A True Political Partner

Edwards recently recalled a moment in the 2004 general election campaign when she lost faith in consultants. It happened when a strategist was explaining a weighting formula by which the campaign advisers planned to schedule John and Elizabeth Edwards and John Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, into different media markets.

"It seemed so completely bogus," she said. "It was like somebody had pulled the curtain back in 'The Wizard of Oz.' All of a sudden you saw people pulling levers on a machine that didn't operate anything. No one could have thought that way who'd actually been out hearing these stories and talking to people. . . . That was the magic hand moving people around and saying, 'You say it this way.' "

Still, with savvy consultants, would the current campaign have avoided some of the issues that have arisen this year? Those are now short-handed as the three Hs -- haircuts (at $400 a pop), hedge fund (the candidate's tenure as a hedge fund executive) and house (the 28,000-square-foot home the couple recently had built for their return to North Carolina).

At the height of the haircut flap, Elizabeth Edwards used a humorous quiz to defuse the issue in her introduction of her husband.

"How many people in his family went to college before he did?" she asked. The answer, which many in the audiences knew: none.

"Anybody know what his dad did for a living?" she continued. "Millworker," the audience uniformly responded.

"Anybody know the price of his most expensive haircut?" With that, the audience dissolved in laughter.

In a recent telephone interview, Edwards addressed those critics who say that with more empowered consultants, the campaign might have avoided or at least minimized those distractions. "Consultants are only good if you're going to listen to them," she said. "With the respect to decisions John's made, he listens primarily to his own conscience."

The decision to join the hedge fund came after John Edwards weighed the opportunities afforded by the job, which his wife said included considerable international work and a chance to gain insight into how this growing segment of the investment economy operated. "He didn't go through the portfolio, but he talked to these people [the fund's executives] and knew them to be good people," she said.

As for the haircuts, she said no one in the family knew the cost. Starting with the first campaign, the couple set up a system to authorize someone else to handle their routine bills. Edwards said they did not want to spend their few minutes at home in any month writing checks to pay them. The haircut bill that went to this campaign did not go to a strategist but to someone in finance, who paid it.

"We're not too happy ourselves about paying that much for a haircut," Edwards said. "We didn't need a consultant to tell us to fix that problem."

She also explained the thinking behind the new house. "We get heat about the house," she said. "A consultant, I suppose, would have told us not to build the house of our dreams when we came back to North Carolina."

Noting that the couple do not drive fancy cars and that she has never indulged in things such as expensive jewelry, she said, "That's money that John earned, and for the purpose we've always felt was most important."

John Edwards said his wife plays two critical roles in his White House bid. One is to encourage him to speak from his heart. "She will, if I ask her, tell me exactly what she thinks about an issue, but the dominant advice from her -- the recurring theme of all the advice -- is, 'Do what you believe is right.' If I were to say one thing that I've heard from her over and over again, that's it."

The other role may be even more a sign of the bond between the couple, who will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary today, and the importance they place on the mission they are jointly pursuing: urging her husband not to suspend the campaign when she was told that her cancer had spread.

"Without her saying we're going forward with this, I would have stopped and gone home and taken care of her," he said. "She was very strong and adamant about continuing in this cause, and not just for my sake, but because she believes the same things I believe about the country."