page)

Although we couldn’t know it at the time, the operation marked the end of the easygoing season that was the summer of 2002. Gracie’s recovery would be slow, as she still struggled to eat and breathe and seemed to catch a dozen colds in the span of three months. Cheri would have to nurse her along and care for Brody, with much less help from me because the senator’s push for the White House had become more intense and he had decided the national headquarters in Raleigh would open on January 1, 2003. The job of setting this up, which included finding space, furnishings, utilities, and more, was added to my ongoing duties as his North Carolina advance man, minder, and occasional proxy. I was so busy during this time—leaving early and coming home late—that a month passed before I realized that Cheri’s brother had moved in with us. Every step was exciting, from my filing the articles of incorporation to the first campaign e-mail.

Campaigns on all levels are stressful, but presidential campaigns, which attract the most competitive players, can be merciless. Most workers receive little or no pay, and most have little connection to the candidate other than seeing him or her on television. You work fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and some people actually bring pillows and blankets and sleep under their desks. The first shift starts at four
A.M.
as the grunts begin searching the Internet for articles about the candidate and creating digests that run to a hundred pages or more. They will spend the whole day gleaning and or ganizing and distributing important items. The office can start to resemble a frat house, and if you don’t have protesters outside, you’re doing something wrong. E-mails and phone messages came in at a rate of ten or twenty at a time. And you have to answer them all, because everything is an emergency and everything has to be done perfectly. During the few hours I slept each night, I could feel the vibrations of my cell phones in my dreams.

During this time, the senator gave a series of speeches that spelled out the positions he would take in his run for the White House. On the economy, he tried to find a place between President Bush on the right and the other Democrats on the left as he called for both steep cuts in spending and an end to tax cuts for the rich. For civil libertarians, he pledged to defend the public’s privacy rights against Bush administration efforts to gather information under the cover of homeland security; and for the hawks, who were numerous in the South, he came down hard on Saddam Hussein, calling his regime in Iraq a threat to U.S. security.

Although I wasn’t part of the group who set his positions, the senator still relied on me for feedback based on my understanding of everyday Democrats who would cast votes in caucuses and primaries. I told him he was on target on the budget, tax, and privacy issues but too close to George Bush when it came to Iraq. As far as I could tell, Saddam had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and the president was rushing toward a war that would cost far more in terms of lives and money than it would be worth in terms of our national security. With these ideas in mind, I took a risk and challenged him.

“Are you sure, Senator, that we need to move so quickly in Iraq?” I asked him. “It doesn’t feel right.”

My question hit a nerve, and he raised his voice with me for the first time, insisting that he had attended intelligence briefings where the administration had presented damning evidence of Saddam’s work on weapons of mass destruction and of the atrocities he had committed against his own people. “Andrew, you haven’t seen what I have seen. Saddam Hussein is a monster.”

No one would argue that the Iraq regime was anything but a brutal dictatorship, but I did ask what purpose would be served by the United States going after this monster when there were many equally monstrous rulers scattered around the globe. The senator held to his position, which he said would probably benefit him politically, because every Democrat who runs for president must prove he is tough on national defense. I didn’t change my
position, either, and he would hear more of the same from Mrs. Edwards, who was more outspoken in her politics and more liberal than her husband and his key advisers.

As I watched them interact, especially when I brought him home from the airport, I could see the Edwardses were able to express strong feelings without getting upset or damaging their personal relationship. She always greeted him with a hug and a smile, and you could see she loved him and respected him. But his candidacy, like his career, was a joint project, and because he respected her intelligence and instincts, he invited her criticisms. She would tell him when he flopped while giving prepared remarks—he was terrible at reading a speech—and she read, reread, and edited every statement he issued, no matter how minor.

Elizabeth did all this work in addition to taking care of Emma Claire and Jack and supporting Cate, who was at Prince ton. Because I saw how hard she was working, I didn’t much mind that Mrs. Edwards called on me for help. The senator said that this assistance with his wife and family was more important than anything because it relieved some of the stress caused by his absence. As the holidays approached, I was spared the chore of taking the Christmas picture, but I got deeply involved in finding and transporting the family’s main Christmas tree (they had more than one) and helping to locate certain important presents for the family.

Cheri and I argued about the time I devoted to the Edwards family, especially when I was busy doing household chores for them. She couldn’t understand why I had to take on responsibility for every practical dilemma that arose in the life of the Edwards family. Time and again I told her it was necessary and would be good for our family in the long run. I apologized and explained: I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. Cheri didn’t buy it, no matter how many times I said it.

Cheri’s point, which I refused to accept, was that I had only so much time and energy and that I was allowing the senator and his wife to take advantage of me. No one could guarantee that John Edwards would ever become president or that I would be part of his team. But that was not an
outcome I would even consider. I felt that John Edwards represented my best shot at real success, and I would be a fool to give him anything less than my full effort. Since I was one of the few who had been with him since his election, I also felt a special connection, a sense of pride in helping this man go from rookie senator to presidential contender.

This all-or-nothing commitment drove me to answer every call and every request with immediate action and to approach every task with the utmost seriousness. Certain that I could do anything and everything at once, I found myself headed for Christmas with Cheri’s family in Illinois with my cell phone, my BlackBerry, and a briefcase full of work. I was going to celebrate the holiday and make sure the Edwards for President office in Raleigh would be up and running on New Year’s Eve, in time for its opening on the first day of 2003. (Since I had negative feelings about the holidays after my father’s affair broke apart my extended family, I was actually kind of glad to have work to keep me occupied.)

The main problem I had with the office setup involved the telephones and so-called T1 high-speed Internet lines. If we were going to run a big national campaign with a major Internet presence, we needed an advanced and reliable communication system. I signed up BellSouth to handle it, but they ran into one problem after another. In Illinois, I commandeered the basement at Cheri’s sister’s house, turning it into an office where I sent out a stream of faxes and made hundreds of calls. While I did this work, everyone upstairs noticed my absence and started to resent that even when I was around, I seemed cranky and distracted. I overheard my skeptical mother-in-law asking what the heck I was doing down in the basement all day.

The holiday debacle in Illinois reached its lowest point as a snowstorm kicked up on Christmas Eve. I had to wait until the last minute to sign various contracts to keep them from becoming public knowledge—it was critical not to steal the thunder of the senator’s announcement day. Because of this, I had to overnight signed documents for delivery on the day after Christmas. I wrote out what was needed and went out into the storm to find a FedEx office that was open, would accept a package, and would guarantee
delivery on the morning of December 26. I made it with minutes to spare and considered the achievement a bit of a victory. Cheri and her family, on the other hand, watched me race around, ignoring the kids, the company, and the celebration they were enjoying, and concluded that my priorities were out of whack.

I couldn’t see their point, and on the long drive home to North Carolina, I continued to defend myself. A presidential campaign is a once-ina-lifetime opportunity, I said. I had a duty to the senator that I had to fulfill. I made the same excuses on New Year’s Eve as I left the house to put the finishing touches on the office. BellSouth had finally completed its work on the phone and T1 lines, establishing consistent and reliable service at our site. The problem was, they wouldn’t run the lines inside the office to serve the phones and computers on the many desks where campaign workers would sit. With no volunteers available on New Year’s Eve, that task fell to me. I worked into the night, crawling on the floor to run wires and tape them down where necessary to prevent anyone from tripping the next day. I didn’t get home until after midnight. It was bad enough that I missed seeing the New Year in with my wife, but I also missed a party that had taken place at my own house. By the time I got there, everyone was gone, along with the party spirit. Of course, I couldn’t spend a lot of time making apologies to Cheri. I had to be up early the next morning to meet the senator and the press at his house. It was going to be a big day.

T
he New York Times
gets everything first. This happens because even in the Internet age, the
Times
stills sets the media agenda, especially where TV network news operations are concerned. This is why it’s always a good idea to give the
Times
an early exclusive on an important story, especially if you think it might spin things your way. On the next to last day of 2002, the senator got just this kind of treatment when the nation’s “paper of record” quoted unnamed sources to report that Edwards was going to announce the formation of his presidential exploratory committee—the first step toward a real campaign—and that he would be perceived by many Democrats as “the anti-Gore.” As the anti-Gore, Edwards was handsome, energetic, and quick on his feet. He was also, as the
Times
said, “a more authentic Southerner who could have far more appeal in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and the mother lode: Florida.”

By letting unnamed campaign “advisers” leak the story to the
Times,
we got a flood of inquiries from other press outlets around the world. Among them were requests for live interviews from the three major networks as well as CNN. At four o’clock on the morning of January 2, the Edwardses’ neighborhood was filled with production trucks from the TV
networks, and the street in front of their house was lit up like a stadium set for a night game. When the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and I looked out from the window of Wade’s carefully preserved bedroom on the second floor, we saw truck drivers and technicians standing outside their rigs, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. A few of them said hello when I later went outside to clean up so every angle visible to the TV crews looked good.

When I finished my work and went inside the house, I helped some volunteers finish clearing away furniture (much of it was piled in a neighbor’s carport) so that the different networks could occupy separate rooms with cameras and lights and crews. The senator was thrilled by the prospect of all the media attention, but Mrs. Edwards paced nervously around the house. I tried to reassure her and reminded her that it was very important to just keep breathing. By the time she was called for the first interview—
Good Morning America
—she was a little less anxious than your typical deer in the headlights. Given my own fear of public speaking, I felt sympathy for her as she struggled to answer questions about her husband with both tact and openness. She got better as the morning wore on but never looked completely comfortable as she listened to the questions through an earpiece and tried to address the camera as if it were a person.

While the Edwardses were introducing themselves to America, I tried to help our press secretary, Mike Briggs, corral the growing media horde on the front lawn. The senator was scheduled to make a formal announcement and take questions at ten-thirty. At about ten-twenty, I noticed that several of the cameras were trained on a side door, where some garbage cans were lined up. Concerned they might appear in a side shot, I jogged over to move them, and as I did, Edwards emerged from the front door and the cable networks like CNN went live with the shot. I scurried to get out of view and then stood to the side as he spoke before the microphones:

Well, good morning. Good morning to everyone. Today I filed my—the papers to set up an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States. I run for president to
be champion—to be a champion for the same people I fought for all my life, regular folks. They are people like my own family, where I was the first to go to college and my dad worked in a textile mill all of his life, or my mother’s last job was working at the post office, to the people I went to school with, the people I grew up with, the families that I represented for almost two decades as a lawyer. And exactly the same group of people. They are the reason I ran for the United States Senate.

I think these people are entitled to a champion in the White House, somebody who goes to work every day seeing things through their eyes and who provides real ideas about how to make their lives better—not somebody who’s thinking about insiders or looking out for insiders.