Countdown

The Buying of the President 2004

John Edwards

John Edwards, the one-term senior senator from North Carolina, most likely hopes that geography is destiny. The last three Democrats to win the White House all hailed from south of the Mason-Dixon line: Lyndon Johnson of Texas in 1964, Jimmy Carter of Georgia in 1976, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas in 1992 and 1996. And Al Gore, who hailed from Tennessee, lost in the Electoral College but still managed to win the popular vote in 2000. But Edwards, who was born in South Carolina, began his career in Tennessee, and made his fame and fortune in North Carolina, must win in the crowded Democratic primaries before he can hope to test the nation’s comfort with southern Democrats. While Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary hold little hope for Southerners (in 1992, Bill Clinton finished fourth in Iowa and second in New Hampshire), a big win in the next test — his native South Carolina—would bolster Edwards’ chances at the nomination.

There is just one hitch. In 1961, Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, a Democrat, signed a law that called for the Confederate battle flag — the Stars and Bars — to fly over the capitol complex in Columbia, South Carolina. For the past 42 years, the flag has flown, supported first by Democrats, and lately by the state’s Republican establishment. Angered that South Carolina still officially honors the Confederacy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched an economic boycott of the state, focusing heavily on its hotels and tourism industry.

On February 6, 2003, Edwards appeared on the cable television talk show Hardball and spoke about the boycott. “I believe very deeply that the Confederate flag should not be flown in front of the Capitol in South Carolina,” Edwards told the show’s host, Chris Matthews. “I think it’s an enormous mistake to fly that flag, and it ought to be taken down.” Edwards went on to explain that he would be “personally honoring the boycott as a sign that the NAACP and the way they feel about this issue should be respected.”

Edwards kept his word. Technically speaking.

Several weeks after Edwards’s January 3, 2003, announcement that he would seek the Democratic nomination, a South Carolina supporter arranged his first fundraiser in the state. Rather than hold the event in a hotel or restaurant — businesses which are targets of the NAACP’s boycott — an antebellum mansion known as the Governor William Aiken House was chosen.

William Aiken Jr., son of the founder of the South Carolina Canal & Railroad Company (later called Southern Railway), was a South Carolina governor, an ardent Confederate, and one of the largest slave owners in the South. The family holdings included more than 700 slaves who tended a dozen plantations. The Aiken fortune was estimated at more than $1 million at the time, and the family patriarch used it generously to help finance the war against the North.

Today, the Aikens’ Charleston estate, once synonymous with the Confederacy, has been restored to its original, turn-of-the-century elegance by new owners, Patrick Properties Limited Liability Company, of Charleston. For a price, Patrick Properties will open the 20,000-square-foot mansion for corporate meetings and even weddings. In February 2003, it hosted an event attended by Charleston’s well-heeled political donors to meet and greet Edwards.

The Aiken House, with its rich Confederate history, might seem like a peculiar site for a candidate who opposes flying the South’s colors. But something stronger than symbolism drew Edwards to Aiken House. Like Edwards, one of the co-owners of Patrick Properties, Charles W. Patrick Jr., is a prominent trial lawyer. He was one of the top attorneys in the offices of Ness, Motley, Loadholt, Richardson & Poole, the South Carolina firm that represented 25 of the states that sued tobacco companies to recover Medicaid funds paid for tobacco-related diseases. The lawsuit resulted in a landmark $246 billion settlement. Cigarette makers agreed to pay that sum to states over a period of 25 years. They also made some trial lawyers very wealthy.

In John Edwards, they have one of their own in the Senate.

A COURTROOM VIRTUOSO

Johnny R. Edwards, his given name, was born June 10, 1953, in Seneca, South Carolina. His parents eventually settled in the tiny town of Robbins, North Carolina, 50 miles south of Greensboro. The town had a population of about 1,000 people. His father, Wallace, worked as a supervisor in a textile plant. His mother, Bobbie, worked at the town post office and ran a small antiques store on the side.

Edwards was a gifted athlete growing up, and lettered in high school basketball, football, tennis, and track. The six-footer was the starting point guard on the basketball team and played both wide receiver and defensive back on the gridiron, winning all-star honors. The high school star’s hopes of college glory ended when Clemson University chose not to offer him a football scholarship his freshman year. Edwards transferred to North Carolina State University and pursued a degree in textile sciences.

Edwards has made his childhood a part of his standard stump speech, in which he says he was the first in his family to go to college, working his way through school by taking on jobs at the mill when he was home for the summers. He majored in textile sciences in case he did not fulfill his childhood dream of getting into law school and becoming an attorney. But he graduated with honors and promptly enrolled at the University of North Carolina Law School. It was there that Edwards met his future wife, Elizabeth Anania and his future law partner, David Kirby.

After graduating, Edwards and Anania, the daughter of a Navy ROTC instructor at Chapel Hill, got married. The newlyweds moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1978 where Edwards joined former Republican Governor Lamar Alexander’s law firm, Dearborn & Ewing, which specialized in defending banks, insurance companies, and other corporations.

Edwards and his wife returned to North Carolina in 1981. She took a job as an attorney at one of Raleigh’s leading bankruptcy law firms, Merriman, Nicholls & Crampton. Edwards joined a firm known for its criminal defense work, Tharrington Smith & Hargrove. He was soon asked by Wade Smith, one of the firm’s founders and a former chairman of the state Democratic Party, to take on a malpractice case. Edwards turned down several settlement offers, according to The New Yorker, including one for $750,000 made just before the case went to the jury. Ultimately, Edwards won a damage award of $8.7 million for his client, his first million-dollar verdict, and a record in North Carolina at the time. The following year, 1985, Edwards won a $6.5 million judgment for a 6-year-old girl who’d suffered brain damage at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville.

Edwards left Tharrington Smith in 1993 to start his own firm with Kirby, his law school buddy. Edwards and Kirby focused on medical malpractice cases, a thriving area of the law, even today. On December 12, 2002, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 4 out of 10 Americans and 1 out of 3 doctors said they or their family members had been victims of preventable medical errors. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, D.C., reported that 98,000 Americans die annually from medical errors in hospitals.

Guided by Edwards, the new firm won multimillion-dollar judgments against hospitals and physicians. But by far his biggest case, the one for which Edwards was most famous, involved a 5-year-old girl named Valerie Lakey, who became caught in an uncovered pool drain that severely injured her, pulling out most of her intestines. As the Washington Monthly reported, she survived but for the rest of her life will need daily medical treatment to keep her alive. Edwards represented the girl and her parents. In preparing for trial, he found a dozen children who had been injured by Sta-Rite drains, and made an emotional appeal to the jurors to punish a negligent corporation for harming children.

Sta-Rite made several offers to settle, the Washington Monthly reported, all of which Edwards refused. The jury found Sta-Rite liable for $25 million, the largest verdict in state history. The company chose not to appeal. Edwards’s reputation among his fellow attorneys was cemented: the Association of Trial Lawyers of America awarded him and Kirby its national award for public service.

Edwards went on to try no fewer than 63 major cases during the 1990s and, according to media reports, brought in more than $152 million for his clients, almost all of whom were victims of medical malpractice. He had become so admired and so feared that doctors would settle cases for millions of dollars rather than face Edwards at trial. The high-stakes victories netted him an invitation to join the Inner Circle of Advocates, the exclusive, secretive club of 100 lawyers who have won multimillion-dollar verdicts.

But even as he gained a national reputation for his courtroom prowess, Edwards’ life was touched by tragedy. In 1996, his 16-year-old son Wade died in an automobile accident en route to the Edwards family beach house in coastal North Carolina. The Edwardses started a learning center that provides tutors and computers to honor their son’s memory, said the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. Some of the nation’s wealthiest trial lawyers have contributed financial support to the Wade Edwards Foundation. Among them is Jack H. Olender, the Washington, D.C., lawyer dubbed the “King of Malpractice” and “Jack the Ripper” by newspapers and magazines for his skills as a litigator. The attorney’s Olender Foundation awarded Edwards its Peacemaker 2002 award and donated $30,000 to the Wade Edwards Foundation.

After her son’s death, Elizabeth Edwards left her practice as a bankruptcy attorney. In 1998, at the age of 48, she gave birth to a third child. The couple’s fourth child was born two years after that, when she was 50. Edwards also decided to quit practicing law and run for the U.S. Senate. His fame and personal wealth — financial disclosures put Edwards’s worth at between $13.7 million and $38.6 million — allowed him to go from relative obscurity to front-runner status against Democratic primary opponent D. G. Martin, who was well established in local politics as a former lobbyist and two-time congressional candidate. The political greenhorn won the primary and won again against his Republican rival, incumbent Senator Lauch Faircloth. Edwards loaned his campaign $3.2 million from personal funds.

During the political campaign, the hugely successful silver-tongued barrister in a Brooks Brothers suit was nowhere to be found. Rather, Edwards projected the image of a humble, small-town lawyer with an earnest desire to go to Washington to fight for the “regular” North Carolinians, people like the ones he grew up with deep in Piedmont country. It was a theme he returned to four years later when he began his run for the White House. “These people are entitled to a champion in the White House,” Edwards said when announcing his candidacy. “Somebody who goes to work every day seeing things through their eyes, and who provides real ideas about how to make their lives better, not somebody who’s thinking about insiders or looking out for insiders.”

THE INFLUENCE OF THE PLAINTIFFS’ BAR

Yet Edwards is a member in good standing of a group of political insiders. His deep-pocketed supporters have been drawn from the ranks of his professional brethren, America’s personal injury lawyers. Edwards displayed throughout his political life the willingness to use the powerful resources, connections, and riches of his fellow trial lawyers to his advantage. His campaign against Lauch Faircloth in 1998 was financed largely through two sources: the wealth Edwards won in the courtroom and contributions from attorneys around the country.

Trial lawyers — who represent plaintiffs in personal injury and other civil suits — number among the most powerful interest groups in Washington. Since 1990, the 56,000-member Association of Trial Lawyers of America, or ATLA, and its political action committee have given more than $21.6 million in political donations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, giving 89 percent or more of their contributions to Democrats. In 2002, ATLA spent more than $3.4 million on in-house and outside lobbyists to influence Congress and the executive branch on issues, not surprisingly, of interest to personal injury and plaintiffs’ attorneys, and their clients. ATLA has lobbied on the way the tax code treats damage awards from discrimination claims, on the way the bankruptcy code treats damages awarded to workers exposed to asbestos, and on whether businesses attacked by terrorists will be liable for damages from those injured or killed.

Their influence in Washington is proportionate to the growing importance of trial lawyers nationally. The plaintiffs’ bar has become a multibillion-dollar industry in its own right. Litigation over asbestos, the fire-resistant mineral used in construction and manufacturing that can cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis when inhaled, may ultimately result in $275 billion in damage awards to workers and their families, according to Milliman USA, an actuarial consulting firm. A portion of those damages — perhaps billions of dollars — will end up in the pockets of trial lawyers. In 1998, tobacco companies entered into a landmark settlement with state governments in which the cigarette makers pledged to reimburse states more than $246 billion over 25 years. Some trial lawyer firms, who teamed with state attorneys general in the case, have pocketed at least $10.7 billion in fees.

Like any other industry, trial lawyers oppose measures that will affect their bottom lines. In 1999, President Bill Clinton attempted to seize control of the $246 billion in payments from the tobacco companies to the states. Such federal intervention would have meant Washington bureaucrats rather than state-level officials would dole out legal fees — a scenario that trial lawyers, one of the Democratic Party’s most faithful and largest benefactors, were loath to see. Edwards was among those who opposed the initiative; and the states kept control of settlement proceeds.

Generally, Republican lawmakers in Congress and the states, and those who have occupied the White House, have favored tort reform — which would limit the kind of multimillion-dollar verdicts that fuel the industry — and other initiatives that would make it harder for plaintiffs to sue. Democrats have been attentive to the legal community’s legislative desires. President Clinton, for example, vetoed bills that supporters claimed would have protected corporations from a spate of investor lawsuits that had made trial lawyers millions of dollars but had become problematic for businesses, particularly in the high-tech industry.

Edwards vehemently opposed a Patients’ Bill of Rights backed by President Bush in 2003 because, among other things, it would have limited jury awards to victims of medical malpractice. He proposed his own bill, which opens new avenues for lawyers to file state and federal claims against health maintenance organizations that deny claims and to more easily sue doctors accused of malpractice. “We need a real solution that frees doctors from crippling insurance costs without preventing the most injured victims from receiving the compensation they deserve,” Edwards said after the Senate rejected the White House proposal.

Since 1997, the year Edwards began raising money for his Senate run, he has collected more than $23.5 million, including money donated to his political interest group, the New American Optimists, one of the loosely regulated organizations that fall under Internal Revenue Service rules rather than those of the Federal Election Commission. In the presidential race, Edwards has raised well over $11.9 million, with at least $6.8 million of that coming from fellow trial lawyers or their firms. Like Charles W. Patrick Jr. of Charleston, many of the lawyers who have backed John Edwards’ bid for the presidency are some of the most aggressive in the country.

No single law firm contributed more money to Edwards’ campaigns than the Dallas, Texas, firm Baron & Budd, PC, which has donated at least $407,000. Frederick M. Baron, the name partner of the firm, is a former president of ATLA and a past president of the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. He was a former Democratic National Committee Trustee and one of the party’s biggest soft-money donors, giving more than $1 million to DNC committees since 1998. Appropriately enough, he is also the national finance cochairman of the Edwards campaign, helping the candidate to exploit the community of wealthy attorneys.

Baron & Budd earned millions of dollars representing clients who filed suit against manufacturers who used asbestos in their products. Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral that was widely used in the United States until 1979. The fiber is resistant to heat, making it useful as an insulator used in everything from kilns to power plants. It is also deadly — which the manufacturers knew. Some hid early evidence of the dangers of asbestos, thereby exposing countless workers to severe health risks. Thousands of American workers died gruesome deaths caused by asbestosis, which scars the lungs and leaves victims gasping for breath, or mesothelioma, a painful form of lung cancer.

Baron was among the trial lawyers who represented such workers. He discovered documents that showed how asbestos makers concealed the evidence of the health risks of those who inhaled the fiber. Lawyers around the country targeted asbestos makers by the dozens in what The New Yorker magazine once described as the “greatest avalanche of toxic tort litigation in
history.”

But critics of the lawsuits have noted that the number of defendants, originally limited to companies that manufactured products containing asbestos, has expanded to include companies only peripherally responsible for exposing workers.

“While the lawsuits have won millions in damages from companies that exposed their workers to asbestos, they have had negative consequences. A 2002 study by the Rand Institute said that some 56 companies, including the largest asbestos makers in the world, like U.S.-based Owens Corning, were forced into bankruptcy. Some 52,000 workers, many of them in unions, lost their jobs when their employers were bankrupted by millions of dollars in damage claims, according to the American Insurance Association.

The flood of asbestos litigation has created a number of problems, not the least of which is that the companies responsible for paying judgments are going bankrupt in the attempt. There are roughly 600,000 plaintiffs who have filed asbestos-related claims, and perhaps as many as 27 million Americans who were exposed to the carcinogen. As more companies are forced into bankruptcy by successful lawsuits, future victims will be unable to recover damages for the injuries done to them. In a 1999 Supreme Court decision, Justice David Souter, a Republican appointee, called for congressional action to address “the elephantine mass of asbestos cases” that was swamping courts around the country. “This litigation defies customary judicial administration and calls for national legislation,” Souter wrote. His words were echoed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, in a 2002 decision.

In the spring of 2003, the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Edwards is a member, held hearings on the topic of asbestos litigation, and whether Congress should move to stem the flood of suits. Lawyers, doctors, and industry experts testified before the committee. The hearings revealed a rare split between two of the largest organizations of lawyers, the American Bar Association, which backed litigation reforms, and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, which opposed congressional interference. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, tried unsuccessfully to push through an industry-backed bill that would have created a $108 billion national trust fund to compensate asbestos victims and would have capped payments to individual plaintiffs at $750,000. The bill met resistance. To date, various proposed reforms have stalled; some are still pending in the House and Senate.

ATLA argued that the compensation offered by the bill was too low, and that plaintiffs (and, though ATLA didn’t say so, their attorneys as well) were awarded far more by the court system. As for Baron, the past president of ATLA and the pioneer of asbestos litigation, he told the committee on September 25, 2002, that a legislative remedy was out of the question. “Thirty years of actual experience in the state tort law systems, where over 500,000 asbestos victims have sought and obtained compensation for their injuries, is conclusive evidence that there is . . . no more effective mechanism for ensuring that victims get compensation than the tort system.”

BENDING THE RULES

ATLA argues that it “promotes justice and fairness for injured persons, safeguards victims’ rights — particularly the right to trial by jury — and strengthens the civil justice system through education and disclosure of information critical to public health and safety.” Yet some prominent trial lawyers, including those who have supported Edwards, have been accused of undermining the integrity of the civil justice system that those victims depend on.

A Texas weekly newspaper, the Dallas Observer, uncovered a 20-page document that Baron’s firm prepared for its clients, called “Preparing for Your Deposition.” Among the advice the document offered was “to maintain that you never saw any labels on asbestos products that said ‘Warning’ or ‘Danger’” and “You may be asked how you are able to recall so many product names. The best answer is to say that you recall seeing the names on the containers or on the product itself. The more you thought about it, the more you remembered!” Baron, who declined to be interviewed for this book, told the publication that clients were always told, orally and in written instructions, to tell the truth. He said the document was genuine and prepared by a paralegal at the firm, and added, “I would never sanction any of our people using a written document like that to give to a client, because it can be misinterpreted a million ways. . . . So, we don’t use written material when we prepare clients.”

Paul Minor was made a multimillionaire by the tobacco lawsuits, which netted his firm $70 million for its role in the negotiations in the states’ settlement with Big Tobacco. Minor, along with his partners, ranks high among Edwards’ career patrons with $129,000 in contributions to the senator. On July 25, 2003, the federal government indicted Minor, a state supreme court justice, and three others. Minor allegedly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and gifts to Justice Oliver Diaz Jr. Minor and the others were accused of scheming “to defraud and deprive the state of Mississippi and its citizens of their right” to an honest judicial system. Minor, Diaz, and the others indicted have all entered not guilty pleas; the case was still pending at the time of this writing.

Some trial lawyers have preferred to bypass the civil justice system altogether. In their most famous case, the Girardi & Keese law firm chose that route. The name of the firm might not ring a bell outside of legal circles, but the legal work they did for a small California town that sued electric utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric was made famous in the 2000 movie Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts. Edwards has certainly heard of the firm; Girardi & Keese’s senior partners and staffers donated at least $362,475 to Edwards and his New American Optimists organization.

Thomas Girardi and Robert Keese, both powerful and politically connected, joined up with Brockovich, then a down-on-her-luck law clerk at a small firm run by lawyer Ed Masry, to represent 650 plaintiffs from Hinkley, California, a small town in the Mohave Desert, 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Back in 1952, Pacific Gas & Electric built a pumping station near the town, as part of a natural gas transmission system that piped natural gas from the Texas Panhandle to the San Francisco Bay area. In 1987, the company discovered that chemical runoff disposed of in unlined wastewater ponds had leaked. Chromium, used to prevent rust in the transmission lines, had contaminated Hinkley’s water supply. That, in part, explained the host of ailments townspeople had suffered.

Backed up by the big-time firm from Los Angeles, Brockovich helped residents win a $333 million award. Pacific Gas & Electric and the plaintiffs’ lawyers agreed to private arbitration before a panel of for-hire judges, some of whom had socialized with the powerful attorneys of Girardi & Keese. After they had ruled, the arbitrators in the case, who had retired from the bench, were among 10 current and former judges treated to an extended Mediterranean cruise organized by something called the Foundation for the Enrichment of Law. Thomas Girardi and other lawyers involved in the case ran the foundation. Girardi told the Los Angeles Times that the cruise included a “professional program,” making it permissible under California judicial rules.

INFLUENCE FOR INJURY

Law firms have played pivotal roles in Edwards’ campaigns. For example, Ness Motley (which has since changed its name to Motley Rice LLC) allowed Edwards to use its corporate jet and pay just $2,532 for the privilege. Federal election law allows candidates to campaign with private jets and then reimburse their patrons for the cost of a first-class ticket instead of actual costs incurred flying the candidate around the country. Between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2002, Edwards reported that his campaign paid up or treated as an in-kind contribution more than $14,000 for services rendered by his fellow trial lawyers, mostly catering for campaign events. Edwards also took air charter services from Charlotte-based Hendrick Motor-sports, the NASCAR racing team that includes Winston Cup racers Jeff Gordon, Terry Labonte, and Jimmie Johnson. The campaign paid out $5,292 to Hendrick for “airfare.”

Trial lawyers have also been his most generous contributors. Of Edwards’s top 25 career patrons, 22 are law firms. (The remaining three are soft-money mogul and movie producer Stephen Bing, Goldman Sachs Group, and Wakefield Development, a real estate developer.) But in his early fundraising for his White House run, Edwards has relied heavily on his fellow lawyers. Some have been generous beyond what federal election law allows.

C. “Tab” Turner of Turner & Associates, a Little Rock, Arkansas, firm that made a name for itself suing Ford Motor Company and Bridgestone/Firestone when faulty tires on Ford’s Explorer SUV caused a number of accidents, is the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into alleged campaign finance law violations. Turner & Associates donated at least $198,000 to Edwards’s campaign and to his 527 committee, the New American Optimists. Turner and four legal assistants from the firm each gave Edwards’s presidential campaign the maximum $2,000 contribution in early 2003. One employee told The Washington Post that Turner had promised to reimburse the employees for their donations. A lawyer for Turner was quoted by the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer as saying Turner did not know it was illegal to funnel political contributions through another person, a trick that enables individual donors to exceed the $2,000 limit on contributions to candidates for federal office. As of this writing, the investigation was still ongoing.

Edwards has put the money he’s received to good use. During his 1998 run for the Senate, he hired a 26-person campaign staff that included all-star Democratic strategists, among them Bob Shrum, a former Clinton advisor and media consultant; Gary Pierce, a media strategist and advisor; and Harris Hickman, a top Democratic pollster. Their handiwork was apparent from the start. The Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer described the event during which he kicked off his campaign, at a Methodist church social hall in Robbins, North Carolina, as a scene right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. “The old high school basketball coach. The parents. The family minister. The barber. And the candidate — John Edwards, the small-town boy who became a big-time lawyer in the state capital.”

There to capture the moment was a camera crew that his Washington, D.C., media consultants sent to film the event. That kind of footage became a staple for Edwards. As his ambitions rose and the campaigns moved quickly from his North Carolina Senate seat to the national stage, the image of the small-town all-American boy became a recurring theme. He reminded voters of Moore County and places like it, where the folks still know him as Johnny, the son of a factory worker. “If you know where I come from, you know who I am,” Edwards told the rally in his hometown that day in 1998.

But Edwards has also been willing to fund groups whose tactics are far less sentimental. Since 2000, he paid $7,500 in “web consulting” fees to Democrats.com, a stridently anti-Republican website that, among other things, compares President Bush to Adolf Hitler. The site sponsored a petition drive to have Bush removed from office by invoking the 25th Amendment, arguing that the president was “demonstrably insane.”

Edwards is no stranger to outside advocacy groups that support Democratic candidates by purchasing advertising and conducting other political work that benefits candidates, directly or indirectly. During the 1998 Senate race against Faircloth, an organization called the Alliance for Good Government was established in Raleigh. The North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers — of which Edwards was a one-time board of advisory member — and the North Carolina Association of Educators funded it, according to reports.

The group provides political consultants to candidates, collects voter lists, and does mailings, mainly on behalf of Democratic candidates. Molly Freeman, the director at the time and now a lobbyist for the state teachers union, said the alliance was established as a counterbalance to the conservative business interests that had launched their own issue advertising campaign, some of which demonized trial lawyers.

In 1999, the alliance trumpeted its role in the state elections. In a year-end review, the group contended that it had sent out nearly 1 million pieces of direct mail and made about 200,000 phone calls to get out voters. It also claimed to have provided political consulting services to 36 Democratic candidates and 2 Republicans in the general elections. The group targeted minority voters statewide and 25- to 45-year-old white women known to vote only in presidential elections.

Some of the most effective pieces of campaign literature used during that race were flyers that targeted women and African-American voters. One featured a black man with his mouth bound by tape. The words “Speak for yourself, or someone else will” were printed across the bottom. Similarly, the second flyer featured a woman with her mouth taped shut, and the same phrase printed beneath. “It was race-baiting; plain and simple,” complained Chuck Fuller, a North Carolina political consultant who was Faircloth’s campaign manager.

As a senator, Edwards has opposed tort reform efforts and provisions in various health care-related bills that would have hindered plaintiffs’ ability to sue and, something he didn’t mention, the ability of his supporters to share in the damages they win. He speaks regularly at local and national chapters of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, touting his accomplishments in Congress and the courtroom.

At the ATLA convention in Montreal, Canada, in 2001, he told the assembled crowd that “for 20 years I fought for the rights and dignity of ordinary people, just like everyone in this room. I make no apologies for what I spent my life doing. I am proud of what I did: leveling the playing field.”

The convention crowd buzzed with talk about the new avenues for lawsuits that a patients’ bill of rights which Edwards had proposed would open, should it become law. And, from the back of the room, as John Edwards left the podium, came shouts that were sure music to his ears.

“Edwards for president! Edwards for president!”

His number one constituency had spoken.

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