Edwards' face lit up when I recognized him and he stuck out his hand. "I'm a reporter at The Leader," I said. "I've met you before." His whole body seemed to sink along with his smile. I wasn't some voter who'd just recognized him on the street. I was supposed to know who he was.
At the time, my boss Stan Kaplan, the now-deceased owner of the newspaper, was fundraising for Edwards. In those pre-historic days of Edwards' Senate campaign six years ago, when no one knew him from Adam, Kaplan would take him around town and introduce him to the bigwigs.
In between meetings, Edwards spent a lot of time at our office. Or rather, on the sidewalk in front of our office, shoving his hand at those who walked by. Sometimes, it seemed, he was out there for hours.
I initially committed Edwards' name to memory after Kaplan pointed out that I'd inadvertently forgotten to include it in an early article I wrote about the Democratic Senate primary. But I wouldn't say I was really aware of him until the incident a few weeks later at Green's. It was around lunchtime, and I happened to notice Edwards entering the restaurant out of the corner of my eye as I lit up a cigarette in the Leader parking lot next door.
I'm not certain exactly what transpired in the length of time it took me to smoke that cigarette and run upstairs to get my purse, but by the time I walked through the front door of the restaurant, two-thirds of the people in the place, people who just 15 minutes before didn't know who Edwards was, were gathered around him, listening with rapt attention to whatever it was he was saying.
As a person who spent dozens of hours every week listening to politicians pontificate, there wasn't much that impressed me. But this, I'd never seen before. Neither, apparently, had those folks at Green's. Several held their forgotten lunch plates in their hands, their food growing cold. He had them glued in a way that was almost eerie.
From across the room, I couldn't make out exactly what he was saying, which really wasn't important, anyway. For Edwards, speaking was more of an aerobic exercise. His arms and body carved out emphasis for his words in the space around him with such intensity that you were never quite certain he wasn't going to grab someone by the collar and shake him to drive home the point.
It was the kind of theatrics normally best enjoyed about 10 rows back from a stage, and if Edwards wasn't so clearly comfortable in his own skin, the raw emotion of his performance would have been too intense for a small space like Green's. As I watched him, the hair on my arms stood on end and I got goosebumps. I was seeing something rare, something I'd never seen before and haven't seen since, and I knew it. This guy could be President some day, I told Kaplan. I've been writing that ever since, no matter what the numbers said.
At the time in 1998, Edwards' name barely registered in the polls. But unknown to his Democratic challengers, Washington consultants were already working on a few million dollars' worth of television ads. While the other candidates in the race were hobbling by with staffs of two or fewer, a staff of 15 was already slaving away for Edwards, a trial lawyer reputed to be worth up to $38 million who ultimately spent $3.2 million of his own money on that primary. In North Carolina, Democratic primaries are considered to be grassroots affairs that turn on personal loyalties and a complex system of dealmaking. It was, and still is considered almost gauche by the party establishment to buy a primary with that much of one's own money. Party leaders like Erskine Bowles shunned Edwards and wrote thousand dollar checks to his opponent, D.G. Martin, a millionaire who loaned his campaign a mere $300,000.
By April, when Martin, the guy who was supposed to win the May primary, finally began taping television commercials, Edwards had run so many ads, he'd built a double-digit lead. It didn't matter that Martin had spent years building relationships with the state's African-American leaders. Edwards bridged the gap by hiring them to reach out to the black community for him. Martin's carefully planned grassroots strategy was no match for a multi-million dollar air war. Martin underestimated Edwards and got trounced. Six months later, after money poured in to Edwards' coffers, Republican incumbent Senator Lauch Faircloth lost for similar reasons.
So was it the magnetism that did it for Edwards, or the money? Political experts are still having that debate, both here and in Washington.
Political analyst Jennifer Duffy of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, a political analysis outfit known for its accuracy at handicapping political races, still can't make up her mind.
"A mystique about Edwards, yes there is," she said. "There is no question he's gifted. I was in Iowa the weekend before the Democratic caucuses and we spent the morning with John Kerry. It's such a contrast. Kerry had this great event where it was perfect, perfect advance work. The backdrops were perfect; the room was filled just right, the music just made sense. Ted Kennedy was there to whip the crowd into a frenzy. Kerry himself was very flat. So then we drive off to Mason City for an Edwards rally and the room is too small. He is really late. It's really disorganized. This woman gets up to introduce him, does not introduce herself, and introduces him as "the next possible President of the United States.' This is a campaign advance person's nightmare. And then Edwards didn't come in the room for six minutes. But despite all of that, he just gave one of the greatest speeches. People really got into it."
Duffy has met hundreds of Senate candidates over the last 15 years. Few have stood out like Edwards. Then again, she says, there was the disastrous 2002 Meet the Press interview in which he literally fell apart on the Tim Russert chopping block, fumbling easy questions and contradicting himself.
The legendary magnetism doesn't always come across on television, Duffy said. He's not as good in one-on-one situations he can't control. And it's easy to forget that the man has been elected to something exactly once in his life, sliding past Republican incumbent Lauch Faircloth with just 51 percent of the vote in 1998 after Faircloth ran one of the lousiest campaigns in North Carolina electoral history. And while Edwards initially showed OK in the Democratic presidential primaries, he ultimately got clobbered in the primary arena when his money was no longer enough to guarantee him a win.
Then again, Edwards stands out for something else, too. Politically speaking, he's also one of the luckiest bastards Duffy's ever met.
It's easy to forget, she points out, that just over a year ago, a poll for the Raleigh News & Observer by Research 2000 showed that North Carolinians had had it with Edwards' endless campaigning for national office, first for the number two slot on the Al Gore ticket in 2000 and then for the number one slot on the 2004 presidential ticket. Just 32 percent said they'd reelect him. (For comparison, Faircloth's reelect percentage was at 45 percent when Edwards took him on in 1998.) Ambitious politicians in North Carolina smelled blood. Edwards declined to run again for the Senate. National pundits began to question whether he could win reelection in his own state. That, in turn, hurt his presidential primary campaign, particularly in the fundraising department.
For the past year, Edwards' political career has hung by a thread that threatened to snap at any time. If he didn't win the number one or number two slots on the 2004 Democratic presidential ticket, he was effectively finished in national politics. Edwards may now be billed as the saving grace that could push Kerry over the finish line, but when Kerry picked him as his running mate last week, he also saved Edwards from political obscurity.
Now, saved from the political graveyard by luck and months of hard work fundraising and campaigning for Kerry, Edwards' star is rising again.
Last month, a year after polls spelled potential disaster for Edwards in a Senate race here, another Research 2000 poll for the News & Observer shows that Edwards' standing in his home state has vastly improved. With Edwards on the ticket, Kerry could get within striking distance of Bush in North Carolina.
If North Carolina elected a president on the day the poll was conducted, President Bush would win, 47 percent to 42 percent. But with Edwards on the ticket, the divide would narrow further, to within the statistical margin of error, a far cry from the 16 percentage point margin of Bush's win over Gore in this state in 2000.
When Creative Loafing asked Stuart Rothenberg, a CNN analyst and author of the Rothenberg Political Report, a bi-weekly analysis of US Senate and House districts, to pick a winner in the presidential election if it were held this week, he picked Kerry. But, he said, that wouldn't have much to do with Edwards.
"Does he bring any states, does he change the dynamics?" Rothenberg asked. "If he was a bomb he might have changed the dynamics. If he was John McCain he might have changed the dynamics, but he's still kind of a liberal senator from North Carolina. He beat an incumbent where Republicans have a narrow advantage. I think that John Edwards might have lost the Senate election. Is he as spectacular in an election as he is working a room? The answer is no. It's still about John Kerry and George Bush. I don't anticipate North Carolina being in play."
That seems to be the standard view of the Edwards situation among hardened Washington number crunchers. Statistics have always shown that vice presidential candidates have only a tiny impact, if any at all, on a presidential election, and this race will be no different.
Rothenberg drew the same conclusion in a column in Roll Call last week -- after he spent the first two thirds of it raving about that magical something Edwards has that even veteran political numbers guys like himself are struggling to define -- and to deal with.
"I still remember the first time I saw John Edwards," Rothenberg wrote. "It was in May 1998, and he was seeking the Democratic nomination in North Carolina for the right to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth. Seeing as many candidates as I do, I often forget my initial reactions when I meet and interview someone for the first time. But not with Edwards. In the middle of my interview with the Senate hopeful, I remember thinking, "This guy is going to run for president some day.' As I recall, I thought even then that he would have a decent chance of eventually settling into the Oval Office."
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
