Free The Politician by Andrew Young

he had a good shot at the job, but he enjoyed the publicity he was getting. When I saw the senator next, he talked a little about Gore, saying he had been strangely shy and that there was no spark between them. He made fun of the vice president’s pointy-toed cowboy boots, which he wore with a suit, and he said he thought Gore was much too cautious. Eager to be his own man and distance himself from the Lewinsky scandal, Gore had all but banished President Clinton from his campaign. Edwards, who had used the president to great advantage while courting the black vote in North Carolina, thought this was a big mistake.
    But although he was lukewarm about the man he met, the senator was extremely impressed by the vice president’s official residence. Built in 1893, Number One Observatory Circle is a three-story building with a round tower and a high-pitched main roof with dormers. It looks a lot like the faux Victorian mini-mansions you see in pricey developments all  across the South, except it’s the real thing. The senator thought it was a nicer home than the White House and would be the ideal place to prepare for a run for the presidency in, say, 2008. He didn’t say what he intended to do if he became president, but as I came to learn, most big-time politicians don’t think much about what they will do when they get to the top of the mountain until they arrive. Until then, it’s all about the climb.
    Of course, a place on the short list for vice president isn’t a guarantee of anything, especially if you are the guy’s in-state advance man. With this inmind, Cheri and I planned our future as if we were going to stay in North Carolina. She went off the birth control pill, and we hoped she would soon be pregnant. We had enough confidence in the future to buy a four-bedroom place on Lake Wheeler, on the south side of Raleigh, and start a major remodeling project.
    We moved in at the end of July and were still unpacking on Saturday, August 5. I put a television on top of a cardboard box and turned on CNN. At some point while I was passing by, I heard a newscaster mention Edwards as they showed a video of the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and Julianna Smoot getting into his beat-up Buick in Georgetown surrounded by photographers. Minutes later, Julianna called to say that the Gore people had sent some sort of signal indicating Edwards was in. Then, almost in the same breath, she backed off a bit, insisting that while all the signs were positive, nothing was set in stone.
    For the rest of the weekend, the cable news shows speculated about Gore’s choice, which meant he enjoyed a bonanza of free publicity and everyone connected with the senator suffered with nail-biting anxiety. Most of the reports followed the themes that appeared in a
Wall Street Journal
article—“North Carolina’s Edwards Gets a Shot at the Gore Ticket”—that ran through the pros and cons. The one line in the piece that stood out to me was, “When Republican nominee George W. Bush chose balding, 59-year-old Dick Cheney for his ticket, Mr. Edwards’s youth became an even bigger asset.”
    The buzz had become a racket, and it was impossible to ignore the idea that John Edwards just might become vice president. (On Sunday, the
Daily News
in New York even published a story saying Gore favored Edwards and would take Massachusetts senator John Kerry if Edwards turned him down.) I had my own ambitions, and I thought about how well I had served the senator and the possibility that he might want me to work in the vice president’s office. For me, an offer to work in a Gore/Edwards administration would mean an instant jump from the minor leagues to the majors. And as much as my apolitical wife loved the life we were building in NorthCarolina, she said she would make the move and support me one hundred percent.
    I tried to temper my own expectations, the way the senator had tempered his wife’s on the day Warren Christopher called. Gore had other people