The Politician

Two

Born off of East Africa in the middle of Ax, „ugust 1999, De

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While we were in the Caribbean, North Carolina went through a nightmare as another hurricane, Floyd, slammed into the coast near Cape Fear on September 16 at three in the morning. Floyd packed winds over a hundred miles an hour and brought a ten-​foot ocean surge that flooded towns up and down the coast. He dumped so much rain that rivers across the state overflowed their banks and flooded thousands of homes. Fifty-​three people would die from storm-​related causes, and the state would suffer more than $3.7 billion in property damage. More flooding came as a series of lesser storms swept through, and by the end of the month there was hardly a dry spot in the eastern part of the state. Cheri and I watched in horror from our honeymoon paradise as CNN showed footage of the steeple of the church where we were married being blown off.

As the news reports showed, Princeville, famous as the first community established by freed slaves after the Civil War, was hit the hardest. Every building in the town was flooded, and every citizen had to be evacuated. But it wasn’t Princeville’s displaced people and damaged structures that stuck in your mind after you visited, it was the coffins. The powerful floodwaters had undermined graves and lifted caskets out of the ground. The water was so deep that as it receded, some of the coffins actually got lodged in trees. Others were scattered in muddy yards and on streets that were strewn with debris. It was a ghastly sight, and something that no witness ever forgot.

I saw the destruction in Princeville and other communities as I drove the senator around the state in the aftermath of the storm, meeting with disaster officials and offering whatever solace we could. Floyd was such an intense storm, and the destruction was so widespread, that President Clinton visited two days after the rain stopped to assure people that federal help was on the way and to soak up some national media attention as he played comforter in chief. “We’re going to stand with you,” he told people in Tarboro, “until you get back on your feet again, as long as it takes.”

Clinton would be followed by a host of other officials, none of whom could change much of anything on the ground. Disaster agencies, charities, and communities were already di Ceregging out and cleaning up, and unless he was willing to grab a shovel or a hammer, all a politician could do was offer symbolic support. Edwards, who was always aware of press opportunities, spent lots of time in the disaster area and got his share of attention from TV and print reporters, but he wasn’t the only elected official looking for the limelight. A few days after the storm, while I was helping to shovel out a church filled with mud and debris, Congresswoman Eva Clayton scurried inside, noticed the Edwards staff T-​shirt I wore, looked at the mask I was wearing to protect myself from fungus, and said, “Young man, gimme that thing, here come the TV cameras.” She took it so she could look as though she had been working. As soon as the news crews left, I got it back.

Fortunately, my boss wasn’t quite so brazen when it came to playing to the cameras. He knew they were there, but he also went out of his way to co

Given his interest in working people, I was a little surprised by Senator Edwards’s reluctance to roll up his sleeves and get a little dirty himself. Instead of picking up a hammer and driving some nails with Habitat for Humanity or throwing around some cut branches with a road-​clearing crew, he would say something about his tight schedule and depart without risking a blister. I thought this was a politically tone-​deaf choice that opened the door to people who might say he was too much style and too little substance. Eventually, I learned that while he wasn’t afraid of breaking a sweat, he was afraid of looking silly and wanted to avoid doing things that reminded him too much of the people he called “rednecks” that he grew up around in Robbins.

As I got to know the senator, I came to understand his ambivalence about his background. As a smart and sensitive young man, he had worked very hard to get an education, build a career, and separate himself from the rougher elements of the small-​town South. He was proud of being one of Robbins’s favorite sons, along with the astronaut Charles E. Brady, who was pictured on a mural in town. (Brady would commit suicide in 2006.) And when he ran for office, the senator harkened back to his humble begi

As flaws go, Edwards’s fear of looking stupid and his ambivalence about his past were small. He presented himself as someone who understood the strain people felt as they lived paycheck to paycheck and said he found it easy to imagine what the flood victims experienced. He often said to me, “There but for the grace of God.” I admired him for putting his arms around people and reassuring them. The Edwards staff worked overtime to help the victims of the disaster, and he returned to the area several times to check on the progress of the cleanup.

These inspections became part of an ambitious project-you might call it “The Hundred-​County Campaign”-that I proposed to him Crop a few months after joining the staff in Raleigh. The project, which called for the senator to visit every county in the state no matter how small and isolated, grew out of the basic notion that if he was going to accomplish anything in Washington, he would need the voters’ support, especially in the next election. And while incumbency is usually an advantage, in the past thirty-​five years no one in his seat had ever served more than one term. One of these senators, John East, had committed suicide. Another, Terry Sanford, was ousted when a close friend turned on him and ran for the same office. The job seemed jinxed.

I presented the idea of the hundred-​county campaign with a written proposal that included a color-​coded map showing where the senator had already spent time and where he had never shaken a single hand. I argued that with a deliberate effort he could get to all these places, where many people didn’t even know who he was, and raise his political profile while doing some official business. Mrs. Edwards absolutely loved the proposal, and since she was the senator’s closest adviser, it got the green light. The project would consume much of my time and put the senator and me in a car together for lots of long road trips. My job involved finding people and places to visit-we stressed education, medical care, the military, and law enforcement to beef up his standing on these issues-and all the logistics of getting him around. I poured days into the task of making sure everything went smoothly. In those days before people had global position systems in their cars, this preparation included actually driving the entire route, timing out the distances, and noting the directions down to a tenth of a mile on the backs of business cards. Sometimes I ran so short on time that I would have to make these test runs in the middle of the night on dark, windy, unlit country roads. I would often get lost, be forced to backtrack, and then find myself driving like one of the Dukes of Hazzard so I might get home in time to get a few hours of sleep.