The Gleam Team

By KAREN TUMULTY

In May 2001, when Washington's political wags were the only ones playing the parlor game of presidential prospects, John Kerry, who has learned the value of forward observation in war and politics, went on a scouting mission. He and his wife Teresa invited John and Elizabeth Edwards over for an intimate gathering at their Georgetown mansion, along with half a dozen other guests. Peter Yarrow, of the folk-singing group Peter, Paul and Mary and an old Kerry buddy from his Vietnam protest days, was there. And so was Georgia's then Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in that war. Dining just one floor below a collection of Dutch masters and beyond a perfectly tended rose garden, the Senator from Massachusetts had reason to be worried that the golden-tongued Senator from North Carolina, who had the raw talent that people were saying they had once seen in Bill Clinton, would steal the show. But as guests recall, it was Kerry who was relaxed and Edwards who was eager to impress.

And when the conversation turned naturally to Vietnam, Edwards could only listen respectfully to the reminiscences of men with lined faces and battle scars. After dinner, Yarrow grabbed a guitar and started a sing-along of his old standards like This Land Is Your Land and If I Had a Hammer, and the potential for embarrassment was high. But Elizabeth knew all the words, and Cleland chimed in with special intensity. When pressed by the table to demonstrate his developing guitar skills, Kerry demurred, and everyone walked away with the picture of a man confident of his instincts--one who had no intention of coming in second.

Perhaps Kerry also sensed after that dinner that Edwards, who would become his most dangerous rival in the primaries, was a man who would respect his elders and tackle with relish the often thankless work of a vice-presidential nominee. The pick clearly thrilled his party after Kerry announced it last week in 21st century fashion with an e-mail to supporters, but Kerry too seemed all smiles and hugs about it. He chose the fresh face that his party had wanted all along, over others who offered him longer resumes and a more comfortable personal chemistry; then he launched their joint venture almost flawlessly, bathing it in the light of values and optimism, stretching the media coverage across three days and introducing the country to a camera-ready blended family that includes what are surely the two cutest children to stand on the national political stage since Caroline and John-John.

By the time Kerry and Edwards sat down for an interview with TIME on Friday morning--in a cluttered conference room along the Hudson River piers where they had just raked in $2.2 million from exultant New Yorkers in back-to-back fund raisers--their romance had blossomed to the point where they were finishing each other's answers and sounding as though this was always meant to be. Kerry described a connection of two former adversaries who came to realize they "really understood each other"; Edwards talked of "a powerful and growing trust between the two of us."

But there are still a few things about each other that are going to take some getting used to, things that even Kerry's hyperefficient team of more than 100 lawyers and vetters missed--like the fact that Edwards has something of a substance-abuse problem. "You ask me what I've learned [about Edwards]?" Kerry said. "This man drinks a lot of Diet Coke." The North Carolinian who would be a caffeine-and-sodium-buzzed heartbeat away from the presidency subsequently admitted that "on a good day" he has been known to open four before noon, at which point Kerry pronounced himself stunned, seized the can from Edwards and started reading the nutrition label aloud. "Sodium, 2%. Protein, John, zero," he called as Edwards scrambled for the door. As for himself, Kerry owned up: "When I drink Coke, I have to drink the real thing, because of the sugar in it."

However they each prefer to get their jolts, there's no evidence yet that Kerry's presidential prospects have got one from the addition of Edwards to the ticket. The latest TIME poll, conducted over the three days of media frenzy that followed the Edwards announcement, shows it did little to budge the race from the margin-of-error territory where it has been pretty much stuck since Kerry secured the nomination in March. He now leads Bush 49% to 45% among likely voters; in early June, the margin was only slightly tighter, with Bush leading 49% to 48%. To the degree that there has been any movement at all, it comes mostly because Bush's numbers are falling--weighed down in part by the fact that half those polled described his choice of running mate Dick Cheney as either "fair" or "poor."

Nor was Kerry and Edwards' honeymoon week entirely without its miscues--such as when their first photo op caught Teresa Heinz Kerry reaching across the candidates to wrest a thumb from 4-year-old Jack Edwards' mouth. Or when during a $7.5 million Radio City Music Hall fund raiser, comedian Whoopi Goldberg went into a raunchy riff of lewd--and not particularly funny--puns that employed the word bush. Someone apparently hadn't told her that the password for the week was values--a term that one or the other of the two candidates used eight separate times in their interview with TIME. When Kerry and Edwards took the stage--again declaring their campaign a "celebration of American values"--Kerry congratulated Goldberg and the other performers for being there "to join in making this a better country." It wasn't until the next day, with Republicans howling for a transcript of the "hatefest," that the campaign tried to distance itself from its choice of entertainment.

Kerry's pick of a charismatic newcomer whose entire public life consists of 5 1/2 years in the Senate reveals two things: Kerry's confidence that, even in these serious times, his foreign-policy credentials are enough to stack up against a wartime Commander in Chief and his calculation that what he most needs to turn the race his way is a heart transplant. In Edwards, Kerry hopes he has found a surrogate who can connect with swing-state voters in ways he has not been able to, who has the working-class roots and the political gift to touch the frustrations and aspirations of that small slice of the electorate that is truly up for grabs in a polarized country. While history suggests vice-presidential picks can only nudge the race at the margins, those margins this year look particularly small and crucial, with only 6% of likely voters declaring themselves undecided even at this relatively early date. Edwards, says Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, "channels the hopes of the middle class and those who would like to be in the middle class, which is a very big part of what Kerry wants to do and say in the campaign."

The near universal verdict among Democrats and Republicans last week was that Kerry had gone with his strongest choice. But Edwards is not without his vulnerabilities. As the Kerry campaign played up Edwards' stint on the Senate Intelligence Committee, his foreign trips and his sessions with world leaders, Republicans moved in quickly to portray him as little more than a pretty face who is still at heart a slick, millionaire trial lawyer. At one point a few weeks ago, even Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz had ventured, "We may need someone with stronger credentials on foreign policy." Bush, campaigning in Edwards' state, compared his running mate with Edwards with a withering one-liner that showed how rough his team is planning to play: "Dick Cheney can be President."

That comparison could come back to haunt Bush, given how sharply Cheney's numbers are falling these days. Asked in the TIME poll who would make a better President, Edwards or Cheney, nearly 47% of the registered voters surveyed answered Edwards, while only 38% preferred the Vice President, who wields more influence than any other Vice President in memory, and who came to the job with more impressive credentials than the Governor of Texas, having already been a member of the House Republican leadership, Secretary of Defense and White House chief of staff.

As for how he envisions the role of someone whose required duties begin and end with breaking ties in the Senate, Kerry too seized the chance to contrast his pick with Bush's, telling TIME he plans to give Vice President Edwards "a very powerful position, properly utilized. I don't think it has been properly utilized in this Administration. I think it's been excessive, and I intend to be a President who is on top of what's happening in every regard. On final decisions, I'm not going to be pushed into them the way I sense this President was." As for his view of the job, Edwards said, "We will talk constantly about issues. He'll know what I believe and what I think needs to be done. But at the end of the day, the President of the United States has to make the final decision. The American people expect that, and I expect that. And both of us understand that."

However eager Kerry and Edwards are to stoke the idea of Cheney as an overreaching force of darkness, Edwards has yet to make much of an impression at all. Nearly 55% of registered voters say they know little or nothing about him, and nearly half--49%--say they're not sure whether the impression they do have is favorable or not. That's a situation the Kerry campaign set out to rectify last week, with a new $17 million advertising blitz in 20 states, including its first buy of ad time in Edwards' home state of North Carolina.

But that's a state that only the most dreamy-eyed Democrats give the ticket a chance of winning, even with its Senator on the ticket. Edwards' Senate re-election prospects had been far from certain when he opted instead to run for President. For all that is being made of Edwards' Southern roots, having him on the ticket isn't likely to change the Election Day forecast in the region very much, though it might force the Bush campaign to spend some more time and money protecting its turf. His Southern appeal was a major premise behind Edwards' presidential campaign, but he never proved he had all that much. New Englander Kerry beat Edwards in every Southern primary except for Edwards' neighboring state of South Carolina, where he had practically taken up residency to score his only victory in the primary.

If there is any geographic calculation in Edwards' selection, the place to find it is in the economically stressed Midwest. When Edwards makes his first solo campaign swing this week, it will start not in the South, but in Iowa. Exit polls from Wisconsin--a state whose Democratic primary Edwards came within six points of winning in February--suggest that Edwards and his message of "two Americas" could have strong crossover appeal in the swing states in which anxious voters are feeling left behind by the resurgent economy. He trounced Kerry among Republicans and independents, who are allowed under Wisconsin rules to vote in the Democratic primary, and edged him out among white males, a group that Democrats have found hard to get in the past few elections.

Even as Edwards lost one primary after another last winter, his charm on the stump wowed the Washington political establishment--some of whom predicted Kerry would never pick a running mate who was so certain to upstage him. And Edwards already is, managing to put more punch into a single sentence than Kerry can in an entire paragraph. Kerry has a tendency to describe the contrast between Bush's foreign policy and his own with a thicket of civics-book phrases like unilateral, multilateralism, community of nations and America's relationship with the world. But at the Democrats' first rally together in Cleveland, Ohio, Edwards made the same point in a way that would be understood in any schoolyard: "We need a President who will lead the world, not bully it." Asked a question about outsourcing during his interview with TIME, Edwards talked about what it did to the soul of his hometown when the paper mill where his father worked closed down. When he finished, Kerry couldn't resist jumping in with a mini-seminar on trade policy that included references to the fine print of the antidumping and antisurge laws. But at least Kerry answered the question.

That potential to be outshone by his No. 2 is one reason Kerry went to such lengths to assure that the process of selecting him was smooth and certain. It was a secret until the end, the details held fast and then leaked after the fact to strike just the right chord of total control. Kerry positioned himself as the maximum leader, the disciplined boss of a party known for chaos, and signaled that he could run a tight ship, make a crisp decision and then manage the moment. So well executed an exercise it turned out to be that even the maestros of message discipline at the Bush White House had to admire it.

At the outset, Kerry told Jim Johnson, the Washington hand he had picked to run the search, that he had two concerns: secrecy and what Johnson called an "extreme focus" on the candidates' feelings. Kerry, who like Edwards had made it to the final round of Al Gore's deliberations in 2000, didn't want any of the candidates to go through the humiliation he had, waiting by the phone only to learn of Joe Lieberman's selection five hours after the Gore campaign started telling the media. He also told Johnson he didn't want to see any "phony names"--people stuck on the list as a nod to diversity or to mollify an interest group. There was a gambit with John McCain in June; Kerry warmed to the fun of floating the name as a testament to civility and bipartisanship, not to mention how it would drive the White House crazy. The actual list of serious contenders grew to about 25. Kerry consulted just about every Democrat who matters, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, all his fellow Democratic Senators and much of the rank and file in the House. One big booster of Edwards was Kerry's senior Senator, Ted Kennedy, who had taken the impressive newcomer under his wing the day he set foot in the Senate. South Carolina's Fritz Hollings, one of Kerry's closest allies, fretted that Edwards might be vulnerable to attacks on his past life as a trial lawyer--though the TIME poll found that more than two-thirds of registered voters either considered it an asset or said it made no difference at all.

But even as Kerry asked around, he didn't tell much of what he was thinking--that, for instance, he was giving his Senate colleague Joe Biden more serious consideration than even his top aides suspected. Only Johnson, Cahill and scheduler Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was charged with the under-the-radar logistics, ever really knew which potential running mates Kerry was talking to and when. Mastromonaco arranged Kerry's secret meeting with Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack in San Francisco, but Dick Gephardt blew his cover when reporters caught him sneaking into Kerry's hideaway office in the Capitol. Kerry insisted on seeing the candidates alone, or sometimes with his wife. About once every 10 days or so, Johnson would deliver to Kerry a fat accordion file of background memos, speeches the various candidates had made and videos of their performances. Kerry would send them back, asking for more information, though those closest to the process were struck that he seemed to need less on Edwards, Gephardt, Bob Graham and Wesley Clark. "He knew more about the people he had run against," says an adviser. "Thirty debates--you learn a lot."

Eight days after Edwards got out of the race in March, his next campaign had begun. He summoned more than 100 of his biggest financial and political backers to a Washington hotel, where he and Kerry stood side by side and asked for their support. Edwards threw himself into the effort, showing up for Kerry whenever and wherever he was asked. It didn't hurt, either, that fellow Senator Jon Corzine and former U.N. Representative Richard Holbrooke called Kerry with rave reviews of how Edwards had wowed the business and political elite at last month's Bilderberg conference in Italy, a secretive annual session where international business and political leaders discuss the state of the world.

What probably clinched the deal was Kerry and Edwards' hush-hush meeting on July 1, a 1-hr. 45-min. session at former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's Georgetown house, to which Kerry had summoned Edwards from a Disney World vacation with his family. But Edwards didn't get the call until early Tuesday morning--almost 14 hours after Kerry had called a plane-decal company and asked it to add Edwards' name to the side of his Boeing 757. The offer made and accepted, Kerry told Edwards: "There will be a team at your house within an hour."

Though they had spent more than a year trying to convince Democratic primary voters that they were two very different species of politician, it won't be so hard to meld their positions on the issues, which were never that far apart to start with. But on such touchstone matters as the death penalty--which Edwards supports, but Kerry opposes for everyone except terrorists--Kerry told TIME: "I wouldn't ask John to change on something as fundamental as that, and I don't ask him to change. I think there's a phoniness to the politics of people who on matters of conscience and matters of deep-rooted belief change." The last time a presidential nominee tapped one of his former rivals to be his running mate, Kerry noted, "I watched George Herbert Walker Bush in one day go from pro-choice to pro-life. Uh-uh--not this team."

But there are signs nonetheless that, as in every marriage, each is already working subtle changes on the other. When asked by TIME to name the hardest question he posed to Edwards before picking him to be his running mate, Kerry instead launched into his stump speech about giving the country a better direction. It was then that his new partner interrupted, most gently: "Don't you think it's fair to say we wanted to both be sure that we both believed in that going forward?" To which Kerry answered, "Obviously. We wanted to make sure there was a connection between us, that we're on the same page, that we really understood each other." It still wasn't an answer exactly, but somehow it felt as though--together--they were getting closer. --With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. on the road with Kerry; and Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, John F. Dickerson and Michael Duffy/Washington

With reporting by Perry Bacon Jr. on the road with Kerry; and Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, John F. Dickerson and Michael Duffy/Washington