Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [113]
On January 6th, the Des Moines Register held a candidate debate. It was enormously important. Caucus-goers would be polled a little more than two weeks later, and more than three-quarters of them watched more than half the debate. It was a very good debate for John. Anyone could see his strength, his personality, his warmth. Everything came through. He had shut down his advisors thirty seconds after they began proposing sound bites for the Register debate. I don’t want lines, he said, I just want to know facts. Give me the facts and I’ll go out there and be myself. And he was great.
The following weekend I was back with the children in Washington when very late on Saturday night John called. “You are talking,” he said, the excitement in his voice unrestrained, “to the endorsee of the Des Moines Register!” The editorial in the most important newspaper in the state was titled “John Edwards—His Time Is Now.” We’d been telling ourselves for so long that John was the voice we needed, and finally—I’ll be honest with you—here it was, the first really objective positive thing that had happened. I am surprised I didn’t wake the children, I was so excited. And in New Hampshire the staff celebrated, too, Colin buying wine for the staffers of other campaigns who were at Cotton with them getting the news on their BlackBerrys as he and Meghan were cheering.
We weren’t doing polling but Kerry was, and he knew the race was no longer between Dean and Gephardt; it was between Kerry and Edwards. Dean didn’t do well in the debate, but it didn’t matter, really, as the tide had shifted. And though we had no polling that confirmed the shift, we could tell because of the crowds. The crowds that had been coming to John’s events on word of mouth about his message increased geometrically after the Register endorsement. The places Sam had selected weeks before for events were now too small. The crowds that in December had been thirty, forty, maybe fifty people, went to two and then three hundred. I was campaigning separately with a two-man staff, driver Tommy Vietor and navigator Brad Anderson. We would be in a library with thirty people and hear that John had five hundred. We were stuck outside the town hall in the snow in Centreville—Tommy having misplaced the car keys—hearing that there were seven hundred people at the next rally. No one had seen anything like it—three hundred to seven hundred, then one thousand, then fifteen hundred.
There would be overflow crowds, and John would give two speeches instead of one at each stop. I still had a separate schedule, and I was in Clinton, Iowa, a river city, at a Democratic hall, talking to about forty people, when Brad got a call about a new poll—John had passed Dean. We stood there in the muddy parking lot and the freezing cold, remembering all the events that had disappointed us for months and how incredible the moment was. We headed then to join John at the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, where he was to have a rally. I sat in the backseat, eating a tangerine, happy that people were finally seeing in John what I saw, when I noticed that the tangerine juice had made a huge stain on the front of my shirt. There was no way to cover it up. Can we find a place with Shout Wipes? Tommy pulled into a discount grocery store where items are sold in case lots. No Shout Wipes. Iowa is a beautiful state, but it is not the shopping capital of the country. We drove on, looking for a clothing store, a regular grocery, anything—no luck. We were getting close to the museum. Then I spotted a Goodwill retail store. Stop here, I said. Brad and Tommy looked at each other. Here? Yes, stop here. I went in the Goodwill and bought a sweater set for three dollars. I put it on in the dressing room and wore it to that event.
I am so glad I didn’t miss that event. It was in a square room with a platform for John. The room had very high ceilings, and Edwards signs covered the walls. The line outside the double doors at the hallway was backed up for twenty