By Kate Zernike
International Herald Trribune
John Edwards, accepting his party's nomination for vice president, roused a cheering crowd at the 2004 Democratic convention with the kind of buoyant refrain that had become his trademark: "Hope is on the way."
The next night, wanting to give the American people something more tangible, John Kerry offered his own pledge, one intended as the ticket's new slogan: "Help is on the way."
But Edwards did not want to say it.
So the running mates set off across the country together with different messages, sometimes delivered at the same rally: Kerry leading the crowd in chants for "help," Edwards for "hope." The campaign printed two sets of signs. By November, the disagreement had been so institutionalized that campaign workers handed out fans at churches with both messages, on flip sides.
To the end of their disappointing run, the two men were unable to agree on the same script, whether for slogans or more substantive matters. And like so many political marriages, that of Kerry and Edwards - Senate colleagues who became rivals and then ticketmates but not really friends- ended in recriminations and regrets.
Kerry aides complain that Edwards never stopped running for president - a Democratic party official recalled some aides wearing "Edwards for President" pins at a fund-raiser long after they were working for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Kerry supporters say Edwards refused to play the traditional vice presidential role of attack dog even as he was going up against a purebred, Dick Cheney. And Kerry had barely conceded the race, they say, before Edwards was aiming for 2008 and embarking on what one campaign aide called the "it wasn't my fault tour" around his home state to distance himself from the loss to George W. Bush.
For his part, Edwards felt frustrated by Kerry's public agonizing over the war in Iraq and a campaign that seemed to constantly change consultants and message. To Edwards, Kerry seemed unable to get out of his own way . He ignored Edwards's warning not to go windsurfing, for example, which led to a "whichever way the wind blows" advertisement mocking Kerry's views on the war. In the end, because Kerry didn't make a legal challenge to the election results, Edwards concluded that Kerry lacked fight.
Today, Edwards insists that he is "the same person I've always been." But his experience as a vice presidential candidate who went down to defeat clearly has influenced his current run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Having seen up close the perils of seeming to shift with the wind, he is selling himself as the candidate of "conviction" and "bold ideas" and trying to portray the front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as tacking for political gain. Once the sunny centrist who did not want to criticize his rivals by name, he has become the most confrontational candidate in the race. And he has courted his party's left wing by renouncing his vote on the war, something he counseled Kerry not to do.
"There's no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004," said Peter Scher, who Kerry recruited to run Edwards's vice presidential campaign. "There's a great deal more confidence in his own instincts and his own judgment. You see much less reliance on consultants and pollsters and media advisers, and more of a willingness to say what he believes and let the chips fall where they may."
Kerry loyalists, meanwhile, seethe as they watch Edwards becoming a more aggressive candidate. Stephanie Cutter, who was Kerry's communications director, said, "A lot of what I'm seeing now, I wish I'd seen in 2004."
Edwards defends his change in tone, calling it the result of "a maturing process."
"I believe that presidential candidates actually have a responsibility to point out substantive differences, to point out perspectives that are different," he said in an interview between campaign stops in Iowa. "I'm totally comfortable doing it."
Edwards began campaigning to be Kerry's running mate as soon as his own presidential run collapsed when he failed to win any of the Super Tuesday primaries in March 2004. He appeared at rallies for Kerry. He dispatched representatives to party officials and Kerry aides, promising that he could raise $20 million and help win his home state of North Carolina and others the campaign hoped to turn from red to blue.
Kerry remained hesitant. He had not known Edwards well in the Senate, and on the primary trail small resentments had built up. Kerry wondered why Edwards thought he could be president before even finishing his first Senate term; Edwards thought Kerry did not know how to talk to rural and southern voters and couldn't win without them.
The two men could hardly have been more different. Kerry was the craggy Brahmin raised in privilege, Edwards, smiling and self-made. Kerry had all the gravitas Edwards was often accused of lacking, but Edwards charmed colleagues and connected with voters in a way that Kerry could only envy.
Kerry had spent a career in the Senate, where success depends on accommodating all sides of an issue - he called friends ceaselessly to solicit different points of view until his campaign manager seized his cellphone. Edwards had built his career by choosing a side and not relenting - he was well-known for turning down big settlement offers because he was confident he could win his case.
At the Democratic convention in late July, Kerry's advisers encouraged Edwards to reprise his theme of the primaries, his pledge to bridge the gap between two Americas, one rich, one struggling. Preaching "the politics of hope," Edwards mocked the negative campaigning the Republicans were sure to deliver: "Don't you just hate it?"
But the convention was barely over when the attacks began, starting with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accusing Kerry of lying about his military record. Kerry aides complained that Edwards would resist or try to tone down language when they asked him to deliver negative lines - "pundit lines" as one of Edwards's aides scorned them.
He objected to anything more than the most generic attacks on the Bush-Cheney administration. After weeks of battering by the Swift boat group, he called only for the president to "stop these ads."
As prominent Democrats began calling for Edwards to be more aggressive, Kerry met with him on the last night of the Republican convention and implored him to be tougher on the Republicans. Edwards soon stepped up his rhetoric. Still, "we were constantly negotiating backward," said Marcus Jadotte, a Kerry deputy campaign manager who was assigned to travel with Edwards.
Some campaign aides speculated that Edwards was trying to protect his reputation so he could run for president again. Others concluded that he believed that the lesson of the primaries was that staying positive worked.
The two men were better than the sum of their parts on the rare occasions when they campaigned together - Kerry seemed more energetic and easygoing, and Edwards seemed to present his case for Kerry better when he was next to him, like a client in a courtroom. But their differences strained their relationship and, ultimately, the campaign.
It was the debate over the war brought out everything that Edwards found most infuriating in Kerry. Both men had voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to go to war with Iraq - Edwards had co-sponsored it with Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. In 2004, they found themselves in an impossible position: Antiwar Democrats were pushing Kerry to say he would pull out troops, while Republicans were calling him a flip-flopper whenever he tried to attack Bush on the war. Kerry had increasing doubts about the war. But Edwards argued that they should not renounce their votes - they had to show conviction and consistency.
On Election Day, the running mates spent much of the day believing exit polls that showed them winning. The next morning, with Ohio still up in the air, Edwards pressed to send lawyers to Columbus to challenge the way the state counted provisional ballots. But Kerry finally concluded that even winning all those ballots would not make him president.
As the two men ended the campaign at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Edwards refused to say "lose" or "concede" or "defeat."
"The fight has just begun," Edwards said. "We will keep marching toward that one America and we're not going to stop until we get there."
Kerry aides heard that as his first bid for 2008.
When John Edwards ran for vice president in 2004, his running mate's advisers thought he was not aggressive enough in attacking the Republican candidates. Now he is running for president himself, and he is the most confrontational candidate in the race.
Edwards insists that he is "the same person I've always been." But Peter Scher, who was recruited to run Edwards's vice presidential campaign in 2004, said, "There's no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004. There's a great deal more confidence in his own instincts and his own judgment. You see much less reliance on consultants and pollsters and media advisers, and more of a willingness to say what he believes and let the chips fall where they may."
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