Politician

by Andrew Young

  God couldn’t have arranged life better for me. After months of separation and unhappiness, Cheri, Brody, and I were together again. Our lakeside house was finally finished and ready for our second child, who was expected near the end of summer. I figured that now I would be able to spend more time with my wife and child—like a real father—because the senator would be traveling around the country as a presidential hopeful.

  By the time I got back to North Carolina in March, Senator Edwards had already visited six states, including repeated trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, where he announced that his goal was to “make the American dream stronger than it ever has been.” It was a vague theme, but it was enough for a handful of Democrats in New Hampshire, who told the national press corps that they were impressed with him. Behind the scenes, Steve Jarding and Mudcat Saunders were raising money and winning friends for the senator in unusual ways. In one of their schemes, our political action committee loaned computers to Democrats running for state offices in places like Iowa, who agreed to give them back to us at the end of the year. The arrangement helped them with the expense of campaigning, and built goodwill. When we got the machines back, they came loaded with information—e-mail lists, telephone lists, addresses—that we thought would be invaluable to us.

  Supported by the money collected by Jarding and Saunders, the senator traveled from state to state, refining his pitch. At eight different Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners (banquets held to give candidates a forum), he railed against “Washington insiders” and “rich fat cats” like the disgraced executives at the bankrupt Enron Corporation, who had become symbols of the greed enabled by Washington. This kind of talk was red meat for Democrats in the hinterlands, and they ate it up.

  Although I saw less of the senator during this period, he came home often enough for me to notice that he was changing. A year before, he had seemed bored and disappointed by life in the Senate. Now, with the presidency as a goal, he was focused and alert. Sure, he complained about fatigue and run-ins with people who made him uncomfortable (he still struggled to feel at ease rubbing elbows with some poor and working-class folks), but I had never seen him more energized and excited. The way he talked, I could tell that he was mastering the issues and getting to know Iowa and New Hampshire better than he knew North Carolina.

  Veterans of presidential campaigns say that the early days are the easiest, and this was true for Edwards, who raced into the lead in the competition for donors and national party backers. In both New Hampshire and Iowa, he won over key political figures with his charm and audiences with his Robbins-to-Washington story. “I believe I can be the champion for regular people,” he said in his standard stump speech. “My own life experience allows me to see things through their eyes. They are the people I grew up with, the people who worked with my father in the mill, the people I fought for as a lawyer.”

  As she accompanied him on campaign trips, Mrs. Edwards turned out to be popular, too. Unlike other political wives, she wasn’t pretentious or cautious, and she openly tried to make sure the country’s sexiest politician didn’t get too full of himself. At one press event, she even asked the local reporters, “Have you met anyone up here who knows who he is?” In another encounter with the press, she let a writer see her stash her cell phone in her bra as she rushed out the door of her house. People, especially women voters, loved this stuff. She knew it, he knew it, and they played it to the hilt.

  The national press loved it, too. U.S. News & World Report put Senator Edwards on its cover at the end of April and made Mrs. Edwards a big part of their story on the presidential hopefuls. A week later, The New Yorker made the senator the subject of a glowing profile that suggested he might be the next Bill Clinton. Writer Nicholas Lemann described Mrs. Edwards as “vibrant” and “fiercely ambitious for and protective of her husband.”

  In protecting the senator, Mrs. Edwards didn’t shield him from her own criticism, which she offered every time she saw him perform at a rally or conduct an interview. She was the one person he trusted to give him honest feedback, which meant that when he bumbled through an appearance on Meet the Press in the spring of 2002, she agreed with the critics who said he looked unprepared for host Tim Russert’s questions and sounded evasive in his responses. In fact, it was the worst TV performance of his career, such an awful and embarrassing display of political sidestepping that he would remember it for years with a combination of shame and anger.

  Fortunately, he didn’t stumble very often, and he was a quick study. Months later, he went back on national television—this time it was Face the Nation—and scored points with pointed attacks of Bush administration policies that had squandered a huge federal surplus in order to lavish tax cuts on the rich.

  As he grew more confident, just being around John Edwards gave me the sense he was going to be the positive leader the country needed. This feeling motivated me, as did some of the early prep work—scouting locations, getting bids on phones and furnishings—for establishing a national campaign office. Because the senator was away more, it fell to me to nurture his relationship with friends, political allies, and potential donors. The work brought me into regular contact with the rich and powerful, including former ambassadors, millionaires, and billionaires.

  Although I was only an aide, I was his only longtime staffer, so many of these people came to see me as a surrogate for the senator. Whenever close friends or members of the family had a question or a problem—like an inquiry from the press corps—they turned to me for help. Gradually, many of these relationships became friendly. One big donor invited my family to visit at his luxurious beach house. Another, Boyd Tinsley of the Dave Matthews Band, became a friend who came to my house for veggie burgers.

  My relationship with Tinsley offers a perfect illustration of the benefits that come to a political aide thanks to fame by association. When he first called and I didn’t know who he was, our senior campaign consultant Nick Baldick, who worked in Washington, told me Tinsley was rich and important. When we finally connected, Tinsley explained that he was a bit of a political junkie. We talked regularly, and Tinsley said he liked what he had seen and heard about Edwards’s dedication to working people and wanted to help.

  In this period, Cheri and I began rubbing elbows with people we would never have met otherwise. At every turn, it seemed, I was encountering another celebrity or walking through a doorway to an exclusive environment that I would never have seen if I weren’t working for a presidential candidate. A case in point was the all-star fund-raiser I helped arrange at the start of the summer of 2002. The hosts were Reynolds Tobacco heir Smith Bagley and his wife, Elizabeth. The politically liberal Bagleys were stalwarts of the Democratic Party who, like their friends, had contributed millions of dollars to various candidates and causes. Mrs. Bagley had been rewarded, during the Clinton administration, with the ambassador’s post in Portugal. Former Gore supporters, the Bagleys were leaning toward Edwards for 2004 and opened their compound on St. Simons Island, Georgia, for a gathering of national supporters, most of whom were wealthy trial lawyers.

  Called Musgrove, the Bagley property covers six hundred acres in one of the richest zip codes in America. It is also one of many almost-secret sites around the country where powerful people can find seclusion and comfort while they share ideas and plans. (Allies would call it strategizing. Enemies would see sinister scheming.) Most Americans have never heard of the place, but over the years Musgrove had been the locale for dozens of exclusive conferences and meetings where national leaders discussed everything from relations with Cuba to tax policy. Before Jimmy Carter went to Washington to take the oath of office as president, he gathered his future cabinet at Musgrove.

  The gathering for Senator Edwards was not about policy; rather, it concerned politics or, to be more precise, how John Edwards might become president. Strategists and consultants offered briefings on the process that led from Iowa to the nomination and dissected the strengths and weaknesses of our opponents. We talked abo
ut Senator Edwards’s appeal as an outsider and a Southerner (Democrats felt they needed to break the GOP hold on the region in order to win the White House) and his populist positions.

  The guests—who were often referred to as “future ambassadors”—were there because they had already shown they were willing to supply the money required to get a candidate elected. Together, the participants—between forty and fifty men and women—could claim hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in personal wealth and connections to a network of thousands of men and women with comparable resources. Those who were trial lawyers were more than willing to pony up for Edwards because they knew him as one of their own and could expect that as a senator and a president, he would protect plaintiff s’ rights and their ability to sue and win big awards.

  Republicans had been attacking trial lawyers for years, claiming that lawsuits filed against corporations and individuals, especially in the health care industry, were driving up the cost of malpractice insurance and making life miserable for good, honest businesses and practitioners. They liked to call the trial lawyers “ambulance chasers” who concocted ridiculous claims that won outlandish awards from gullible juries. For their part, the lawyers brushed off the ambulance chasers as a low-rent minority and described themselves as heroes who sought justice when people were maimed or killed by faulty products and incompetent professionals. (When Edwards appeared to be the front-runner for the nomination, President Bush traveled to North Carolina to give a speech on tort reform.)

  For me, the highlight of the weekend was Friday night, which began with a cocktail party where I spent a substantial amount of time chatting with Smith Bagley, who is a very tall and distinguished-looking man. My mother’s father had been a foreman for Reynolds Tobacco for thirty-three years, and her mother had worked for the company as a secretary. As I stood with the man who held much of the company’s fortune, I had to struggle to grasp how I had come so far and what it meant for me to be there. My mind was further boggled when we went down to the waterside for an oyster bake, which was served by an all-black waitstaff who then performed songs that could have come out of a nineteenth-century minstrel show. This kind of thing happens every once in a while in the place we liberals like to call “the New South.” You get lulled into thinking that the sins of the past are long gone, and then suddenly some evidence of the old racism comes into view. It made me uncomfortable.

  Later that night, I met up with the senator’s former law partner, David Kirby, and a famous litigator from Biloxi named Paul Minor, who had been one of the first lawyers in the suit against tobacco companies that produced a $200 billion settlement in 1998. (Only in the New South would a lawyer who sued Big Tobacco be welcomed at the home of an heir to a cigarette fortune.) The three of us were hungry—it’s hard to fill up on oysters—so we went to a local hee-haw bar. The kitchen was closed, but they let us have a pizza delivered. Kirby insisted that Minor tell me a story about the settlement, and he immediately launched into a tale that begins with a phone call he received from an attorney friend named Ron Motley.

  As the story goes, Motley had begun a massive suit against the major tobacco companies (which at this point had never lost a case), alleging that the industry had knowingly hidden health risks associated with their products and a history of deceptive marketing. Recent changes in federal rules and regulations gave the litigants a fighting chance, but Motley needed $100,000 to keep his effort alive. Minor resisted at first but eventually gave him the money, although he hid the loan from his own wife. Years later, Motley called again. This time, it was the middle of the night and both of the Minors awakened as Motley was leaving a message about “that one hundred thousand dollars you gave me.”

  The number brought both Mr. and Mrs. Minor fully awake. Anger flashed across her face as he grabbed the phone to hear his drunken friend report that the $100,000 would soon be repaid and followed by millions more. The case had been settled, he explained, and the attorneys for the plaintiffs were going to reap fees totaling billions of dollars. After he hung up the phone, Minor explained it all to his wife, who quickly forgave him for hiding the $100,000 loan, and they jumped on the bed like little kids.

  Minor told the story with the kind of matter-of-fact pride you’d hear in the voice of a former high-school star recounting his best game twenty years after the event. But instead of being a local hero, he was one of the richest lawyers in the world and I was being let into his confidence. Many of the other people I met over the weekend could match Minor when it came to power and influence. Altogether, this group donated enough money to the Edwards campaign effort to put him over $3.5 million for the year. This was much more than the amount raised by his nearest competitors, and it signaled to the national party and pundits that he was a powerful candidate.

  _______

  T

  he weekend at Musgrove gave me great stories to share with Cheri when I got home. She was entertained but never got as excited about high-flying politics as I did. She’s a practical person who lives in the moment and resists getting swept up in flash and show. For her, happiness was found mostly at home, and she was satisfied to have us together again, without the pressure we felt in Washington or the round-the-clock demands that came when the senator was in town.

  In many ways, the summer of 2002 was the best season of my life. For the most part I worked normal hours, which meant that I was home for dinner every night and helped put Brody to bed. Cheri and I then relaxed on our back porch, listening to music and gazing at the lake. The schedule also allowed me to run every day, which meant that my body was fit and my mind was clear. When I run, I say my prayers and let myself dream. During this period, I kept a notebook and a pen in our mailbox, so after I ran laps in our neighborhood, I could write down any ideas or flashes of insight before going inside to shower. I was so excited about the impending arrival of our next child—by this time, we knew it was a girl—that most of my notes were about baby names.

  My favorite name was Grace. Cheri’s favorite was Lauren. When our daughter was finally born on September 1, 2002, we named her Lauren Grace and called her by the nickname Gracie. A bit smaller and quieter than Brody, she had trouble breathing, and Cheri noticed that as she struggled to get air she made a high-pitched noise called stridor. Doctors told us the problem was not serious, but when it didn’t get better and she had trouble feeding, we took her to the hospital. Only two weeks old, she stayed for several days of tests that gave us no definitive diagnosis. Worn out from the stress, Cheri asked her mother to come care for the kids while she went with me for a long weekend—half work and half fun—at the famous Pinehurst Resort.

  Set for the last three days of the summer, the Pinehurst event had been the main focus of my work in the month of August. Like the event at Musgrove, the “retreat” was supposed to be an organizing and rallying point for about a hundred of the senator’s key supporters from around the country. Many were “big dogs” in the nation’s trial law profession, and we needed to offer some special amenities to draw them in. The resort is a golf mecca, where our guests would have eight courses to choose from, including Pinehurst #2, one of the best in the world. For those who didn’t golf (and those who did), we included a concert by the band Hootie & the Blowfish, who were Edwards supporters from South Carolina. The band members donated their services but sent a list of more than two dozen requirements that included transportation, suites, free rounds of golf, five cases of beer, three fifths of Jim Beam, and “orange juice (no pulp).”

  For attendees, the per-person cost for the three days, including accommodations at the Victorian-era Carolina Hotel, was about $1,200, which was hardly a consideration for the people we invited. In fact, the hotel didn’t have enough fancy suites to satisfy this crowd. Almost everyone we asked agreed to come, and we had a full house for the pig roast/reception on Friday night and the lunchtime meetings held on Saturday and Sunday. At these two sessions, our backers heard from the senator and a group of experts, including tw
o of Bill Clinton’s closest advisers, Doug Sosnik and Gene Sperling. A high-energy person, Sosnik talked urgently about the public’s hunger for a likable candidate who shared their values, and naturally he thought Edwards was that guy.

  Sperling began with a self-deprecating story about delivering his first major policy program—for jobs creation—to Bill Clinton. In the moments before being ushered in to see the boss, he had chewed on his pen, which leaked ink all over his mouth and chin. When Sperling entered the Oval Office, President Clinton asked, “Whatcha been eatin’, boy?” and political consultant James Carville, who was in the room, grinned and cackled, “What a Maalox moment, your big day, meeting the leader of the free world. What an idiot!” It was the perfect story to grab the attention of those people, who were daydreaming about helping to create the next “Bubba” like Bill Clinton.

  After winning the crowd over, Sperling spoke about Edwards as a progressive whose values and Southern roots could appeal to moderates and independents. He acknowledged President Bush’s strengths coming out of the September 11 attacks but noted that Bush’s father had been popular after the first Iraq war and led Clinton in many early public opinion polls. The right Democrat would have a very good chance to make Bush II another one-termer, and Edwards was the right Democrat.

  By the time the senator spoke, the participants had been primed to consider him presidential material, and I saw a more serious and less relaxed man than I had known before. He was clearly acting in a more careful and deliberate way, and so was Mrs. Edwards. I noticed, too, that they brought Emma Claire, who was four, and Jack, now two, into meetings and as usual allowed them to run around among the adults. Like any other little kids, they were adorable some of the time, but even when they got a bit cranky and the nanny volunteered to take them to the pool, the senator and his wife insisted they stay around. They said having the kids around would be appealing to the donors—that no president in recent times had young kids. I realized the kids were being used as props to show that the family was young and lively like, say, the Kennedys circa 1962, when Caroline was five and John Junior was two.