The Politician

by Young, Andrew

  Hope was not exactly an original theme. Jesse Jackson had made his name with speeches in which he implored the country to “keep hope alive.” However, it is a reliable and positive message. Unfortunately, Kerry’s staff insisted that the refrain in Senator Edwards’s speech be built on the word help, as in “Help is on the way.” The difference is not as small as it may seem. “Hope” allows people to imagine solving problems on their own. “Help” suggests a handout, which can deprive a person of his or her dignity. Edwards stood his ground and got to use the theme he wanted.

  When the time came, and Edwards stood before a sea of flag-waving partisans and the major networks all beamed his image and voice across the nation and the world, the senator did his duty by praising John Kerry and then rocked the house with a series of declarations that each ended with the promise “Hope is on the way.”

  The speech was a hit with everyone except John Kerry’s top people. Afterward when I ran into Julianna Smoot, she said, “You picked the right horse,” and told me, “You deserve everything you get.” She asked me to pass word to the senator that she hoped he would call her. He never did.

  The next night, Kerry stuck to his choice of “Help is on the way,” and while the delegates gave him all the noise you could ask for, the speech did not wind up on anyone’s list of best American political addresses. In contrast, Barack Obama’s brilliant keynote address, which challenged the idea that Americans were hopelessly divided, marked a historic moment. It was the one performance that every analyst gave a top grade, and more than anyone knew, it revealed the future of American politics.

  Coming out of the convention, the Kerry-Edwards team had a significant lead over Bush-Cheney, but by the time the GOP had their convention and their allies began their well-funded attacks—remember the “swift boaters”?—it became obvious that it would be difficult to unseat the incumbent. Kerry’s decision-making style—slow, even dithering in response to the lies coming from the far right—frustrated Edwards, and he told me he suspected he was being sent to make low-impact appearances in out-of-the-way spots because Kerry was afraid of being upstaged. So much for trust.

  Presidential candidates handpick staff for their running mate long before the candidate is even selected. As a result, Edwards had only two of his loyalists with him during the 2004 run. As often happens, tension arises between the vice presidential nominee—who’s supposed to be a lapdog—and the people serving the person at the top of the ticket. This dynamic was in full force on a weekend when I joined Edwards at his beach house. Except for the presence of the Secret Service guys, the weekend recalled the time we had spent together in years past, and we talked more football than politics. But when we did discuss the campaign, Edwards bragged about how he had won a minor victory by getting Peter Scher, whom Kerry had picked to be his chief of staff, to “go native.” By this he meant that Scher had come over to his side of things in some dispute with Kerry.

  Candidates never recover the time and energy wasted on distractions in a campaign, so it’s always best to keep them out of intramural battles over issues like staff loyalty and to control any personal issues that might flare into controversies that would draw attention from important issues. During the 2004 campaign, the senator’s younger brother, Blake, a good ol’ boy who reminded me of the actor John Goodman, began telephoning the lawyer Wade Byrd, who was a big political contributor. Blake wanted help with what he said was a serious problem. With Roger Clinton and Billy Carter in mind, Senator Edwards asked me to find out what was going on and resolve it.

  It turned out that Blake had a history of arrests for driving under the influence and had had his license suspended in Colorado. He had contacted Wade Byrd in hopes of getting his license back and perhaps having the charges removed from his record. But as I quickly discovered, this was not even a remote possibility. Instead, as authorities in Colorado indicated, Blake was wanted for failing to appear on a decade-old charge of driving while intoxicated. The press learned of the warrant for Blake’s arrest and descended on the little house he shared with his longtime girlfriend, Debbie, in the town of Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, which the senator had bought for them.

  While Blake and Debbie hid behind their locked front door, Mrs. Edwards reacted angrily when the press called the campaign. “How could he do this?” she asked, as if Blake had gotten drunk and taken to the road in a deliberate attempt to derail his brother’s ambitions. The senator was more relaxed in his response. He issued a statement that said he understood that Blake had committed serious crimes but that he was now taking responsibility and that he loved him.

  The senator asked me to visit Blake and Debbie to reassure them, and help them network their way to the best lawyer available, who could try to delay the proceeding in Colorado until after the election. Eventually, we found someone who promised to do just that. The main challenge in this process would be to help Blake with the anxiety he felt about the case and getting him to Colorado. Although his crimes had been dangerous, Blake hadn’t hurt anyone, and the man I knew was truly remorseful and frightened about what he faced. I did my best to reassure him, and when the time came for him to appear in court in Colorado, I picked him up at his house at five A.M. so he could catch an early-morning flight and avoid the press. I’ve never seen a more forlorn person than he was as I dropped him at the terminal, but the outcome of the hearing was a reprieve: The judge delayed sentencing until January. Until then, Blake was a free man and the press would leave him alone.

  I

  t may come as a shock to the obsessive, twenty-four-hour-a-day crusaders who work in presidential campaigns, but life goes on for people who live away from the frenzy of cross-country tours, press conferences, and debates. On August 11, 2004, the Kerry-Edwards team was arguing with George Bush about health care. You might say I was involved with the same issue, but in a far more personal way, supporting Cheri in the delivery room as our third child, a boy we named Cooper, came into the world.

  Before he was born, doctors had told us the odds were against Cooper having the kind of congenital anomaly that made Gracie’s first months of life so difficult. When he showed some of the same signs of distress, but in a milder form, we asked to have him checked out anyway. Incredibly, we went through many of the same problems we had getting Gracie diagnosed until we confirmed that lightning sometimes strikes twice. Cooper did have an almost identical problem, and while we didn’t have to address it immediately, surgery would be required.

  Informed by our previous experience, we decided to find the best surgeons for the job. I turned to a logical source, a famous malpractice attorney named Tom Demetrio, who helped us narrow the choice to Children’s Hospital in Boston. The doctors wanted to give Cooper some time to grow stronger, so we scheduled the procedure for late November. Cheri would keep a close eye on him until then. I would go back into the frenzy of the campaign, which, thanks to the swift boaters, became one of the nastiest in modern times.

  By the end of September, everyone in the campaign assumed the race would be neck and neck to the finish. The war in Iraq occupied much of the candidates’ time and attention, but they also traded jabs related to character, and who might be better suited to the job of leading the free world. Occasionally, a gaffe or minor mistake gave comedians something to squawk about and distracted everyone from the substance of the campaign. For our side, one of the worst came when John Kerry insisted on going windsurfing in the waters of Nantucket.

  Hard as it may be to accept, Kerry’s hobby had actually been the subject of intense conversation inside the campaign, and it was widely agreed that it was the kind of activity many Americans would view as effete and unpresidential—what if he fell off?—and it would be better if he just gave it up until after the election. Despite warnings, Kerry just couldn’t resist. On a day off he spent in Nantucket, he put on a bathing suit, grabbed a pair of gloves, and took to the water atop what looked like a surfboard with a sail. The image of Kerry tacking back and forth reminded everyone
of the opposition charge that he was a “flip-flopper” who couldn’t stick to a position and prompted Jay Leno to say, “Even his hobby depends on which way the wind blows.”

  Fortunately, the first presidential debate came about ten days after the windsurfing exhibition and shifted the conversation away from the water. Kerry seemed to outpoint Bush in the first of the three presidential events, but the result was so close that it put more pressure on Edwards to score a knockout in the one encounter he would have with Vice President Cheney, the Darth Vader of Washington. Of course, Cheney also faced similar pressure, as Republicans said he needed to stomp Edwards in order to seize the momentum for his side.

  The Republicans seemed most concerned about Senator Edwards’s telegenic looks and his ability to work a room. Standing next to Edwards, Cheney would look like a stooped old man. However, Kerry’s people gave away some of this advantage in the negotiations over the debate format when they agreed that Cheney and Edwards would be seated at a table for the entire ninety minutes. (The Republicans said they were concerned about how standing would affect Cheney’s heart.) Presumably the Democrats received something in return from the Bush side, but I never heard what it was.

  When the date of the debate arrived, I escorted the senator’s parents to Cleveland and brought them to the site at Case Western Reserve University. During the event, I was positioned a few yards from the stage. I like to believe it helped him to see my friendly face. He performed about as well as could be expected, limiting the points Cheney scored against John Kerry and steering the discussion toward the deception the White House had practiced to get the nation into the Iraq war. The vice president went to great lengths to sell the country on his extensive experience in government, which stretched back more than thirty years. Edwards came back with a perfect retort, saying, “Mr. Vice President, I don’t think the country can take four more years of this kind of experience.” However, his performance was not flawless. At one point he brought up Cheney’s lesbian daughter, and this would be viewed by many as a cheap shot.

  On my scorecard, Cheney failed to get the big victory he needed and Senator Edwards prevailed, as he showed he was equal to the job of vice president. The instant polls done that night found similar sentiments among viewers, but as time passed, the Karl Rove Republican spin machine shaped opinion and more people began to say that Cheney had won because he didn’t collapse when confronted by Edwards’s superior communication skills. This is how the scoring often proceeds with debates. First impressions are followed by endless nitpicking, and before you know it, the partisan analysis matters more than what actually happened during the debate itself. In the case of Edwards vs. Cheney, the only certain conclusion you might reach is that very few voters were moved out of their preestablished groupings, which found them divided almost evenly between the parties.

  Unfortunately, Americans were so hardened in their positions that as election night grew close, everyone realized that we were fighting over a tiny number of voters—a few hundred thousand in each of a handful of “swing” states—who might actually be undecided. Kerry’s campaign team decided that Edwards could serve them best by making a series of national TV appearances, and he performed perfectly on shows ranging from The View to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Leno and Edwards liked each other. The host told the audience he loved the oft-told story about how every year Edwards took Elizabeth to Wendy’s for hamburgers to celebrate their anniversary. He said that any man who could get away with that deserved to be elected.

  Between the national TV shows and the debate, Edwards was seen by well over 100 million TV viewers in the span of a week. But when he suggested the campaign let him make a bigger effort to woo voters in the South, especially in North Carolina, Kerry’s people balked. Despite polls showing Democrats had the best chance there in decades, they refused to buy any television ads in the Tar Heel State. Instead, they focused their spending on the Midwest and sent the senator to out-of-the-way places like Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Iowa. Edwards was furious about this.

  For reasons that were never explained, the advisers and managers at the top of the campaign developed a surprising amount of confidence in the final weeks and, to our surprise, held back more than $14 million that could have been spent on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts in Ohio and Florida. Although we kept hearing concern, even worry, in the voices of friends, Kerry operatives talked to the press about the combination of states that would get them to the magic number of 270 electoral college votes. In every winning scenario, either Ohio or Florida was painted blue for a Democratic Party victory.

  T

  he campaign ended in Boston. On election day I flew into Logan with the senator’s family and friends and checked in at the Copley Plaza. (Cheri came with me to soak up the moment.) The weather was dreary, but the hotel was so alive with press and security people that it felt as though we had arrived at the center of the universe. Everywhere we turned we bumped into someone we knew, and our conversations were filled with a mixture of relief, hope, and gratitude. As Cheri and I sat at lunch with the Edwards family, the senator’s sister, Kathy, said, “You’re closer to him than anyone, Andrew, and if he’s elected, he’s going to need you even more.” His parents said they agreed, and it made me feel good.

  Kathy was part of a large group I shepherded on a day that included an afternoon aboard an amphibious tourist craft operated by an outfit called Boston Duck Tours, which took us around to historic sites and to the Charles River and Boston Harbor. (The senator’s mother, Bobbi, got a chance to drive the “duck.”) All the while, I was receiving text-message reports on exit polls that were very promising for our side. As I gave them updates, Bobbi and Wallace seemed overwhelmed by the thought that their son might win the second-highest office in the country. We couldn’t be sure of the outcome, of course, but by the end of the afternoon, as Cheri and I went to the hotel to dress for dinner, we were almost convinced that the Kerry-Edwards team had won.

  Our minds were changed as we gathered at the Palm restaurant for the last supper of the campaign. Although some in the friends and family group clung to the hope that we had received better “inside” information, the television reported that Bush was likely to hold on to the White House. As I checked in with people high in the campaign, they stopped talking about their new offices in the West Wing and started to sound very pessimistic. Eventually they stopped answering their phones, and with their voice-mail files full, I couldn’t even leave a message.

  After dinner, Cheri and I went back to the Copley Plaza with the senator’s family and got on the elevator with the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Upstairs, we headed to the senator’s VIP area, where we ran into the actor Matt Dillon, model Christie Brinkley, and Seinfeld creator Larry David. By the time the polls started to close, we were almost sure we had lost, so although the place was filled with the sounds of phones ringing, people talking, and TVs blaring, the atmosphere was still fairly somber. We heard lots of reports of minority voters—our voters—being blocked from the polls.

  T

  he count and the media coverage reminded me of 2000, when I had sat in the senator’s living room and irregularities cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, especially in Florida. This time the center of controversy was Ohio, where, we heard, people in mostly Democratic wards were having a difficult time with long lines and officials who challenged seemingly valid voter registrations. Although some newscasters called the election for Bush, at midnight Kerry conducted a conference call from his house with about fifty advisers and Senator Edwards and concluded that the race was so close, he couldn’t concede.

  Even though he had problems with Kerry, Edwards saw the election as a battle of good versus evil and truly believed the country would be hurt by four more years of Bush-Cheney. Although he was concerned about all the people who were standing in the rain at the Kerry-Edwards rally site in Boston Common, the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000 had made him deeply suspicious of the vote-counting p
rocess. Kerry continued to hold out, and at about three o’clock in the morning he sent Edwards to the Common to speak. (Many people thought it was strange that Kerry didn’t address the crowd himself.)

  The diehards who stood in the rain on that cold November night numbered in the thousands. Many had on Red Sox caps, worn like emblems of their tremendous patience, which had been rewarded just days before when their beloved team had finally won the World Series after eighty-six years. They had seen Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer declare Bush reelected on the big TV screens set up near the stage but remained waiting faithfully to hear from their candidates. When Edwards appeared, they cheered so loudly that his parents called from the hotel to ask me if the Democrats had actually won. Of course they had not, but I thought that the roar confirmed that the wrong guy had been at the top of the ticket. “We’ve waited four years for this victory,” he said. “We can wait one more night.”

  By morning, when it seemed they had lost Ohio by about one hundred thousand votes, Edwards spoke to Kerry and could tell he was devastated. Although Edwards thought he should wait and perhaps contest the Ohio result, Kerry soon conceded to Bush via a phone call and then scheduled a public appearance for ten-thirty at historic Faneuil Hall. While he waited for this event, the senator asked me to find his parents and bring them to his suite. When I brought Wallace and Bobbi to the room, I could see that something other than the election was going on. The senator told his parents and then told me that they thought Mrs. Edwards had cancer.