So ended Edwards’s quest for the Democratic nomination. Though the North Carolina senator had repeatedly vowed to press ahead no matter what the results on Super Tuesday, the outcome proved too withering to withstand. He received a thrashing in all 10 states except for Georgia, where he managed to finish within 5 points of Kerry–though still in second place. He lost among voting groups like union workers and blacks that he’d championed as the inspiration and lifeblood of his campaign. And he failed to prove his argument that as a son of the South, he could deliver a region of the country that has proved so vexing for Democrats in recent years. The voters’ verdict was unequivocal: of 30 primaries and caucuses since January, Edwards won just one, in his native state of South Carolina. To prolong the agony would have risked tainting his legacy with a tinge of disgrace.
In more than a year of campaigning, Edwards followed a trajectory marked as much by drudgery as drama. He launched his bid amid buzz that he was the next incarnation of Clinton, then lapsed into obscurity in the shadows of Gov. Howard Dean and Gen. Wesley Clark, only to storm back onto the stage with a strong second-place showing in the Iowa caucuses. Along the way, he earned a reputation as a gripping campaigner and garnered praise for his positivity, which some say helped quiet the acrimony that divided Democrats before Iowa. “We have been the little engine that could,” Edwards told cheering supporters in Atlanta on Tuesday night. But because of a combination of factors–both beyond his control and intrinsic to his campaign–that engine eventually ran out of steam.
The signs were evident in the previous week. He seemed enervated on the stump. His oratory–widely admired for its soaring rhythm and rhetoric–slipped into a perfunctory delivery. His events drew steadily shrinking crowds, and their enthusiasm lacked the fervor of earlier days. At a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio, for instance, organizers had to condense the staging area because of poor attendance. In Augusta, Ga., he actually called for the audience’s applause after a line that almost always elicited whoops and hollers fell flat.
Faced with these disheartening signs and dire numbers in the polls, the campaign tweaked its tactics. Edwards cut short a swing through California to concentrate on Minnesota, Ohio and Georgia. In debates in Los Angeles and New York, he sharpened his criticisms of Kerry, going after the Massachusetts senator for his votes on trade agreements, his acceptance of lobbying money and his status as a Washington insider. The campaign also made a concerted push to win over Dean and his supporters. Edwards spoke regularly to the former Vermont governor to seek his endorsement, and on the stump, lavished praise on him in an ingratiating display that smacked of desperation. Finally, in the days before Super Tuesday, Edwards made his most explicit argument yet about his electability. He claimed he was the only candidate who could capture independents and swing voters and pointed out that while Kerry lost to President George W. Bush in a hypothetical match-up in North Carolina, Edwards won. “I don’t know if using his home state as an example is very effective,” observed one voter after seeing Edwards speak at a Cleveland church.
None of the tactics proved sufficient. In the build-up to March 2, a senior Edwards adviser said that “we need to win some of these states” and pick up “huge clumps of delegates in some of the others.” Early on Super Tuesday, the exit polls showed that that clearly wasn’t happening. So Edwards approved a withdrawal plan that one of his aides had begun preparing a few days earlier. After trading compliments with Kerry over the phone, Edwards took the stage in an Atlanta hotel ballroom and delivered a prelude to his concession speech in Raleigh. He congratulated his “friend” Kerry for running “a strong, powerful campaign” and being “an extraordinary advocate for causes that all of us believe in.” Then he signaled solidarity with the rival he’d been nicking only days earlier. “It wasn’t very long ago that the pundits and the pollsters were saying that come Super Tuesday, there wouldn’t even be anybody named John competing for the nomination,” said Edwards, as aides and volunteers hugged and cried on the side. But “John Kerry and John Edwards have both proven those pundits and pollsters wrong.” Then he left the stage and boarded a plane for Raleigh.
So what went wrong? For starters, a number of external forces conspired against Edwards. The compressed primary schedule deprived him of time to make his case to voters and curb Kerry’s momentum. Edwards rightly noted that in the build-up to numerous contests–like Iowa and Wisconsin–he was ascending in polls. But in each instance, he lacked the extra campaigning days that might have pushed him over the top. Moreover, Edwards never made it to the delegate-rich March 9 states–Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida–all of which he was convinced he could win because of their late place in the primary schedule. Then there are the multitude of “what if’s” that haunt every campaign. What if Edwards had eked out a win in Oklahoma, where he lost by just 1,300 votes, thus driving Clark out of the race earlier? “He could have gone on to Tennessee and Virginia and turned it into a two-person race” much earlier, says Merle Black of Emory University.
But other shortcomings were inherent in Edwards’s candidacy. One inescapable problem: his lack of foreign-policy experience. However heavily domestic issues weigh on voters’ minds, the fact remains that terror and security figure prominently in the national dialogue. Edwards lacks practice and depth in such matters and shunned discussion of them on the campaign trail. It proved to be a glaring gap in his resume–one that preoccupied the media and unsettled plenty of voters. Of course, Bush arrived at the White House with about the same amount of experience–an argument “I’ve thought about” using, Edwards told NEWSWEEK in a recent interview. But, he said with a laugh, “I figured that’s probably not a persuasive argument” for Democratic voters horrified at the results of the Bush administration. In the interview, Edwards argued that it made no sense for Democrats to allow Bush to focus the general election on the issue of national security. “Why in the world would we allow him to define the terrain of the debate?” he said. “Where he’s weak, enormously weak, is in what’s happening with the economy, what’s happening with jobs, this complete failure to address the health-care crisis in this country.” Yet Edwards also flubbed some foreign policy questions that had nothing to do with national security. It took him three tries, for instance, to offer a thoughtful response to the crisis in Haiti.
Edwards’s campaign strategy also created difficulties for him. By casting himself so resolutely as the “positive” candidate, he deprived himself of attack lines that might have narrowed the field earlier. “The campaign never really took seriously Clark’s entrance into the race” as the other Southerner, says Emory’s Black. “Imagine Bill Clinton in that situation. Clinton would have taken some shots at those above him.” Edwards seemed perpetually torn about how forcefully to distinguish himself from Kerry. He would ratchet up his criticisms of his rival in the days immediately before a primary, only to dial them back afterward. In the end, Edwards never managed to convince voters that he offered a preferable alternative to Kerry.
By running strongly and withdrawing when he did, though, Edwards catapulted his position in the party. He helped shape the Democratic agenda by speaking eloquently about poverty and racial division and the outsourcing of jobs. And he flexed his formidable muscle as a campaigner, drawing in voters with a message that blended personal history and policy. Whether Kerry asks him to be his vice-presidential running mate remains to be seen. What’s fairly certain is that this won’t be the last time voters hear from Edwards. As he waited in a holding room to make his primary-night speech in Atlanta, one of his staffers joked about Edwards’s room number in the hotel he’d just left: 2008. Just a coincidence, or a wink from destiny assuring him that he’d be back in the next election cycle?
