Tuesday, December 04, 2007

"John Edwards: An urgent agenda" (with video)



Chicago Tribune, with video (00:56):
In his second run for the presidency, North Carolina's favorite son is taking a stronger stand on the issues that matter to him most--As chemicals coursed through his wife's body, attacking her tumors and plunging her into sleep, John Edwards sat bedside in a drab Georgetown hospital room and planned his future as president of the United States.
Edwards was a year past falling, by his rendering, a few cold Iowa days short of the Democratic presidential nomination. He was months past missing the vice-presidency by a state. Cancer had stricken his wife, a hospital was his new haunt, and sometimes, in calls to a friend, he lamented that so many patients spent their days so alone.

Every two weeks from November 2004 to February 2005, Edwards kept a chemotherapy vigil that stretched from morning to late afternoon. His wife says his job was to be there when she woke. He says her slumbering hours gave him what a frantic national campaign had not: "a lot of time to reflect on what I wanted to do as president."

Two years and a cancer remission later, the former North Carolina senator flew to New Orleans to announce another run for the White House. The man America met as a Southerntwanged, hope-is-on-the-way, sunny son of a mill worker emerged in the Lower 9th Ward grimmer, better traveled and quicker to attack, his policies more ambitious, detailed and liberal. The tone and manner were as if Edwards' persona had been transformed, or at least as if Edwards listened to different people now. Was that true?

"Yeah," he says. "I listen to me."

A tight clutch of advisers say his 2004 defeats and the years that followed gave Edwards the knowledge and confidence to shed caution in what could be his last run for elective office. "Urgency" is the one-word bumper sticker many of them use to describe Edwards '08.

Edwards '04 wanted health care for every child. Now he wants it for every American. Edwards '04 wanted a $6.65 per hour minimum wage. Now he wants $9.50. Then: Double a tax credit for the poor. Now: Triple it. Then: Get the United Nations involved in Iraq. Now: Bring the troops home.

"He left the 2004 campaign thinking that the ideas needed to be more aggressive," said Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, who doubles as his closest adviser. "His experience on the road [between campaigns] just confirmed that for him." Later, she added: "Your first campaign, you really don?t know what you?re going to do. He's a lot more at ease this time."

Rivals note that Edwards is also a legendary trial lawyer with a focus-group-honed skill for swaying juries. His political evolution coincides with a leftward drift in the Democratic electorate. Some of his top issues this campaign -- including global warming and poverty -- hardly show up in his six-year Senate record.

Voters are left to wonder: Is John Edwards finally being himself? Or is he just down to his last closing argument?

Late in 2004 campaign, after John Kerry put him on the Democratic ticket, Edwards campaigned in a small town in western Pennsylvania. The acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency met him in a Best Western motel room for a five-hour briefing on national security matters, customary for presidential candidates and their running mates.

When it ended, Edwards stood up. "I think I saw an Outback Steakhouse coming into town," he said, according to Peter Scher, the chief of staff for the vice presidential campaign, who sat in on the briefing. "Let's go there for dinner." Dessert followed at a Dairy Queen.

Almost everyone close to Edwards tells an equally folksy story about him. But perhaps no one tells the full folksiness of his life better than Edwards, who in 2004 crafted his up-from-nothing biography into what was arguably the best stump speech of any candidate.

Johnny Reid Edwards was born in a South Carolina mill town to Bobbie Edwards and her husband, Wallace, who borrowed $50 to bring his son home from the hospital. He grew up (along with his sister, Katherine, and brother, Wesley Blake) in rural Robbins, N.C., worked mill jobs as a teenager and realized that getting ahead meant going to college.

After washing out as a walk-on football player at Clemson University, he earned a textile science degree from North Carolina State University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina, where he met Elizabeth Anania. They married after graduation, worked briefly for large firms in Nashville, then settled in Raleigh, where John Edwards built a fortune as a plaintiff's attorney with a flair for medical malpractice cases and underdog clients.

He distinguished himself through meticulous preparation -- testing arguments in front of mock juries and mastering the intricacies of fetal heart monitors and the engineering of swimming pool drains -- and courtroom orations that other lawyers jammed the gallery to watch.

Edwards was considering a jump to the political arena when tragedy struck. In April 1996, his son Wade, 16, was driving a wind-whipped freeway to the family vacation home on the Carolina coast when his Jeep rolled off the road. Wade died before rescuers could reach him. Edwards, Elizabeth and their daughter Cate (now 25) mourned at home for months.

Elizabeth Edwards would eventually undergo fertility treatments and have two more children: Emma Clare, now 9, and Jack, now 7. John Edwards would return to the courtroom to win a $25 million judgment for a family whose daughter was eviscerated by a swimming pool drain. Then, buoyed by that victory and moved to service by his son's death, he audaciously launched a political career by challenging an incumbent Republican senator, Lauch Faircloth.

Edwards owes much of his rocket rise in politics to the same gifts that made him a courtroom phenom: his ability to connect his personal story and his populist message. He beat Faircloth by styling himself a fighter for "regular people" -- an argument that undercut Faircloth's efforts to demonize his trial lawyering days -- and railing against Washington lobbyists.

In his first presidential campaign Edwards talked frequently with another Southerner who leveraged his life story, former President Bill Clinton. Like Clinton, Edwards ran as a moderate optimist, and in December 2003 he crystallized the message that would become his personal theme: There are Two Americas -- one for the privileged, one for everyone else -- and we can bridge that divide.

The Des Moines Register cited Edwards' story and his message in its surprise endorsement of him in January 2004, writing that "his life has been one of accomplishing the unexpected, amid flashes of brilliance." The praise helped fuel a late Edwards surge in Iowa; he and his advisers believe he would have beaten Kerry -- and rolled to the nomination -- if the caucuses were held a few days later. (Kerry advisers disagree.)

Edwards wound up Kerry's vice presidential pick, in part because campaign aides hoped he could charm voters who were otherwise cool to their Brahmin-like nominee. But November brought a narrow loss in Ohio that sealed President Bush's re-election -- and a breast cancer diagnosis that sent Elizabeth into treatment at Georgetown University Medical Center.

In late 2004, soon after his wife began her 16- week chemotherapy regimen, Edwards invited a small group of advisers to his home to discuss his future. Attendees say one idea seemed to capture his imagination above the others. "He said, 'I may or may not be president,' " recalled Robert Gordon, a former Edwards aide who now works at the Center for American Progress, " 'but I want to know that I spent this time worthwhile -- fighting poverty.' "

Edwards spent the next two years straddling the Two Americas, if not the Two Planet Earths. He traveled the globe, studied and debated policy, walked picket lines and helped hurricane survivors. He also nurtured his political network, built a 28,000-square-foot house and padded his resume and bank account. Each move brought skepticism and scrutiny. When Edwards announced he was establishing a poverty center at the UNC law school, professors including Marion Crane wondered "whether it would be real or a presidential campaign platform." When he signed on to co-chair a Council on Foreign Relations task force on Russia policy, some academics on the panel said it was clear he wanted to burnish a sense of foreign policy gravitas.

"I'm sure [Edwards] would rather have been on the Iran task force," said Michael McFaul, a Russia scholar who is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and now informally advises U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Later, he added: "He understood that this is what you need to do to run for president."

At UNC, Edwards lined up donors and speakers for the poverty center, worked there once a week, moderated panel discussions and wrote the final chapter for its book of poverty-fighting policy recommendations. "I think most folks were won over by the quality of the work produced," said Jack Boger, the law school dean who became the poverty center's director when Edwards stepped down last year. Crane, now the Center's director, agrees.

On the task force, Edwards traveled to Russia and urged other members to seek the "high-altitude" view of America's relations with its onetime superpower rival. He pushed for a final report that declared "U.S.-Russia relations are clearly headed in the wrong direction." His efforts impressed many of the panel's Russia experts, including McFaul. "He wanted the report to say something bold," he said, adding that Edwards "did his homework."

Edwards made several other field trips in 2005 and 2006. He visited some 200 union picket lines and campaigned for Democratic candidates and ballot measures to raise the minimum wage in several states. He led a group of college students to rebuild Hurricane Katrina victims' houses on spring break. He turned a rural North Carolina county into a testing ground for a plan to pay college tuition, fees and books for any student who agreed to work part-time.

He called the Ohio Democratic Party chairman to congratulate him on his wedding. Across several continents, Edwards met with people struggling to get by -- single mothers in his home state, war refugees in Uganda, schoolchildren living in a slum outside New Delhi.

Many of those trips also brought Edwards face-to- face with world leaders, such as Britain's Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Edwards ended them all with policy speeches, including a marathon question-and-answer session with a sometimes hostile London School of Economics crowd that criticized him for saying he was proud of his country.

"He wasn't just going out and getting his passport stamped," said Derek Chollet, a longtime Edwards adviser who accompanied him on several trips. "He was trying to test ideas, work things out in his head."

Some trips were funded by the Fortress Investment Group, a $30 billion hedge-fund manager who hired Edwards as a consultant in 2005 -- and whose holdings in the sub-prime lending industry would raise questions for Edwards in his presidential bid.

Fortress paid Edwards nearly $500,000 in 2006, and its employees contributed heavily to his 2008 campaign. Edwards said in an interview that he took the position to learn more about how financial markets work. And, the man who pegged his fortune at nearly $30 million in a disclosure report this year added, "I wanted a job that earned income. I was 50-something years old, and my entire life I've worked."

In March of 2006, Edwards called his inner circle to Raleigh again. He told them he was in for '08. He would bring on some new advisers, but this time, he would be in charge of the message. As one person in the meeting put it: "He doesn?t want other people?s words in his brain."

The smile has not changed. It still spreads easily from ear to ear, across a face that bears remarkably few lines for all its years, stresses and sorrows.

"I'm still an optimist," Edwards says during an interview in Iowa.

But in Iowa and New Hampshire -- where, by nearly all forecasts, Edwards needs strong showings to have a chance against the better-financed Hillary Clinton and Obama when the campaign hits an expensive blitz of states on Feb. 5 -- the words streaming from behind the smile are bolder, harsher and heavier than the Edwards of old.

It's a late weekday morning in Littleton, N.H. A fleece-clad crowd is spilling out the back door of a low-ceilinged, wood-paneled building and peering through the windows at a man with rolled-up sleeves and a microphone.

A bluegrass band, the warm-up act on this Granite State swing, has yielded the stage. Edwards is midway through a several-minute rundown of his universal health-care plan when he pauses to beckon the stragglers inside: "Y'all just keep comin'!"

He has kicked off the speech with a diatribe against health insurers and a thinly masked jab at U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, who, he likes to note, accepts contributions from lobbyists. "I don't want to see a bunch of corporate Republicans replaced by a bunch of corporate Democrats," he says.

Later, he touts his college-for-everyone proposal, his push to curb global warming that includes consumer sacrifice -- "it's time for America to be patriotic about something other than war" -- and his plan to end the Iraq war. (Between elections, Edwards publicly repudiated his Senate vote to authorize force in Iraq.) He invokes his Africa travels to stress that "the world needs to see us as a force for good."

Opposing campaigns question where Edwards' sunshine has gone. Not this crowd or similar ones across New Hampshire or Iowa on a pair of recent campaign swings.

Littleton resident Jed Holmes points to his heart when asked about Edwards. "He speaks from here, I believe," he says.

The Edwards campaign proudly notes that he announced a detailed position on nearly every major issue before Clinton or Obama -- by design, advisers say; he wanted to set the agenda. After avoiding the fray while other candidates brawled for the '04 nomination, he attacked Clinton relentlessly this fall.

"In 2004, a lot of people in Iowa said, 'We like this guy, but we're not sure he's ready,' " said Robert Shrum, who advised Edwards in his Senate campaign and Kerry in 2004. "He may not win Iowa this time, but that won't be why."

Shrum's memoir, published this year, hints at what rivals say could keep Edwards from the nomination: a question of authenticity. Shrum writes that Edwards, interviewing for the vice-presidential nod, told Kerry a story about his son Wade's funeral that he claimed never to have told anyone before -- except, Kerry remembered, Edwards had told him the same story the previous year.

Rivals add to that Edwards' infamous $400 haircuts -- he said he didn't know they'd be so expensive -- and the dream house, complete with indoor basketball court and swimming pool, that he and Elizabeth are building outside Chapel Hill. They note his shift from Senate centrist to arguably the most liberal positions of the top '08 Democratic contenders. Even his campaign headquarters, nestled amid trendy restaurants and a Google branch office in an upscale Chapel Hill development, has sparked controversy for its symbolism.

Friends and aides liken Edwards' personal wealth and commitment to poverty to the Kennedy clan -- perhaps Edwards' true political heroes; he was close with Ted Kennedy in the Senate and would listen to Robert Kennedy's speeches on drives between North Carolina and Washington.

John and Elizabeth Edwards, who are continuing the campaign despite her cancer's recurrence this spring, prefer to invoke his working- class roots.

"It's sort of naive, it's sort of masterfully brilliant," a former Edwards adviser said. "They think they're normal people. They think they're like a soccer mom and a small-town lawyer. They think, 'They're normal America, and we;re normal America, and they'll understand.' "

Edwards writes in "Four Trials," his book about courtroom successes and life challenges, that early in his law career, "I learned that trials are about credibility -- and that if a jury is to believe your case, a jury must believe you."

On this crisp New Hampshire morning, a woman with a thick chowda accent asks Edwards to name "that one other characteristic that you have above all the other [Democrats] that you say, 'I'm in this race because they don?t have this and I do.' "

Edwards stammers a moment to find his words. "If I were choosing a president and I wasn't running," he says, "besides the policy positions, which are important, I would be looking -- absolutely require -- that the person I vote for be honest and sincere. ... We don't need the world's next great politician as president. We need somebody we can trust."

Later that day, on a charter plane high over Pennsylvania, he elaborates.

"I'm perfectly happy to answer that question in front of America and let them judge me," he says. "Am I phony or not? I think they'll say that I'm not."
Howie P.S.: Edwards has a new ad up in Iowa. As Ben Smith says, "His tone, as it has been lately, is pure, vintage 2004 optimism."

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