John and Elizabeth Edwards: The Nightmare I Cannot Escape

I was a John Edwards supporter.  I preferred him in 2004, but backed Kerry because I thought he was more electable (?!?).  When Kerry chose Edwards as his running mate, for me it was like chocolate and peanut butter: good on their own but great together.

Then came election day.

How could they have lost?  We had it all on George Bush, beat his ass in the debates, you name it.  Who believed that Swiftboat shit?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

So then came 2006.  Everyone is jockeying for position as the Presidential campaigns get rolling.  Then came the news that John Edwards was getting into the race again and that he would make an announcement tour with stops in New Orleans Louisiana and Des Moines Iowa.  That was it, I was all in for Edwards!

A friend and I hit the road and went to his Des Moines event at the Iowa Historical Society building, just down the street from the state capitol.  I had two old "Kerry/Edwards" buttons.  I took a blue marker and colored in the "Kerry" so it just read "Edwards".  We walked in and found ourselves behind the velvet rope with the media.  Evidently people thought our buttons were credentials.  Where else could we have gone with those?

We went back to Iowa twice: once for a town hall meeting in Davenport where we got to not only experience an election year town hall in person (Edwards was an hour late, ouch!), but we got to meet him afterward one on one.  (No security, it was just him and us.  Good thing we were not nuts.)

In January 2008 we went back to help the Edwards campaign before the caucus.  I saw on the Edwards website that John and Elizabeth would be at a New Year's Party at their headquarters in Mason City. 

(Short aside here.  I chose Mason City for three reasons:

1. John and Elizabeth would be there.
2. Mason City is the hometown of Meredith Willson, creator of "The Music Man"
3. I had just re-read "The Dillinger Days" by John Toland, a great book about the gangsters that criss-crossed the midwest in the twenties and thirties.  Dillinger and his gang hit Mason City and got caught in a big gunfight were a few members of the gang were wounded.)

We drove there on New Year's eve, got caught in a bad snowstorm about halfway through Illinois, made it to the Quad Cities by the skin of our teeth and soldiered on to Mason City.  We got to Mason City about 11:30pm and passed the Edwards for President headquarters twice before I realized the small storefront with cardboard signs written in marker was the place.  (I kid you not, they were pizza boxes turned inside out!).  Once there we found out that John and Elizabeth had already left for another town.  We slunked back to our hotel and went back in the morning to do some good.  The temperature was -5 with a wind chill of -20.  They asked us if we wanted to make phone calls or go out door to door.  We chose door to door like the hearty Midwesterners we were.  We were sent to Northwood Iowa, just south of the Iowa-Minnesota border.  The roads were drifting over and when we got to Northwood, it was a ghost town.  We knocked on doors of peoople our lists told us were in their 70's and 80's and got no answer.  Where were these people?  Dead?

I got back to Indiana, where I was involved in the local Edwards for President effort.  At the time, no one imagined that Indiana would actually be in play, so we were regarded with curiosity.  With eternal thanks to Shaw Friedman and Vidya Kora, I was able to attend an Edwards fundraiser in Michigan City.

John Edwards and I in Michigan City

Then the bottom fell out.

Edwards came in second in Iowa, respectable but disappointing.  He was definitely banking on a win in Iowa to propel him forward.  More disappointing finishes in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, where he hoped the proximity to his home state of North Carolina would win him a few points.

Edwards dropped out and I resigned myself to choosing a new candidate to support.  I backed Obama and went on with my life.

Then the stories started to emerge about Edwards and a secret affair.  That summer someone asked me what I thought about the story in the Enquirer.  I laughed it off as a story wedged between "The Amazing Bat Boy" and "Richard Nixon's Secret Cheeseball Recipe".

Little did I know it was all true.

Fast forward to 2010.  Just when you thought it was safe to put the Edwards debacle behind you, more revelations from the new book "Game Change" by Mark Halperin and John Heileman, including stories about Elizabeth Edwards.

The hits just keep on comin', but I still have my rally sign from the Davenport town hall.  I just cannot throw it away.  That sign represents two years of my life and something I really believed in.  The worst part is, everyone who said John Edwards was nothing more than a slick lawyer, a southern smooth talker, a pretty boy, a hypocrite who preached on poverty but lived in a mansion used that story to justify everything they felt.

The Edwards' rose fast and fell faster.  And they may not have hit bottom yet.