Free The Politician by Andrew Young Page A

under consideration, and presidential candidates always float a bunch of names to see how people react and to grab as much free press as possible. I also kept in mind that a jump to Washington would be disruptive. Cheri and I had just moved into a new house, and we were serious about starting a family. There was no sense in getting all worked up about something that might never happen.
    Gore would make his announcement on the coming Tuesday at his campaign headquarters in Nashville. The senator and I began another road trip on Monday morning, heading north to Asheville, where we would stay overnight before heading into the Great Smoky Mountains and three remote counties that we could check off our list. When we got in the car, he announced that he was going to share something special, something he hadn’t told anyone else. (I knew this wasn’t true, but I played along.) He then told me that on Saturday he had heard from one of Gore’s closest advisers, who said he was going to be picked for vice president. But then on Sunday, after the idea of Edwards for vice president was floated on the political talk shows, he got another call indicating the deal was not yet set.
    “Today I don’t know any more than you,” he said. But this didn’t make much sense to me. If he was going to be the pick, he would have been informed. So any hope we had was slender at best.
    All day long we kept waiting for the phone to ring with Gore on the other end, asking Edwards to come to Nashville. In the mountains the cell phone signals are so unreliable that we often lost service, so I would check every few minutes for messages. We heard from staffers and political advisers and Mrs. Edwards, but not Gore. At the events we held, where the crowds were suddenly massive and we saw more reporters than usual, the senator made sure I arranged to have him jokingly introduced as “the next vice president of the United States.”
    That night in Asheville, we stayed at the historic Grove Park Resort, a massive hotel built in 1912 out of local granite by a patent medicine huckster who filled it with Arts and Crafts furniture and decorated it with quotations from Thoreau and Emerson and others. A few special rooms feature theme decorations. The “Great Gatsby” is Art Deco. The “Swinging Sixties” has a flower power motif.
    As usual, I checked him into a suite and put myself in a regular room. Even though it was in the basement, it still cost hundreds of dollars for the night. Before dinner, we took a long run in the streets of Asheville and even cut through the parking lot attached to the building where my sports pub (now a Chinese restaurant) had, in the good times before bankruptcy, buzzed with life. At some point during the workout, I turned to the senator and said, “Doesn’t it suck?” He wasn’t sure what I meant, so I explained that I was talking about Gore and the all-but-obvious fact that he wasn’t going to be selected.
    In response, Edwards told me that his life experience, especially his son’s death, had taught him to control his expectations and never take anything for granted. He had thought about what Gore had to consider as he made his choice and concluded that John Edwards was not the ideal pick. Since he never had the job and never expected to get it, losing out wasn’t going to hurt. He also said something about how he had been a senator for only a short time and that the future would bring so many opportunities, it didn’t make much sense to get upset about this one.
    The next morning, as we drove west toward a meeting on the banks of an isolated reservoir called Fontana Lake, radio news reports from Nashville noted that Gore was going to make his announcement at noon. I began to feel like the one kid in class who wasn’t invited to a birthday party. When we got to the lake, we were met by half a dozen officials from local communities and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The locals complained about the TVA’s policy of