It turned out that Blake had a history of arrests for driving under the influence and had had his license suspended in Colorado. He had contacted Wade Byrd in hopes of getting his license back and perhaps having the charges removed from his record. But as I quickly discovered, this was not even a remote possibility. Instead, as authorities in Colorado indicated, Blake was wanted for failing to appear on a decade-​old charge of driving while intoxicated. The press learned of the warrant for Blake’s arrest and descended on the little house he shared with his longtime girlfriend, Debbie, in the town of Fuquay-​Varina, North Carolina, which the senator had bought for them.

While Blake and Debbie hid behind their locked front door, Mrs. Edwards reacted angrily when the press called the campaign. “How could he do this?” she asked, as if Blake had gotten drunk and taken to the road in a deliberate attempt to derail his brother’s ambitions. The senator was more relaxed in his response. He issued a statement that said he understood that Blake had committed serious crimes but that he was now taking responsibility and that he loved him.

The senator asked me to visit Blake and Debbie to reassure them, and help them network their way to the best lawyer available, who could try to delay the proceeding in Colorado until after the election. Eventually, we found someone who promised to do just that. The main challenge in thi calls process would be to help Blake with the anxiety he felt about the case and getting him to Colorado. Although his crimes had been dangerous, Blake hadn’t hurt anyone, and the man I knew was truly remorseful and frightened about what he faced. I did my best to reassure him, and when the time came for him to appear in court in Colorado, I picked him up at his house at five A.M. so he could catch an early-​morning flight and avoid the press. I’ve never seen a more forlorn person than he was as I dropped him at the terminal, but the outcome of the hearing was a reprieve: The judge delayed sentencing until January. Until then, Blake was a free man and the press would leave him alone.

It may come as a shock to the obsessive, twenty-​four-​hour-​a-​day crusaders who work in presidential campaigns, but life goes on for people who live away from the frenzy of cross-​country tours, press conferences, and debates. On August 11, 2004, the Kerry-​Edwards team was arguing with George Bush about health care. You might say I was involved with the same issue, but in a far more personal way, supporting Cheri in the delivery room as our third child, a boy we named Cooper, came into the world.

Before he was born, doctors had told us the odds were against Cooper having the kind of congenital anomaly that made Gracie’s first months of life so difficult. When he showed some of the same signs of distress, but in a milder form, we asked to have him checked out anyway. Incredibly, we went through many of the same problems we had getting Gracie diagnosed until we confirmed that lightning sometimes strikes twice. Cooper did have an almost identical problem, and while we didn’t have to address it immediately, surgery would be required.

Informed by our previous experience, we decided to find the best surgeons for the job. I turned to a logical source, a famous malpractice attorney named Tom Demetrio, who helped us narrow the choice to Children’s Hospital in Boston. The doctors wanted to give Cooper some time to grow stronger, so we scheduled the procedure for late November. Cheri would keep a close eye on him until then. I would go back into the frenzy of the campaign, which, thanks to the swift boaters, became one of the nastiest in modern times.

By the end of September, everyone in the campaign assumed the race would be neck and neck to the finish. The war in Iraq occupied much of the candidates’ time and attention, but they also traded jabs related to character, and who might be better suited to the job of leading the free world. Occasionally, a gaffe or minor mistake gave comedians something to squawk about and distracted everyone from the substance of the campaign. For our side, one of the worst came when John Kerry insisted on going windsurfing in the waters of Nantucket.

Hard as it may be to accept, Kerry’s hobby had actually been the subject of intense conversation inside the campaign, and it was widely agreed that it was the kind of activity many Americans would view as effete and unpresidential-what if he fell off?-and it would be better if he just gave it up until after the election. Despite warnings, Kerry just couldn’t resist. On a day off he spent in cff Nantucket, he put on a bathing suit, grabbed a pair of gloves, and took to the water atop what looked like a surfboard with a sail. The image of Kerry tacking back and forth reminded everyone of the opposition charge that he was a “flip-​flopper” who couldn’t stick to a position and prompted Jay Leno to say, “Even his hobby depends on which way the wind blows.”

Fortunately, the first presidential debate came about ten days after the windsurfing exhibition and shifted the conversation away from the water. Kerry seemed to outpoint Bush in the first of the three presidential events, but the result was so close that it put more pressure on Edwards to score a knockout in the one encounter he would have with Vice President Cheney, the Darth Vader of Washington. Of course, Cheney also faced similar pressure, as Republicans said he needed to stomp Edwards in order to seize the momentum for his side.

The Republicans seemed most concerned about Senator Edwards’s telegenic looks and his ability to work a room. Standing next to Edwards, Cheney would look like a stooped old man. However, Kerry’s people gave away some of this advantage in the negotiations over the debate format when they agreed that Cheney and Edwards would be seated at a table for the entire ninety minutes. (The Republicans said they were concerned about how standing would affect Cheney’s heart.) Presumably the Democrats received something in return from the Bush side, but I never heard what it was.

When the date of the debate arrived, I escorted the senator’s parents to Cleveland and brought them to the site at Case Western Reserve University. During the event, I was positioned a few yards from the stage. I like to believe it helped him to see my friendly face. He performed about as well as could be expected, limiting the points Cheney scored against John Kerry and steering the discussion toward the deception the White House had practiced to get the nation into the Iraq war. The vice president went to great lengths to sell the country on his extensive experience in government, which stretched back more than thirty years. Edwards came back with a perfect retort, saying, “Mr. Vice President, I don’t think the country can take four more years of this kind of experience.” However, his performance was not flawless. At one point he brought up Cheney’s lesbian daughter, and this would be viewed by many as a cheap shot.

On my scorecard, Cheney failed to get the big victory he needed and Senator Edwards prevailed, as he showed he was equal to the job of vice president. The instant polls done that night found similar sentiments among viewers, but as time passed, the Karl Rove Republican spin machine shaped opinion and more people began to say that Cheney had won because he didn’t collapse when confronted by Edwards’s superior communication skills. This is how the scoring often proceeds with debates. First impressions are followed by endless nitpicking, and before you know it, the partisan analysis matters more than what actually happened during the debate itself. In the case of Edwards vs. Cheney, the only certain conclusion you might reach is that very few voters were moved out of their preestablished groupings, which found them divided almost evenly between the parties.