For Edwards, a relationship that never quite fit

By Kate Zernike

updated 12:09 a.m. ET Nov. 21, 2007

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 Mr. 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: Mr. Kerry leading the crowd in chants for “help,” Mr. Edwards for “hope.” The campaign printed two sets of signs. By November, the disagreement had been so institutionalized that campaign workers handed out fans with both messages, on flip sides.

To the end of their disappointing run, the two men were unable to agree on the script, whether for slogans or more substantive matters. And like so many political marriages, the one between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards — Senate colleagues who became rivals then running mates but never really friends — ended in recrimination and regrets.

Kerry aides complain that Mr. 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 Mr. Edwards refused to play the traditional vice-presidential role of attack dog even going up against a purebred, Dick Cheney. And Mr. Kerry had barely conceded the race, they say, before Mr. 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.

For his part, aides said, Mr. Edwards felt frustrated by Mr. Kerry’s public agonizing over the war in Iraq and a campaign that seemed to change consultants and message constantly. To Mr. Edwards, Mr. Kerry seemed unable to get out of his own way. He ignored Mr. Edwards’s warning not to go windsurfing, one aide recalled, which led to the infamous “whichever way the wind blows” advertisement mocking Mr. Kerry’s statements on the war. And in the end, Mr. Edwards concluded that Mr. Kerry lacked fight for not filing a legal challenge to the election results.

Today, Mr. Edwards insists he is “the same person I’ve always been.” But his experience as a vice-presidential candidate who went down in defeat has clearly 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, Mr. Edwards 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 Mr. Kerry not to do.

“There’s no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004,” said Peter Scher, whom Mr. Kerry recruited to run Mr. 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 his new aggressiveness. Stephanie Cutter, who was Mr. Kerry’s communications director, said, “A lot of what I’m seeing now, I wish I’d seen in 2004.”

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Mr. 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. “I’m totally comfortable doing it.”

Unlikely pair
John Edwards began campaigning to be John 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 Mr. Kerry. He dispatched emissaries to party officials and Kerry aides, promising that he could raise $20 million and help win his home state, North Carolina, and others the campaign hoped to turn to blue from red. And, as an experienced trial lawyer, he could take on Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Kerry remained hesitant. He had not really known Mr. Edwards in the Senate, and on the primary trail, small resentments had built up. Mr. Kerry wondered why Mr. Edwards thought he could be president before even finishing his first Senate term; Mr. Edwards thought Mr. Kerry did not know how to talk to rural and Southern voters and could not win without them. He bristled at Mr. Kerry’s presumption: when Mr. Kerry said in a debate how he would take on President Bush, Mr. Edwards rebuked him, “Not so fast, John Kerry.”

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