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www.theotherpaper.com
Ohio Democrats might vote for John Kerry,
but they'll be thinking about John Edwards
By Dan Williamson / February 26, 2004
Ann Tormet
The smile of a movie star, the caution of a frontrunner: Edwards at the Ohio Union Sunday
Arca Lucas cast her first vote for president at age 21 to re-elect President Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. She will cast her next one for John Edwards in Tuesday's Ohio Democratic Primary, and she's just tickled about it.
A cheerful woman wearing a button that strategically added the letters "LL" and "IT" to the word "BUSH," Lucas excitedly awaited Edwards's arrival in the West Ballroom of the Ohio Union Sunday afternoon.
"I think he's tops," she gushed. If elected, Edwards would be the second handsomest United States president in history, she said: "Next to John Kennedy."
"I liked him the first time I saw him," Lucas said of Edwards. "He has a pleasant personality.
"And that smile."
She's right. Whatever else you might say about Edwards, he has a damn good smile.
He knows it, too, which you can tell by the way he teases his audience with it after one of the surefire applause lines in his stump speech.
First he'll feign a serious facial expression while nodding slowly and knowingly. That look will give way to a sly, self-assured grin. Then he gives the people what they want: those gleaming pearly whites.
Edwards will savor the moment by rubbing his hands together or massaging his chin. If it's a really good applause line—like when he boasted about how he whipped up on corporate attorneys back when he was a litigious trial lawyer—he'll punctuate the routine with three thumbs-up pumps of his right fist.
If it's an even better one—like when he boasted about how he whipped up on incumbent Republican Sen. Lauch Faircloth in 1998—he'll do the three thumbs-up pumps with both fists.
Compare Edwards's stage presence to that of the Democratic frontrunner, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. Kerry calls out his applause lines as if he were standing on a balcony somewhere reading them to the masses from a scroll.
And Kerry has a terrible smile. It comes awkwardly out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly. Kerry doesn't look like a guy who's used to smiling. He's more natural when he appears forlorn.
All of this helps explain why, though Kerry is the candidate they'll probably go home with, Democrats want to dance a little longer with Edwards.
Mayor Mike Coleman, whose own endorsed candidate, retired Gen. Wes Clark, dropped out of the race two weeks ago, took Edwards to church with him Sunday morning. A handful of Democratic elected officials who haven't endorsed Edwards—including City Council President Matt Habash, county Treasurer Rich Cordray and county Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy—beamed as they sat in the front row for Sunday's Ohio Union speech.
They may end up voting for Kerry Tuesday, but they'll tell their kids they voted for Edwards.
Hot or not, Kerry remains the favorite to win Ohio Tuesday. Of the 10 states that will vote in next week's Super Tuesday primaries, Ohio is one of only three—New York and Georgia are the others—in which Edwards is campaigning. Badly trailing Kerry in the delegate count, Edwards needs to win somewhere or get out of the race.
And since he's the last man standing among Kerry's challengers, nobody wants that to happen.
Therefore, Edwards has been assigned the role of the surging underdog.
Surging is a curious term to describe a guy who has lost 10 straight primary states since his sole victory in his native South Carolina Feb. 3. But when Edwards finished a surprisingly strong second in Wisconsin Feb. 17, it gave political reporters something to grab onto. After all, they have to write about something.
Each presidential election year, the political intelligentsia invest their hopes and dreams in at least one candidate who probably isn't going to win. From Gary Hart in 1984 to John McCain in 2000, there's a proud tradition of fawning over an underdog, if only to postpone the monotony of talking about the two parties' nominees.
A year ago, it appeared the surging underdog would be former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, but then he became the frontrunner himself. So the mantle briefly went to Wes Clark, but he failed to surge.
Edwards, meanwhile, was viewed as something of a lightweight. His nickname, the "Breck Girl," was so well known that his campaign handed out bottles of Breck shampoo at his presidential announcement speech last year.
His defining moment as a U.S. senator was when Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York outmaneuvered him for floor-speech minutes while the Senate was debating the authorization resolution on the impending invasion of Iraq.
"Just stand there and look pretty, John," Clinton reportedly quipped before making her speech. Edwards marched out of the chambers.
But that was then, and this is now.
Edwards has outlasted would-be heavyweights Dean, Clark, Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt. He's also turned out to be an energetic campaigner and a gifted speaker
And, well, there's that smile.
"I'm going to be voting for Edwards," said Jessica Maggard, a young Ohio House legislative assistant who was dressed in an "I STILL HATE GEORGE BUSH" T-shirt Sunday.
She said she likes Edwards's charisma and the fact that he's from the South. And, yeah, he's really cute.
"I think his looks help him," she said. "I think it helps me like him."
And whether or not John Kerry has had Botox injections in his face—he has denied it—Maggard said he doesn't hold a candle to Edwards.
Botox? Kerry, she said, "needs more help than that."
With a clear mission of prolonging the presidential primary season, Ohio political reporters set out this week to get to know—and, if possible, inflate the political viability of—this Edwards fellow.
They imagined themselves sitting on Edwards's campaign bus, listening to Edwards spin tales of his legal adventures in that charming Carolina twang. The senator certainly seems like a friendly sort. Maybe they'd become friends.
As it turns out, however, Edwards—unlike the chatty, unscripted McCain of four years ago—likes his encounters with the press tightly controlled. Rather than leap at every chance to get his name out, as you'd expect from a guy with only one primary victory to his name, Edwards is behaving like a cautious frontrunner who's sitting on a lead.
A small band of reporters who were invited by the mayor's office to talk to Edwards at Coleman's home learned this when the candidate's van showed up half an hour late.
"We goin' to church?" Edwards asked as he gave a hearty handshake to the mayor and a hug to Frankie Coleman. After a brief discussion inside the house, Edwards marched right past the gaggle, declared, "Great to be in Columbus!" and hopped right back into the van.
Things didn't get better at the Ohio Union rally, where reporters from the Associated Press and PBS were overheard grousing about the challenge of completing their stories without access to the candidate.
Following Edwards's speech, he was made available for a closed-door session with reporters chosen from four media outlets: the three Columbus TV stations and Dispatch political writer Joe Hallett.
A few Ohio Statehouse reporters who ventured to the third-floor Ohio Union interview room were met by a withering glare from local PR operative Jan Allen, who was guarding the door like a sentry.
When Edwards emerged, he was quickly surrounded by aides who hustled their man to a nearby elevator. When Jeff Ortega, an unfailingly polite reporter for Dix Newspapers, made a last-ditch attempt to approach the candidate, one of Edwards's body men menacingly warned him to step away from the elevator.
"He's not taking any more questions," the man snapped.
But he sure looked pretty.
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