Catholics for Kerry

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Edwards Staying on Stage

By Jim Schlosser, Staff Writer
News & Record

GREENSBORO — Sen. John Edwards can insist mightily — as he did repeatedly Tuesday — that he isn't giving any thought about whether he'll run for high office again.

Why, then, the fuss over the flags?

For 45 minutes before the boyish, blue-suited Edwards entered the auditorium of the Greensboro Historical Museum for a farewell town meeting with constituents, his aides furled, unfurled and kept repositioning five American flags and a North Carolina flag on the stage.

They'd move one flag forward, another backward. They twisted coat hangers and placed them inside two flags to make the fabric lean a certain way.

An aide picked a place on the floor in front of the stage and marked it with white tape. This is where Edwards needed to stand for the flags to be centered in the background.

The aides then changed their minds and moved the tape to the second step leading up to the stage.

One aide went to the back of the auditorium and folded his hands as if it were a camera lens. He squinted through his fingers and called for some more minute shifting of the flags.

The young staffers fretted about the lighting, worried it might be too harsh. Audio concerned them, too. It didn't sound "clean" enough.

Wait a minute. Don't these people know the election is over? Edwards, who sacrificed his Senate seat to be Democrat John Kerry's running mate, need not worry anymore how he looks in front of a crowd.

Unless, he's already running for president in 2008.

Edwards said no decision about what's next for him will come until his wife, Elizabeth, is well again. The day after the election, she received a diagnosis of breast cancer. She has responded to the cancer challenge as she did other crises, with toughness, Edwards said.

"We are going to beat this. We feel very good and optimistic about that," Edwards said to applause.

But constituents and reporters persisted in asking what's up for him now that his Senate term is ending. How does he stay in the public eye without a public office?

Plenty of ways, he said. He could do so through a public policy institution or think tank, by making speeches in the United States and aboard, by working in a university setting or by associating himself with a foundation that shares his concerns.

Those concerns include jobs, health care and fighting for "the kind of people I grew up with," Edwards said of his boyhood in Robbins in Moore County, where he played football on Friday nights and went to church on Sundays.

One of his former teachers at North Moore High School, Eva Rae Clark, drove from Davidson County to see him Tuesday.

Edwards did offer one firm answer about his future.

"I don't have any plans to practice law," he said of the profession that made him wealthy and earned him a reputation for shrewd maneuvers in the courtroom.

He also said he didn't take it personally that voters in his home state went for the Republican Bush-Cheney ticket.

"We were running against a popular incumbent," he said of President Bush.

There was speculation during the campaign season that Edwards may have had trouble winning re-election to the Senate had he chosen to do so. By North Carolina standards, his voting record tended to be liberal.

"I would have won re-election as a senator," he replied firmly when asked how he would have done.

Arriving 45 minutes late, Edwards spoke to an audience that filled the 150-seat auditorium and had people standing along the walls.

Greensboro was a stop in a three-day state tour to thank people for their support and to hear concerns that he'll pass on to Richard Burr, who won Edwards' Senate seat.

His loudest applause, except when he declared that Kerry "would have made a great president," came when he said: "The fight is not over. Not only is the fight not over, I'm not through fighting."

After answering questions from the audience, Edwards stood in front of the stage as people filed by to ask for an autograph and to be photographed with him.

"I can't tell you how proud I am of you," Terri Battle of Greensboro told him. "I cried all day that Wednesday. We need you so much up there."

"I'm sick you and John Kerry lost," Victoria Topkins of Greensboro said to him. "It just makes me sick."

Angie Smits of Greensboro said she attended because of her friendship with Elizabeth Edwards, whom she met 10 years ago during an Internet chat-room discussion of UNC basketball.

"She can do a very in-depth analysis of the game," Smits said of the senator's wife.

Few people probably know of Elizabeth Edwards' love of basketball or, for that matter, that her husband played on the freshman football team at Clemson University before he transferred to N.C. State, where he didn't play football.

Was he better than his soon-to-be successor, Burr, who played football for Wake Forest University? Like a good politician, Edwards dodged the question.

"I didn't know," Edwards said, "Richard played football."


Contact Jim Schlosser at 373-7081 or jschlosser@news-record.com

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