At the last US presidential election Elizabeth Edwards had to watch as John Kerry helped sink her husband's chances of getting to the White House. They bounced back - and are gearing up to try again. After all, the campaign trail could never be as tough as losing a child and battling breast cancer, writes Anna Mundow
Nancy Pelosi is running the House of Representatives, Hillary Clinton is running for president and Condoleezza Rice is running around the Middle East. Sporting a variety of power suits and occasionally ill-advised footwear - memo to the secretary of state: high heels are not recommended for descending an aircraft staircase at Heathrow during a gale; ask any flight attendant - female politicians in the US are increasingly hard to ignore.
Elizabeth Edwards, on the other hand, is easy to overlook. She is, after all, known chiefly as the wife of John Edwards, the former senator who was John Kerry's running mate in 2004 and who, earlier this month, entered the race for the presidency. She is 158cm (5ft 2in) tall, unfashionably round and disarmingly honest. She shops at regular stores such as Target and Costco and celebrates each wedding anniversary by sharing meat loaf or salad with her husband at their local Wendy's fast-food restaurant. But don't be fooled. Clinton may have the money, and Barack Obama the smile, but Edwards is her husband's stealth weapon. Spend an hour in her company and you see why. Edwards, quite simply, has It: the irresistible common touch that aspiring politicians spend millions of dollars to acquire but that she apparently came by naturally.
The charm is immediately evident, even at the start of a hectic day of television and radio interviews about her new book, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers. In a Boston hotel room that vibrates with incoming telephone calls, e-mails and faxes, all fielded by her book-tour publicist, Edwards is smiling and relaxed. "We've been a really open family our whole lives," she says of the Edwardses' North Carolina household. "People would always walk into our house and announce that they were there. Which means there's a large group of boys now in their 20s who have seen me in every pair of pyjamas I own. Once you've crossed that threshold, Anna, everything's a lot easier."
Her use of my name is revealing. It is easy to tell when self-important interviewees have just reminded themselves to drop the interviewer's name into the conversation; the self-congratulatory look is unmistakable, and they repeat the trick a little too often. Edwards, by contrast, seems to remember your name because she is more interested in you than she is in herself. She is, in other words, a born politician, something that her candidate husband has never resembled, except when he is standing next to her.
This became increasingly noticeable during the 2004 presidential campaign, as the American public felt that they, along with all those boys in their 20s, were seeing Edwards, metaphorically at least, in her pyjamas. Whether she was appearing at a Hollywood fundraiser or attending a Kansas spaghetti supper, alongside the Kerrys or alone, Edwards looked like the friendly cashier who starts up a conversation at the supermarket checkout or the waitress who tops up your coffee cup in the local diner. (In Saving Gracesshe writes that her mother once declared her a born waitress.)
Edwards's apparent openness survived even the superficially glossy but relentlessly gritty 2004 campaign, during which she and her husband revealed much of their lives, including the effect that the death of their 16-year-old son, Wade, in a car crash in 1996, had on their marriage and on their family. The second blow, however, remained a family secret until Kerry and Edwards lost to George W Bush.
Immediately after Kerry's concession speech, the Secret Service drove the Edwardses a few kilometres across Boston, from Faneuil Hall to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, for the biopsy that would confirm that Elizabeth had breast cancer. At one point it looked as if it had metastasised to her liver. It had not, and, after 16 weeks of chemotherapy, a lumpectomy and, finally, six weeks of radiotherapy, Edwards, at 57, is "cancer free", as her doctor puts it, although troubled by lymphoedema - numbness of the hands and feet that is a common effect of lymph-node removal.
Saving Graces, which resulted from her experiences during the election campaign and cancer treatment, was not the widely expected name-dropping exposé. "Publishers pushed me to write a memoir after the election," Edwards says, "but I didn't want to write what they were suggesting - something that was just me, me, me with a little bit of juicy gossip thrown in. By the fall of 2004 I had decided to write something, but I didn't move forward with it until the following year, when I had finished chemotherapy. You see, I did have something I wanted to say. I'd been through a lot, yet I still felt optimistic. I was in isolated circumstances, but I never felt alone. And I thought there was a reason for that that was not personal to me; it was just the way I had chosen to live. And anyone can have the same kind of support that I had. So I thought maybe I could tell people how I acquired that. This is not a how-to book, but it shows how I did it anyway." She pauses before adding: "'Course, nobody knew whether I could write a single line."
It's that down-home charm again, deflecting the observation that of course her publishers knew Edwards could write. She studied English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before going on to law school, and she taught legal writing before practising as a commercial litigation lawyer. This time, however, the writing was personal. "Emotionally, writing the part about Wade was the hardest," Edwards says, "because I used much of the writing I had done at the time Wade died. There was a lot of it. It had been my unwanted companion for over a decade, and I didn't want to rewrite it, because if I did I might take some of the rawness out. It was the most unfiltered writing I'd ever done in my life, and I felt it was important to be that honest. But that meant that I had to read through everything in order to pick what I would use. That was hard."
She is silent for a moment; then her tone becomes more businesslike. "Technically, the most difficult part was writing about the politics. I wanted to describe the sense of community you get with the people you meet, whether they're working on the campaign or are just in front of you for one event. But I knew that readers would be interested in the backstory, and trying to meld those two was difficult. Remember, I mostly travelled on my own in the campaign, so I really don't have many juicy stories."
Maybe, maybe not. Reading between the lines, it is clear that she still thinks her husband, not Kerry, should have been the Democratic presidential candidate and that she and Kerry's wife, the aristocratic Teresa Heinz Kerry, never became soulmates. Edwards wryly recalls how her friends and neighbours mobilised to transform the bedroom of the Edwardses' college-age daughter when they got word that the Kerrys would be spending the night in the Edwards house. As it turned out, John and Teresa only changed clothes there before moving on to more salubrious accommodation.
Such stories are told without a trace of venom, and Edwards is equally good humoured when describing minor humiliations, such as the moment she noticed the Secret Service agents assigned to her tense when they saw the sign being held up by a protester. There had been angry demonstrators at her speaking events, but this man was smirking, not shouting. His sign read simply: "Fatso." Edwards laughs at the memory of the Secret Service being more insulted on her behalf than she was.
The birth of Edwards's two younger children (the eldest daughter, Cate, attends Harvard Law School) also inspired her detractors. Having undergone what she describes as "fertility treatments", Edwards gave birth to Emma Claire when she was 48 and Jack when she was 50. When asked repeatedly whether she used donor eggs - a procedure that many fertility experts say she must have undergone - Edwards has consistently given the "fertility treatment" answer. It is clear that she does not want the question to be asked again.
It will be, of course, as next year's US presidential election approaches. And as John Edwards continues to alter his message - on Iraq, Iran, Israel - depending on which interest group he is addressing, ordinary Americans will be scrutinising Elizabeth while the pundits scrutinise her husband. She appears untroubled by that prospect and sure of her role. "Sometimes the dialogue moves away from personal to impersonal language," she says, diplomatically. "If we bring it back to the personal language maybe people will find a way to make the connection between their own lives and political action."
For the first time this morning Elizabeth Edwards sounds like a politician. Born and made.
Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, by Elizabeth Edwards, is published by Broadway Books, $24.95 in US