Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (20 page)

“Harold is smiling down on us tonight,” I said.

W
HEN
I
WAS
A
KID
,
my father and
I
would occasionally watch chess masters in the park, who silently moved from board to board as they took on multiple opponents at the same time.

Such is the life of a political consultant, and in the spring of 2003, I would add another challenging match to my lineup.

I got a call from Pete Giangreco on behalf of one of his other clients, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. Edwards was a charismatic trial lawyer elected to the Senate in 1998 with great fanfare. Now he was running for president. I knew that Bob Shrum, who had done Edwards’s Senate race, had recently left him to take over as media consultant for the presidential campaign of Edwards’s Senate rival, John Kerry of Massachusetts. “Can you go to Washington and talk to Edwards?” Giangreco asked. “He needs a media consultant and is really interested in you.”

I called my friend Mike Murphy, the Republican consultant who had masterminded the clever, insurgent presidential candidacy of John McCain in 2000. He urged me to take it slow.

“Don’t make any judgments off your first meeting,” he said. “Spend a few days traveling with the guy and get a sense of whether this will work.”

But I was eager.

I didn’t know Edwards, but I believed strongly that an economic populist, in times of growing economic inequality and stress, could pose the greatest challenge to Bush. Besides, the starting gun was about to sound for the Super Bowl of American politics, and I wanted to play on that big stage. I had passed on two previous presidential campaigns, and was champing at the bit to be involved in this one.

A few days later, I met with Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, in his ornate office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, a short walk from the Capitol. Mindful of Murphy’s advice, I tried to center the conversation on Edwards’s career, family, and the upcoming race, to better understand the man I was potentially following into the foxhole. When Edwards asked for my analysis, I told him that, with the middle class feeling besieged, a strong populist candidate had a real chance. “Those are the people I’ve been fighting for my entire life,” he said, recalling his beginnings as the son of a millworker from Robbins, North Carolina, and his career as a trial lawyer. “That’s really why I want to make this race.”

A handsome guy with Ken-doll looks, Edwards was camera friendly from his laboriously coiffed brown hair right down to his broad, toothy grin.

And if Edwards seemed confident in his abilities, his wife was downright effusive.

“John connects with people like no one I know,” said Elizabeth, her intense blue eyes locked on mine. “When they see him, they’ll respond. I’m sure of it.”

During this first meeting, John and Elizabeth talked about the death of their sixteen-year-old son Wade, from a car wreck in 1996. While he often shied away from this question in public for fear of injecting politics into their family tragedy, John told me that Wade’s death had jarred him into considering a career in public service after amassing a fortune practicing law. The loss was obviously a painful memory with which the two were still struggling. While they had one other child at the time, their then-fourteen-year-old daughter, Cate, Elizabeth said Wade’s death had left a “hole in our hearts.” Since his death, they’d had two more children, Emma Claire and Jack, who were five and three.

“That’s why we had more kids,” she explained. “They helped fill that hole. They’ve brought our house back to life.”

After two hours of conversation, we left it that we both would think about moving forward together, though he seemed interested and so was I. I was heartened by Edwards’s professed sense of advocacy, and felt a bond with both of them. Though I hadn’t lost a child, I knew what it was like to anguish over one.

When I got home, Susan asked me about the meeting. I related the sad story of Wade’s death and the Edwards’s struggle to cope with their loss. As I told the story, something caught her ear.

“Wait, they had these other children to fill this hole in their hearts?” Susan asked. “How did their daughter feel about that?”

It wasn’t an idle question. Susan had lost two brothers in her life, one to meningitis and the other to heart disease. She knew what it was like to be the surviving child.

“How old is Elizabeth?”

“I think she’s fifty-three,” I replied.

“So they had these kids when she was forty-eight and fifty to fill the hole in their hearts?” Susan asked.

“That’s what she said.”

Susan, an expert on what campaigns do to families, was incredulous. “And now they’re going to run for president and basically orphan them for the next couple of years? Dave, I don’t think you should do this race. There’s something wrong with this picture.”

I hadn’t really thought about the questions Susan was raising, and I was so eager to get in the game that I foolishly ignored her keen intuition and plunged headlong into the Edwards race.

It was troubled from the start. Having no prior relationship with Edwards, I lacked insight into the man or a bond or at least some basis for mutual trust, which you need to run a gauntlet together. I immediately clashed with his longtime pollster, Harrison Hickman, a cantankerous southerner who was deeply invested in preserving his preeminent place in the Edwards universe. I never felt as if he were dealing from the top of the deck with me. Yet the most difficult personality in this caustic stew was Elizabeth.

John and Elizabeth had met as law school students on the campus of the University of North Carolina. She was the beautiful, worldly child of a career military man and had lived in many places. He was the handsome, athletic son of a millworker and had barely seen the world beyond Robbins. “John was a hick in a plaid shirt when I met him,” Elizabeth told me, in the manner of Professor Henry Higgins reflecting on Eliza Doolittle. “He’s come a long way.” If her attitude toward John was right out of
My Fair Lady
, her approach to the campaign bore a greater resemblance to
The Manchurian Candidate
.

Elizabeth, also an attorney, was clearly bright and even charming, often in public or social situations. Behind the scenes, though, she was always edgy and quite often unhappy, especially when she believed John’s campaign was being harmed. Then she was prone to fits of rage, which often played out in nasty e-mails or late-night calls. One such call came my way when I was planning to shoot an interview with John’s parents, Bobbie and Wallace, for possible use in ads and videos in Iowa. I felt their humble roots and small-town bearing would be embraced by many Iowans as a familiar image, and would help connect Edwards’s story to his message.

“That’s a waste of time and money,” Elizabeth shouted through the phone. I assured her that nothing would go on the air without her knowledge and approval. I reasoned that it could help if John’s parents, as well as Elizabeth and their daughter, filled out a portrait of John for voters, sharing insights into him that he could not. Finally, she relented and allowed the shoot to move forward.

Edwards’s parents were as appealing as I had hoped, radiating the simple decency and small-town values I had seen in Iowa and all across rural America. They told their own stories, and spoke proudly of how far John had come while maintaining his identification with people who lived from paycheck to paycheck. I was thrilled.

To my mind, John’s roots in Robbins were an important authentication of his message. Yet to Elizabeth, I learned, they were something of an embarrassment; a reminder of the unrefined “hick in a plaid shirt” her husband was before she orchestrated his transformation. Besides, Elizabeth had an almost messianic belief in John’s communication skills and felt that any other messenger would be inferior and, thus, a waste of money.

“When they see John, they’ll respond to him,” she said with absolute confidence. “We don’t need anyone else.”

Elizabeth was unstinting in her criticisms and lashed out at anyone she felt was failing the candidate in any fashion, from senior staff and consultants to low-level volunteers. Once, on a conference call, she opined that a spot I had worked hard on “belonged in the circular file.” The dismissive rebuke on a group call didn’t sit well with me. Before long, Elizabeth was bypassing me altogether and communicating through Hickman and his team. They would then deliver unhelpful, sometimes conflicting translations of Elizabeth’s input. Confused by the mixed signals and frustrated by the constant palace intrigue, I knew I wasn’t doing my best work and wasn’t the man driving the message, as I’d expected to be.

Not that there wasn’t reason for tension within the campaign, which, in the fall of 2003, was languishing in also-ran territory, falling behind in the money race and ceding much of the populist support to Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean’s strident opposition to the war in Iraq, and portrayal of DC Democrats who supported it as milquetoast accommodators, had fired up the Left and inspired young voters. And under the leadership of Dean’s cyber-savvy manager, Joe Trippi, the campaign had, for the first time, turned the Internet into a potent fund-raising machine. Edwards had initially led the money race on the strength of his support from trial lawyers across the country, but by summer, Dean had shocked the political world, vastly outraising his opponents, largely through the collection of small donations online.

By October, polls showed Dean moving past Dick Gephardt in Iowa and surging into the lead in New Hampshire. Looking for a spark, Senator and Mrs. Edwards called a meeting in Washington to discuss an upcoming vote on the Bush administration’s $87-billion proposal to fund the war in Iraq. Senator Edwards had voted to authorize the war, but with Dean riding the wave of discontent over Iraq to the top of the polls, Elizabeth saw a winning issue and was adamant that John oppose the funding. The senator and senior staff remained mostly silent as his wife hammered the point. “I didn’t think authorizing the war was the right vote in the first place,” she said, “but it would be suicidal to vote for this funding now.”

I thought to oppose funding for the war Edwards had so recently voted to authorize would come off as politics at its worst, and I said so.

“Senator, if you had opposed the war in the first place, you could make an intellectually honest argument to oppose this funding now,” I said, as others nervously toed the floor and averted their eyes. “I think this will look like a transparent reaction to Dean.”

Elizabeth exploded with a combination of fury and disdain, and I could see clearly where this was heading. Edwards voted against the funding, as, in a similar reversal, did the ultimate Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Kerry’s vote and his clumsy attempt to explain it gave the Bush campaign a huge opportunity to portray the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Edwards as craven opportunists who put party politics ahead of protecting the troops. Yet if this episode proved costly to Kerry and Edwards in the long run, it had an immediate cost to me, further aggravating my already uneasy relationship with Elizabeth.

I began to have less say in strategic decisions and even less control over the campaign’s message, until ultimately the campaign ads that ran those final weeks in Iowa were not mine.

I was in New Hampshire observing focus groups when I got a message that Edwards, who was campaigning in the area, wanted to see me. I met the candidate in the private room of a local restaurant. It was an awkward conversation, though not one that came as much of a surprise. Nonetheless, I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut.

“I feel like we need to add to our media team,” Edwards said. “Harrison recommended a guy he knows who he thinks could help. You’re still our guy, but we just want to bring another approach to the table.”

That was a lie, and Edwards and I both knew it, but he was eager to avoid stories about a shake-up within his campaign. And while I was angry and bruised by the dismissive treatment, such stories weren’t in my interest, either. So I agreed to stay on and continued to act as a principal media spokesperson for the duration of the campaign. We maintained the fiction that I was the chief media strategist, though I was no longer even in the loop. I did my nimble best, but in the end I would find myself simply bullshitting when called upon by reporters to explain ads that the new team hadn’t had the courtesy to show me.

As Dean imploded, Edwards closed strong in Iowa but finished second to Kerry, who solidified his front-runner status with a follow-up win in New Hampshire. By Super Tuesday, on March 2, Edwards was gone. Looking back, I see that Susan’s sight-unseen insights into Elizabeth and John were prescient. Mike Murphy’s admonition to spend time with Edwards before signing on was wise. I ignored them both in favor of my ego, and it was a bracing learning experience. Sometime later, I read that Elizabeth didn’t think I “got” John. Maybe she was right. I resolved that I would never again work on a presidential race unless I had a close, trusting relationship with the candidate.

 • • • 

While I was in Wisconsin for Edwards, just weeks before the Illinois primary, I had a drink in the bar of Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel with Dan Balz, the veteran political writer for the
Washington
Post
, and talked to him about a candidate I strongly believed in.

“I’m working for a guy running in Illinois who’s going to win and make a real impact nationally down the line,” I told Balz, a thoughtful, thorough throwback to the golden age of political reporting. “His name is Barack Obama.”

“Barack Obama?” Balz mused. “Interesting name. I’ve never heard of him. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

Barack might still have been a well-kept secret in Washington, but his talents were evident to all those who worked with him and, increasingly, to voters in Illinois.

It was a revealing experience to work with Obama and Edwards at the same time, as they wrestled with many of the same policy issues. Edwards was a stellar performer on the stump, but his one-on-one interactions with people were plastic, and out of the public eye, his interest in the substance of issues was thin. He wanted only as much information as he needed to glide by—and he was bright and glib enough to glide a long way. Once he locked in his lines, Edwards delivered them flawlessly, repeating on cue every word, every inflection, every catch of the throat, and every tearful eye. It reminded me of the old George Burns adage “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”