COLUMBIA, S.C. -- At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, election day, a staffer from Sen. John Edwards' campaign rushed into the back office of their headquarters on Gervais Street. Exit polls were showing Wesley Clark, John Kerry, and Edwards running neck and neck in Oklahoma, each with 30 percent of the vote. Should they tell the people calling potential voters in South Carolina to start trying people in Oklahoma?
The exit polls in South Carolina showed Edwards with a comfortable lead. But the phone bankers were on a roll. More volunteers than anyone expected had poured in over the weekend, and everything was humming at a perfect whirr. The team decided they should continue reaching out to people in South Carolina. The Oklahoma get-out-the-vote effort would continue to be the province of the phone bankers in that state.
Edwards went on to win 30 percent of the votes in Oklahoma to Clark's 30 percent, a virtual delegate tie that gave first-place bragging rights to Clark.
"Maybe we should have done it," said the staffer later, at Jillian's pub and restaurant in Columbia's hip Vista district, where the Edwards crew was celebrating its victory with beer and cheers and digital group photos of friends. The festive air was largely undampened by such thoughts, though. Edwards had won South Carolina.
With a decisive, 15-point victory in his must-win state of South Carolina, a near-win in Oklahoma and a reasonably decent -- though distant -- second in Missouri, Edwards consolidated his status as the clearest challenger to front-runner Kerry. While Clark won Oklahoma by about 1200 votes, Edwards is now the only candidate besides Kerry to achieve a decisive victory in any state during the first nine contests.
Though Edwards has yet to show an ability to win states outside of his native South, his impressive showing in South Carolina nonetheless demonstrated a depth of regional support far greater than Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) was able to muster in his neighboring Iowa or former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean found in New Hampshire. That bodes well for him as the nominating contest heads into additional Southern states, such as Virginia and Tennessee, on Feb. 10. Indeed, Edwards got more votes 131,174 -- than all the ballots (114,000) cast in the 1992 South Carolina primary. And twice as many people turned out this year as in 1992.
"His two Americas message is what I think took him over the top. He's absolutely right and nobody knows it better than the people of South Carolina," says Rick Wade, the 2002 Democratic candidate for secretary of state in South Carolina. "He can take that message to Michigan. He can take that anywhere he needs to go, even against Bush in November."
After South Carolina, Edwards heads for Tennessee and Virginia. His crack team of staffers who'd worked in Iowa has already been dispatched to Michigan. And while he road-tested his message in Iowa and New Hampshire, it had a special resonance in South Carolina. At eight p.m. last night, Edwards bounded out of a side door at Jillian's to the stage, accompanied by roars from the crowd and John Mellencamp's "Small Town." It's a familiar song to campaign watchers -- he uses it as an introduction at nearly every appearance, and has blared it out of the embedded exterior speakers on his Real Solutions bus. "No, I cannot forget where it is that I come from," sung Mellencamp. "I cannot forget the people who love me/ Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town/ And people let me be just what I want to be."
Edwards high-fived the people standing beside him on the stage, grabbing their hands and wrapping his parents, Wallace and Bobbi Edwards, in a giant hug. His wife, Elizabeth, stood behind him with a gigantic, genuine, irrepressible grin on her face as he delivered his victory speech. "It's a long way from that house in Seneca, South Carolina," he began.
Seneca is where Edwards was born. It's a three-hour drive from Columbia through the piney, undulating upcountry and still so small that it only merits a sign when you get there. The modest home where his parents lived when he was born is something he talks about in his stump speeches, even though they lived there only a few months and then his parents moved to a roomier house. The town itself remains a small place, with a dated drive-up burger joint on the main road and a fudge shop and a couple of other restaurants that close early at night.
The road from there to yuppified Greenville, which is near the new BMW plant and full of upscale restaurants, is lined with signs for no-money down furniture and payday loans, check-cashing and special car-financing deals. Edwards rails against such companies in his stump speech, turning credit card companies with high fees and usurious interest rates into the No. 1 villain.
Just driving to Seneca and back, you can see where his fury comes from. Like Edwards, his message seems born of the Carolinas and a sympathy for the small-town, small-life experiences he's spent his whole life getting away from. By attacking these companies, Edwards is focusing on a novel approach of getting more money into people's hands, beyond the 25 cent minimum raise hikes and tax cuts politicians usually profer.
"Tonight you said the politics of lifting people up beats the politics of tearing people down," said Edwards to the Jillian's crowd. "And today we said clearly to the American people that in our country, our America, anything is possible."
Red, white, and blue balloons shifted slightly in their nets above Edwards' head, while men with balloon-release strings maintained tense holds on the threads leading up to the white, hewn-wood beams. "I love to be at victory parties," said Margaret Williams. Or Mrs. Marshall Williams, as she's known. Her husband was the longest serving state senator in South Carolina when he passed away eight years ago. "I want to see him represent us," she said of Edwards. "He came up the hard way with a family in the mills, and I love to see people do well that come through hard circumstances."
In politics, you get one chance at the microphone, one moment when it seems as though the whole media world turns to you. It is a moment of danger for most politicians, when they have to prove that they really have something to say and can be at their best when they are most exhausted. Edwards was hoarse, but he seemed as deft in front of the crowd as if he were just starting the day.
He spoke about a 10-year-old girl whose father had lost his factory job, saying she went to sleep hungry and cold. The girl wasn't a real person -- Edwards gave no name -- but a studied creation intended to symbolize American economic problems in the most innocent, sympathetic figure imaginable.
"Tonight we see her," said Edwards. "We embrace her" and the 35 million Americans in poverty like her. "Tonight we see them. Tonight we hear them. We believe in them. We will lift them up!"
For a moment, I was reminded of Bill Clinton. When he spoke, you could watch a room light up. Each person seemed to feel that a turn of phrase, a promise, however trite, or a mundane sentence was a personal vow to them. Edwards was doing the same thing, with the story of a girl who wasn't real and a problem that is. It was a roomful of supporters, but they were as affected as the crowds of strangers I've seen in Iowa and New Hampshire.
"Your father's days are lost to you/ This is your time here to do what you will do/Your life is now," the Mellencamp CD played as Edwards left the stage. The television networks were filled with Edwards. "It's nice to have this whole hour to ourselves," said one campaign staffer. It was Edwards' moment. Who knows if what comes next can match it.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at the Prospect.
