When I got home with my news about the vice presidency, Cheri was shocked and a bit impressed. She had been skeptical about the senator. The idea that he might be moving up didn’t change her opinion completely, but it gave her a bit of confirmatio Cof n about my judgment, proof that I had placed my bet on a pretty good horse.

Days after Christopher’s call, Edwards went to meet with Gore at the vice president’s mansion on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. He did not think he had a good shot at the job, but he enjoyed the publicity he was getting. When I saw the senator next, he talked a little about Gore, saying he had been strangely shy and that there was no spark between them. He made fun of the vice president’s pointy-​toed cowboy boots, which he wore with a suit, and he said he thought Gore was much too cautious. Eager to be his own man and distance himself from the Lewinsky scandal, Gore had all but banished President Clinton from his campaign. Edwards, who had used the president to great advantage while courting the black vote in North Carolina, thought this was a big mistake.

But although he was lukewarm about the man he met, the senator was extremely impressed by the vice president’s official residence. Built in 1893, Number One Observatory Circle is a three-​story building with a round tower and a high-​pitched main roof with dormers. It looks a lot like the faux Victorian mini-​mansions you see in pricey developments all across the South, except it’s the real thing. The senator thought it was a nicer home than the White House and would be the ideal place to prepare for a run for the presidency in, say, 2008. He didn’t say what he intended to do if he became president, but as I came to learn, most big-​time politicians don’t think much about what they will do when they get to the top of the mountain until they arrive. Until then, it’s all about the climb.

Of course, a place on the short list for vice president isn’t a guarantee of anything, especially if you are the guy’s in-​state advance man. With this in mind, Cheri and I planned our future as if we were going to stay in North Carolina. She went off the birth control pill, and we hoped she would soon be pregnant. We had enough confidence in the future to buy a four-​bedroom place on Lake Wheeler, on the south side of Raleigh, and start a major remodeling project.

We moved in at the end of July and were still unpacking on Saturday, August 5. I put a television on top of a cardboard box and turned on CNN. At some point while I was passing by, I heard a newscaster mention Edwards as they showed a video of the senator, Mrs. Edwards, and Julianna Smoot getting into his beat-​up Buick in Georgetown surrounded by photographers. Minutes later, Julianna called to say that the Gore people had sent some sort of signal indicating Edwards was in. Then, almost in the same breath, she backed off a bit, insisting that while all the signs were positive, nothing was set in stone.

For the rest of the weekend, the cable news shows speculated about Gore’s choice, which meant he enjoyed a bonanza of free publicity and everyone connected with the senator suffered with nail-​biting anxiety. Most of the reports followed the themes that appeared in a Wall Street Journal article-“ North Carolina ’s Edwards Gets a Shot at the Gore Ticket”-that ran through the pros and cons. The one line in the piece that stood out to me was, “When Republican nominee George W. Bush chose balding, 59-year-​old Dick Cheney for his ticket, Mr. Edwards’s youth became an even bigger asset.”

The buzz had become a racket, and it was impossible to ignore the idea that John Edwards just might become vice president. (On Sunday, the Daily News in New York even published a story saying Gore favored Edwards and would take Massachusetts senator John Kerry if Edwards turned him down.) I had my own ambitions, and I thought about how well I had served the senator and the possibility that he might want me to work in the vice president’s office. For me, an offer to work in a Gore/Edwards administration would mean an instant jump from the minor leagues to the majors. And as much as my apolitical wife loved the life we were building in North Carolina, she said she would make the move and support me one hundred percent.

I tried to temper my own expectations, the way the senator had tempered his wife’s on the day Warren Christopher called. Gore had other people under consideration, and presidential candidates always float a bunch of names to see how people react and to grab as much free press as possible. I also kept in mind that a jump to Washington would be disruptive. Cheri and I had just moved into a new house, and we were serious about starting a family. There was no sense in getting all worked up about something that might never happen.

Gore would make his announcement on the coming Tuesday at his campaign headquarters in Nashville. The senator and I began another road trip on Monday morning, heading north to Asheville, where we would stay overnight before heading into the Great Smoky Mountains and three remote counties that we could check off our list. When we got in the car, he announced that he was going to share something special, something he hadn’t told anyone else. (I knew this wasn’t true, but I played along.) He then told me that on Saturday he had heard from one of Gore’s closest advisers, who said he was going to be picked for vice president. But then on Sunday, after the idea of Edwards for vice president was floated on the political talk shows, he got another call indicating the deal was not yet set.

“Today I don’t know any more than you,” he said. But this didn’t make much sense to me. If he was going to be the pick, he would have been informed. So any hope we had was slender at best.

All day long we kept waiting for the phone to ring with Gore on the other end, asking Edwards to come to Nashville. In the mountains the cell phone signals are so unreliable that we often lost service, so I would check every few minutes for messages. We heard from staffers and political advisers and Mrs. Edwards, but not Gore. At the events we held, where the crowds were suddenly massive and we saw more reporters than usual, the senator made sure I arranged to have him jokingly introduced as “the next vice president of the United States.”

That night in Asheville, we stayed at the historic Grove Park Resort, a massive hotel built in 1912 out of local granite by a patent medicine huckster who filled it with Arts and Crafts furniture and decorated it with quotations from Thoreau and Emerson and others. A few special rooms feature theme decorations. The “Great Gatsby” is Art Deco. The “Swinging Sixties” has a flower power motif.

As usual, I checked him into a su C hiite and put myself in a regular room. Even though it was in the basement, it still cost hundreds of dollars for the night. Before dinner, we took a long run in the streets of Asheville and even cut through the parking lot attached to the building where my sports pub (now a Chinese restaurant) had, in the good times before bankruptcy, buzzed with life. At some point during the workout, I turned to the senator and said, “Doesn’t it suck?” He wasn’t sure what I meant, so I explained that I was talking about Gore and the all-​but-​obvious fact that he wasn’t going to be selected.

In response, Edwards told me that his life experience, especially his son’s death, had taught him to control his expectations and never take anything for granted. He had thought about what Gore had to consider as he made his choice and concluded that John Edwards was not the ideal pick. Since he never had the job and never expected to get it, losing out wasn’t going to hurt. He also said something about how he had been a senator for only a short time and that the future would bring so many opportunities, it didn’t make much sense to get upset about this one.