Hate sells in the Primaries. He can always back off if he makes it.
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Pique Performance
On the Stump, John Edwards Is a Man Spoiling for a Good Fight
By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page C01
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa
This is John Edwards doing rage:
"George Bush goes down to that big ranch of his, with that big belt buckle," he says. "He pretends to know what it's like for you and me." Edwards's voice eases to a slow, dripping disdain. One imagines him in his previous career as a plaintiff's lawyer, representing, he says, "ordinary people who play by the rules." He is indignant, theatrical and successful -- in courtrooms as on the stump. He draws big applause from a weekday crowd of 200 at a small community center here. He has 5-year-old girls booing pharmaceutical lobbyists.
One of the striking things about seeing Edwards up close is the degree of raw anger he evinces in his speeches -- and the level of anger he elicits from his audiences toward the president. It's not uncommon for presidential candidates such as Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt or John Kerry to attack Bush's performance with contempt and ridicule.
But Edwards's anger seems more stomach-level. He is prone to attack Bush not just for what he has done in office, but for who he is and where he comes from. Several times a day, Edwards will dismiss the president as "a man who only values wealth and money."
"It's the way he looks at the world," Edwards says of Bush. "This is his world, this is what he knows. He's working for a handful of insiders. People like Halliburton," he says of the energy company formerly led by Vice President Cheney. The president's priorities, Edwards says, are offensive to people "who grew up the way I did."
Edwards, 50, was raised in a procession of Southern mill towns. He got into fights. "This kind of fight," he says, holding his right fist to a reporter's nose. It was, he says, "very much the law of the jungle. . . . If you couldn't protect yourself, they'd run all over you."
The North Carolina senator likes fighting imagery. Not in the cliched, metaphoric manner of "fighting political battles" or "leading the fight for working people," but actual, blood-smeared fights. He recounts one from high school. Edwards was a freshman, his opponent a junior or senior. The other guy was a bully, Edwards says. The other guy started it.
"He was winning," he says. "And I remember I was really upset because a lot of people were watching and I was embarrassing myself."
Edwards was much smaller. But as the fight wore on, things turned. "By the end of the fight, he was backing up," he says.
That ability to connect to the gut is part of Edwards's strength as a politician. He is a full-body listener: He cocks his head, locks in his stare, clenches his fists at his side, feels people's pain, all that.
But Edwards also lacks some of the qualities that allow candidates to rise above the clutter of noise and sound bites in multi-candidate debates. He is not a gifted jokester (like Joe Lieberman) or a preacher (Al Sharpton) or a provocateur (Dean). He is best when he has the room to himself.
"There's something that's authentic about John Edwards that's hard to measure from a distance," says Ro Foege, an Iowa state legislator and an early Edwards supporter. ("Ro" is short for Romaine, he says. "My mom thought I was a head of lettuce.")
"He gives you a feeling in your gut when you meet him," says Beverly Strayhall, of Davenport, Iowa. She means a good feeling. And one day, she says, people will catch on to this. That's the hope, or the plan: That people will start paying attention to John Edwards -- "people" being the media and the pollsters and the fickle oracles of momentum who decide who is winning and who's losing and who's surging in a campaign whose first votes won't be cast for three months.
Edwards had momentum once. It was more than a year and several flavors of the month ago. He was a nimble mind and fresh face. He was profiled lovingly in the New Yorker, People and Vanity Fair. He raised a lot of early money. He hired a smart, experienced staff. He was the "It" candidate.
Of 2002.
But that was before Al Gore decided not to run, and Kerry was anointed the new front-runner, and Dean surged ahead of Kerry, and Wesley Clark jumped into the race and onto magazine covers.
Stories about Edwards began to include, as they still do, phrases such as "second-tier" or "whose campaign has yet to catch fire" or "has been overshadowed by." A powerful judgment was set: John Edwards is running unanointed.
In 2003.
Noise Filter
"It's just short-term noise."
This is what Edwards calls the cacophony of wise-guy judgments that are rendered in a campaign. "Day-to-day chatter that regular voters are paying no attention to," he says. He means polls, punditry -- who's up, who's down, who won the quarter in fundraising.
In interviews, Edwards is polite and disciplined. But his voice takes on a discernible edge when discussing "short-term noise."
"I don't read the stuff you're talking about," he says. This would be the stuff that runs in nearly every story about his campaign, about how it is "in search of a niche." Or that Dean has seized the mantle of the angry outsider candidate, or that Clark has stolen Edwards's claim to the South.
Edwards holds his thumb and forefinger three inches apart to demonstrate the "clips this big with my name in them" that come out every day and that he does not read.
It is common for candidates who find themselves on the wrong side of conventional wisdom to say that they're paying no attention to conventional wisdom (unless said conventional wisdom has them ahead in, say, South Carolina). They will inevitably claim to be "sensing" great energy on the stump. Voters are "responding" as they hadn't previously. These are generally the same lagging candidates who say they don't believe in polls.
Still, it would seem that there is more of a flavor-of-the-month quality to this Democratic primary than previous ones. Perhaps it's due to the glut of candidates, condensed news cycles and the overall proliferation of information.
"There is just a lot of introspective reporting that goes on," says Edwards's wife, Elizabeth. By this she means media groupthink that says, "This guy's doing well because we say so, and that guy's not doing well because we say so. And because this guy's doing well, obviously this guy couldn't be going well."
She shakes her head and laughs, and offers the oft-heard caveat in the Edwards orbit, which also happens to be true: Few voters are even paying attention at this point.
Getting Things Right
Yet the expert examinations swirl. Smart dudes and dudettes talking, writing, blogging. Candidates are anointed, unanointed, disregarded.
"Oh, of course," John Edwards says when asked if this can be frustrating. He is sitting in the back seat of a van, on a half-hour's drive between campaign events in Fort Madison and Keokuk. He sips from one of the 10 or so cans of Diet Coke he drinks in a typical day.
"I've sat through so many trials where I would see jurors move from day to day," he says. "They would be angry about this, or angry about something that happened that day, or responsive to something." This experience has engendered in him a faith, he says, that over the long term "people get things right."
In recent weeks, Edwards has been campaigning to good reviews and growing crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls show him leading in the key early state of South Carolina. Edwards's plan, basically, is to wear well. He will "talk directly to voters," to emphasize the qualities that make him distinct and to offer himself as a "different kind of candidate." He touts his outsider's bona fides: He is not a political lifer. He was elected to his first and only Senate term in 1998, defeating Republican Lauch Faircloth. (Edwards announced recently that he will not run for re-election next year, and that he will focus entirely on his presidential campaign.)
He lacks experience, his critics say, to which Edwards responds that his training comes in non-political realms. As a prominent trial lawyer, he gave legal voice to the voiceless. Other lawyers would flood into court to watch Edwards give closing statements. He could move juries to tears.
Johnny Reid Edwards was born in the mill town of Seneca, S.C. Neither of his parents, Wallace and Bobbie Edwards, attended college. The family settled in Robbins, N.C., when John was in seventh grade as his father took a job in a mill, eventually working his way up to supervisor (only then to be demoted because he lacked a college degree).
Belying a pleasant mien, Edwards is quick, if not to anger, then to revel in his rawer self. He eats like a savage, chews hard, rips off pieces of sandwich with his teeth. His grimaces when he discusses the people he knew growing up, people "that were never given the proper respect."
He squints. "My father used to always say he could tell in 30 seconds if somebody was talking down to him." His grandfather, a boxer, was paralyzed over half of his body in a fight.
"And I'd see people making fun of him. And it had an effect on me."
Edwards is at his most animated when describing how his roughened edges were and are manifest. When he first moved to Robbins, a group of kids from the neighborhood invited him to play football on Sunday afternoons. Edwards's style of play was so chippy and physical that other players didn't even try to tackle him, he says.
Like the fighting metaphor, this works as a tidy symbol for a man who makes tidy presentations of his life's narrative. But to see Edwards up close is to view a decided lack of tidiness -- a raw, emotional edge.
His self-assurance collapses as he recalls a case he tried in the late 1980s. He represented an injured young man who was suing a trucking company and was devastated when the jury ruled for the company. "I had to go tell this young man that he lost," Edwards says. "He had a serious brain injury. He just didn't understand. And he kept asking me over and over again."
Edwards stopped sleeping. He blamed himself.
"He believed in me," Edwards says. "He believed I could do this for him. And he was right. There must have been something I didn't do right."
He shakes his head over and over. He appears distracted for several minutes.
Connect Calls
Edwards is a magnet for people's stories. It doesn't matter how rambling or personal their accounts are, or whether they're relevant to the office he is seeking. He just seems to get them. The phenomenon infuses Edwards's campaign stops with a confessional flavor.
A divorced father in Cedar Rapids wants to see more of his children. He asks Edwards whether he's considered some kind of "affirmative action program" that would help fathers. Not really, Edwards says in so many words.
"Be sure you give me your name and phone number so I can get back to you," Edwards says. By "me" and "I," he means that a staff person will get back to the man. Edwards deploys the "me" or "I" pronoun several times a day, in the same way that a waiter might say, "I'm all out of taco salads." The transaction is lent a whiff of intimacy.
At a union hall in Keokuk, a burly man divulges to Edwards -- at great length -- that he has a brain tumor and a year to live. His kids are in Illinois with his ex-wife, to whom he pays $235 a month in child support and who is giving him all kinds of runaround.
But that's another story. The man goes on for several minutes. He wants to know: What can John Edwards do for him?
Nothing, as a practical matter. Edwards is running for president, not caseworker.
But that is beside the point. This is a chance to connect. "Make sure I know how I can reach you," he tells the man, and he moves on to a question about North Korea.
"People want somebody they perceive as a leader in the country to listen to them," Edwards says. "And I think that matters to them."
At a house party in Tipton, a woman tells Edwards that her husband just died and she's struggling to get health insurance. After his brief speech, Edwards will tap her on the shoulder and she will whisper in his ear.
She lost a son in a drowning accident in 1995. He was 19. Edwards's son Wade was 16 when he was killed in a car wreck in 1996.
"It never leaves you, does it?" he says to the woman, Rose Sessler of Wilton. He holds her by the shoulders, and says, "Bless your heart," as he turns to leave.
"He's someone that people will be drawn to once they get to know him," Sessler says.
But can a candidate ever be sufficiently known if not blessed with momentum? The question is the political equivalent of a tree falling in a forest: If Edwards gives a great stump speech and moves people and "feels great energy wherever he goes," does it matter that only a small entourage is recording the transaction?
Does it make Rose Sessler's tears less real?
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