so that I could arrange [co for landscapers to make things right. We made good on this promise, but eventually one of the senator’s neighbors made a public stink about how Edwards had shown himself to be a bad citizen by tearing up lawns.
Except for the grumpy neighbors, the response to the launch of the campaign was remarkably positive. We saw a surge in donations and received a flood of resumes and calls from people who wanted to work with us. I was most impressed by a young woman named Kayla Burman, who walked through the door of the office about a week after the announcement and asked how she could help. We were receiving hundreds of applications, including from people with two or three Ivy League degrees, and I was busy trying to figure out why a fax machine wouldn’t work. I thanked her, then told her to leave her resume and wait for us to get back to her. She promptly burst into tears.
The crying got my attention, and as she calmed down, Kayla explained that she had driven to North Carolina from California, alone and eighteen years old, in a beat-?up old car, because she believed in John Edwards and just had to do something to get him elected. Our top campaign consultant, Nick Baldick, was in charge of the payroll, so I didn’t have a paying job for her, but I asked her to volunteer in the office. She found a free couch to crash on for three months until we were able to pay her. By then, she had real skills and was a valuable part of the team. And no one had more enthusiasm.
The senator had repeatedly promised me that I could have any campaign job I wanted, but Mrs. Edwards told Cheri she was thinking about her, Brody, and Lauren Grace when she pushed to make sure I was named operations manager in Raleigh and didn’t go on the road minding the senator as his body man or setting up events as an advance man. She also told Cheri that she wanted me to be in North Carolina to help with her family while the senator was traveling. In the role of operations manager, I would be responsible for supporting the people in the field, as well as setting up and maintaining a national network of offices in key states. For the offices, I found the cheapest space possible-in old gas stations, warehouses, even an abandoned firehouse-and arranged for phones, Internet service, computers, and furnishings. The advance men and other traveling staff needed cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys, hotels, rental cars, airline tickets, and other support, which I was supposed to supply at the lowest possible cost. With over 150 full-?time employees, scores of office locations across the country, thousands of volunteers, and over $30 million in expenditures in one year, it was like setting up a small company on short notice.
Once things got going, the people who required the most support and attention were on the advance staff, which numbered about fifteen at any one time. Advance men-and they are almost all men-are a cross between community organizers and rock-?and-?roll roadies who trash hotel rooms and run up big room service tabs. They can turn a parking lot into a rally site and arrange for a candidate to meet key people and speak to important audiences all day long. High-?energy types, they tend to have extreme personalities. Typical was a mustached former advance man for President Clinton named Sam Myers, whom we called “Senior [ &#” because he asked that we hire his son, “Junior,” too. Beloved by the senator, Senior could manage an event with the creativity of the director of a feature film, and I can’t think of a time when anything went wrong with an event he handled.
Another of our stars was a wild man named Marc Adelman, who spent several hundred dollars a month on cell phone calls. I liked Marc and Senior and most of the other people we sent out across the country because they worked hard, performed their duties well, and always had entertaining stories to tell when they called in. But they were also high-?maintenance people who wanted to crash in the best hotels, loved room service, and tended to violate the no-?smoking rules so that we had to pay expensive cleaning charges. One of our guys even hit a moose while driving a van rented by the campaign in an isolated corner of some northern state. The accident was bad enough. The fact that he had failed to check off the box requesting insurance coverage on the car rental form made it a minor disaster.
As the person responsible for both the arrangements for our people in the field and the budget to pay for everything, in a good cop/bad cop routine, I played with Nick and Sam. I was supposed to impose some discipline on these folks, which wasn’t easy considering that we often changed plans on the fly and had to book travel on short notice, when the airlines and hotels charge their highest prices. The complexity of the job was mind-?boggling. I mean, how do you get a handle on the cell phone budget when an organization has four hundred phones and people keep losing them?
Fortunately, in the early days of the campaign, we raced to the head of the pack in the competition for contributions, which gave us more cash to spend than anyone else. In just the first three months of 2003, the organization posted nearly $7.5 million in donations, a record that left people in the camp of the second-?place candidate, John Kerry, saying, “We’re impressed.” The writers for the ABC News political report The Note went a little further with an article titled “Shock and Awe: John Edwards Sets a Blazing Pace.” Senator Tom Daschle, once a viable contender, promptly dropped out of the race.
The war chest was filled by a new fund-?raising team who had replaced Mudcat Saunders and Steve Jarding after the senator found out they had promised we would make sizable donations to politicians and organizations in key states. (We couldn’t afford them.) The new group also employed some unorthodox techniques-according to gossip, one of them actually slept with a number of big donors-but they were obviously effective. They got a lot of help from trial lawyers like Fred M. Baron of Texas, who had become super-?rich suing asbestos manufacturers and other companies on behalf of people injured by their products. A former high-?school football player, Fred was extremely fit and young looking for his age, which was fifty-?six. He had silver hair and a million-?dollar smile, and he wore wire-?rimmed glasses that made him look sort of professorial. The law firm he founded, Baron & Budd, was so big and successful that it pursued cases nationwide.
Although Fred provided invaluable connections to wealthy and powerful people, he made an even more important contribution to the campaign when he agreed to give the senator regular use of his jet. In the post-9/11 era, it’s hard to ove [;s rstate how important flying private is for a presidential candidate. With a private jet, you can visit four key states in one day and make it home for the night. If you fly commercial, you can only do half as many events and you won’t be home at the end of the day.
Fred was often on the plane with the senator, especially for fund-?raising tours, which were conducted at a breakneck pace. In one three-?hour period, they might rush from drinks with a small group to two separate dinners, drinks with another crowd, and then meet privately with a major “bundler” who would gather donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. These trips were exhausting, and despite being around a lot of food, the senator and Fred ate so little that they’d be starving come midnight. Under the stress, Edwards sometimes got irritated when his friend pushed him to stay on schedule. Fred, who was usually a happy-?go-?lucky guy, was a stickler for punctuality, and because he was not intimidated by Edwards-Bill and Hillary Clinton were his close friends-he would complain every time Edwards was late for an appointment. And the senator was almost always late. The irritation was mutual, and after hearing a few grousing remarks from Baron, the senator took to calling him Fred A. Baron (the A stood for “asshole”) whenever he talked to me about him.
I liked Fred, and his trial lawyer contacts supplied most of the low-?hanging fruit-easy money-that we collected early in the campaign. Some of these fellows also got us into a little trouble with the Federal Election Commission because they tried to get around legal limits on their contributions by getting employees to donate and promising to reimburse them. These violations were resolved when the money was returned and a penalty was paid, but the effect of negative publicity around them lingered.
While Fred and the senator poured time and effort into amassing an intimidating pile of cash, an all-?star group of professionals put together the machine that would be responsible for attacking the caucus and primary states. For 2004, Edwards relied on heavyweights who had previously served the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden, Bill Bradley, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and George McGovern. Senior advisers like David Axelrod of Chicago fashioned the campaign message. Consultant Nick Baldick guided the day-?to-?day conduct of the campaign, while Harrison Hickman handled polling. Our communications were run by David Ginsberg and press spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, who were veterans of the Clinton White House.
The first real action in the battle came in May 2003, when nine Democrats took the stage together for a debate in South Carolina, where the senator was almost a favorite son. The only thing this session established was a sense of who the serious candidates might be, and the list included Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Vermont governor Howard Dean, and John Kerry. Kerry and Dean, who were from states that bordered New Hampshire, were considered to be the front-?runners, and they spent much of their time sniping at each other, as if it were a two-?man race. After the debate, Senator Edwards announced that he was not going to run for reelection to the Senate, so that he could keep his focus on higher office. But even with this distraction removed, he found it hard to reach the voters with his message. As the months passed, it became clear that we weren’t getting much traction in our effort to catch up with Kerry and Dean. Donors noticed, too [s n, and since they were most interested in supporting the man who might actually get to the White House, we found it more difficult to talk them into writing checks.
As money became tight, I received lots of calls from field-?workers who found that their campaign-?issued credit cards were being rejected. (The worst moment came when the current body man, a young fellow named Hunter “Rock Star” Pruette, had his card rejected after dinner at a restaurant with the candidate himself.) On many nights I had to fax credit information to hotels at one or two in the morning so that our people could check in, and every day I engaged in a running battle to control spending. But no matter what I tried, the guys on the road were able to outfox me. For example, when I required them to double up in hotel rooms, they started listing the names of volunteers as their roommates. These people weren’t actually in the rooms, but the trick allowed them to get their way in the tussle over money.
The people who work in big campaigns are all, by definition, ambitious and competitive, and they are often highly manipulative. They also fall into camps that have very different perspectives on the candidate and the future. Outside consultants, professionals hired for their expertise, may care about the cause and the Democratic Party, but they are also concerned about their reputations, bank accounts, and future work. They want to win because it’s good for business. Campaigns also rely on thousands of volunteers who come and go. Most of these people never have any contact at all with the candidate. People like me, who had an established history with the candidate, hoped to continue with Edwards long into the future.
There was an odd feeling on our campaign, because very few staffers came from North Carolina and I was the only one who had worked for Edwards in the Senate. Nick Baldick, an established political pro who had had little prior contact with Edwards staffers, was hired to run the presidential campaign and given full control. (People who once ran things for Edwards in the Senate were either let go or given minor positions.) Baldick also brought in manuals left over from the Gore campaign and his own people, including an associate named John Robinson. Calling himself “J. Rob,” he arrived in Raleigh driving a little Mazda Miata sports car and lugging a huge amount of bad attitude. From the moment he set himself up in the office opposite mine, he tried to intimidate me (and everyone else) by barking orders, making mocking remarks, and sending a stream of text-?message requests even though I was sitting ten feet away and always available for a talk.
J. Rob didn’t appreciate that besides managing all the demands of the campaign staff and the senator, I was still taking care of the personal needs of the Edwards family. Here J. Rob had something in common with my wife, Cheri, who also questioned the time I put into the care of the Edwards clan. But although I could understand the concern, I figured that as long as I didn’t screw anything up, J. Rob should leave me alone.
On a particularly bad day, when J. Rob kept on sending me annoying texts about problems I was working to resolve, I answered one of his messages with a wisecrack. Incensed, he got up from behind his desk and actually walked the vast distance across the hall to my doorway and glared at me. I was on the phone, so I covered the mouthpiece and said, “I &# [id,8217;m on a call.”
J. Rob was not accustomed to being sloughed off. He turned on his heel, and as he retreated into his office, he slammed the door hard enough to shake the walls. Soon after I completed my call he came back, stood in the doorway with his arms folded, and said, “You were sassing me.”
I leaned back in my chair and said, “No. I don’t think so. That’s the kind of thing a little kid does to his parents, so I wouldn’t say I was sassing you.”
“Well, I don’t care what the fuck you call it,” he shouted. “You work for me, and you don’t ever talk to me like that.”
With that, he turned away and went to retrieve a gym bag so he could change his clothes and go for a run. Now I was incensed. I got up, followed him, and growled, “Don’t ever fucking yell at me. I was here way before you got here. I’ll be here long after you are gone.” Completely fired up, I followed him to the elevator, took out my cell phone, and challenged him: “Why don’t we call the senator right now and see if he wants to fire me or you? I’ve got his number. We can settle this right now.”
Suddenly, J. Rob wasn’t so eager to yell back. He muttered something about calling his man Baldick, and when the elevator came, he got on it and disappeared. I noticed afterward that he stopped yelling in my direction and the flood of text messages slowed to a trickle. Two weeks later, Nick came to town for a meeting with key staff, and as we sat around a table we were asked to introduce ourselves. When it was my turn, I hesitated-as always-owing to my fear of talking in groups. J. Rob jumped in to say, “I’ll tell you something about Andrew. He hates it when people yell at him.”
Because the professionals had their own games to play-like the one between J. Rob and me-and their long-?term careers to consider, they tended to get distracted and preferred a conservative campaign style. (Later I would realize that some of these guys wouldn’t attack an opponent in the primaries because they were worried about getting jobs with whoever won in the end. Unfortunately, Senator Edwards listened to these consultants and followed their advice too closely, almost becoming robotic.)
Despite their flaws, they were very good at their jobs, a fact that became obvious to me when it came time for us to shift from “exploratory” status to a genuine presidential campaign. First they arranged for an informal “announcement” on Jon Stewart’s program, The Daily Show, which would appeal to younger voters. Then they put together an event for the big formal announcement. The main event would be held in Robbins in front of the old textile mill, which had been shut down and stood as a massive brick emblem of the troubles in small-?town America.
