The running men: how candidates decide to run for president reveals how prepared they are to win

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2003 by Walter Shapiro

It is impossible for an outsider to gauge what role the memory of Iris son Wade (whose Outward Bound pin Edwards wears in the lapel of his suit jacket) played in his inner struggle over seeking the presidency. Neither John nor Elizabeth ever mentioned Wade in any of the meetings at the house, but Iris presence, even six years after his death, hovered softly around both of them. As one Edwards adviser explained, "Someone like John Edwards is painfully aware that life moves quickly and things are precarious. We never talked about it, but it has to be part of his thinking." Others in the inner circle suggested that Wades death made Edwards impervious to the fears that govern the lives of other politicians, fears like losing an election. As veteran pollster Harrison Hickman, who had advised Edwards since the 1998 Senate campaign, put it, "After you have to get up on a table in a medical-examiner's office and hug your son good-bye, there's nothing they can ever do to you."

Right after Christmas, Edwards escaped both the flurry of phone calls probing his intentions and the chaos of a household revolving around two small children, by retreating (as he often did before major trials) to the family's North Carolina beach house on Figure Eight Island near Wilmington. There, over three days, he finally made his decision. There was never a Eureka moment, just the gradual are of inevitability. Edwards deserves credit for recognizing the need for solitude and for refusing to be stampeded into seeking the presidency by the restlessness of his staff. In a follow-up conversation, Elizabeth recalled, "It was necessary for him to say, 'You have to do it on its own merits.' And not because people expected you to or even that they turned down another job to take this prospective job with you."

The Loyalist

Joe Lieberman was that rare senator born without a presidential gland. No stranger to ego, though he masks it well, Lieberman's lack of palpable interest in the big prize didn't stem from any concern over being too Jewish or too hawkish. Rather, before 2000, he always regarded himself as a man of the Senate. Even with his family, he never allowed himself to muse aloud, "Well, maybe, someday, if everything goes right ..." Even when a conservative newspaper columnist would occasionally suggest that the Democrats should abandon their foolhardy leftist ways and look to someone like Lieberman, the Connecticut senator would wave it off with a bemused air. As Rebecca Lieberman, his 33-year-old daughter from his first marriage, recalled, "Ite never talked about running for president. He never talked about it with us."

Of course, everything changed as soon as Lieberman ended up a hanging chad short of having the heartbeat-away job of vice president. Small wonder. Every vice presidential nominee in the past 30 years, with the conspicuous exception of Geraldine Ferraro, has at one time run for president. Now that he was kosher-certified presidential timber, Liebennan was poised to be a candidate, except for his old-fashioned loyalty to M Gore, the man who singlehandedly raised the Connecticut senator's sights beyond someday being chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Thronghout 2002, Lieberman was animated by the intuition--more a hunch than any solid nugget of information--that Gore wouldn't do it. But by late fall, as Gore roared hack into the headlines with his book tour and a foreign-policy speech assailing Bush's Iraq policy, Lieberman began to develop a frisson of doubt. After all these careful if-I-run preparations, was his career again destined to be defined by a near miss? Lieberman, though, was absolutely certain about one thing: Gore had said he would announce his decision in early January. The senator expected to learn more when the two of them got together at Gore's Washington-area home on Monday morning, Dec. 16, for a long-scheduled chat.