His message to all advisees: Take on President George W. Bush, big time. “Let him have it,” he told one. The speaker who most enthusiastically followed that counsel was his wife, who got the best reception of anyone at the DLC event with a rousing defense of her husband’s economic stewardship in the ’90s. Her performance was so good that many in the audience wished aloud that she would run in 2004–something she has so far ruled out. “She’d be a great candidate,” said South Carolina state Rep. John Scott.
Edwards isn’t just seeking advice, he’s continuing to try to lure into his circle major players from the Clinton years. DLC chief Bruce Reed, who headed domestic policy in the Clinton White House, is already close to the Edwards camp (one of the reasons that Al Gore stayed away from the DLC event). The latest object of Edwards’s wooing: veteran lawyer and diplomat Tom Donilon, an expert in both nuts-and-bolts campaigning (he’s a master delegate counter) and foreign policy (he was State Department chief of staff under Clinton). The Edwards campaign wants Donilon–who is also close to Sen. Joe Biden and counsels Sen. Tom Daschle–to play a major advisory role. If the other two senators don’t run, Edwards hopes Donilon will say yes.
Gore was conspicuously absent from the DLC meeting (although he was in Manhattan at the time), and his muffled signals about his 2004 intentions are causing special problems for another contender, former running mate Joe Lieberman. Lieberman has said that he won’t run if Gore does, and that he will give Gore until the end of the year to decide. But Lieberman is now being told by supporters in Congress that he should move up his own timetable to this fall, and simply say that Gore has waited too long. “The moment he gets a hint that Gore might, in fact, get in, Joe should announce,” said one member of Congress. “He can say, ‘Too bad, you’re too late!’ At least that’s what I’ve told Joe he should do.”
