JOSEPH N. BELL
The Democrats got the jump in Orange County in the "Race To the White
House" by running vice-presidential candidate John Edwards past 400
well-heeled party loyalists Saturday at that hangout for rich
Republicans, the Balboa Bay Club.
And I stopped by for a look, disguised as a journalist.
The look was brief and expensive for attendees, who had to kick in
at least $1,000 for a chance to break bread with the exuberant half
of the Kerry/Edwards team. Turned out that those who contributed
$10,000 or more got to press flesh with the candidate for a half-hour
in a private room before he showed up an hour-and- a-half late in the
main room for some 15 minutes of passionate campaign rhetoric.
And then he was gone, off we were told to do the same thing in
Florida. No more time for the breaking of bread in Newport Beach.
That's the way it went when I was covering national political
campaigns many years ago. The candidates were always late; local
party functionaries always tried to occupy a restive crowd with
excuses, bad jokes and campaign songs; and when the wait became
almost intolerable, the candidate would suddenly burst in, saving the
day.
Maybe they planned it that way, I don't know. But when it was
announced Saturday that Edwards was indeed on his way, the crowd that
was buzzing a second earlier hushed in expectation, and he was
greeted almost as if it were a coronation.
What we saw in the brief time he was before us was the
anti-Cheney.
None of the dark, brooding, deliberate, undemonstrative, spare
tough talk projected by the current vice-president. Edwards, wearing
an open shirt and jacket, looks younger than his 51 years. He talks
with passion and frequent gestures, in full command and without
notes, in a soft Southern accent. He was lively, animated and
frequently blunt.
Although he made his familiar point of the growing distance
between the haves and the have-nots in our society -- Edwards' "two
Americas" -- he drew a laugh by acknowledging that even an audience
of Democrats was part of the "other America" in Newport Beach.
He spoke and gestured and paced as if he were summing up his case
for a client before a jury, and it was easy to see how he got rich
doing just that.
There was a good deal of talk about the bonding of Edwards and
Kerry in a "common set of values," and Edwards stressed the
leadership demonstrated in Kerry's decorated military service. Two
loud-applause lines were: "the most important thing for us is not to
