Emotional Edwards aides discuss end of campaign

NEW ORLEANS — As of Tuesday afternoon, John Edwards’s campaign staff members were still heading to North Dakota and Georgia. A television advertising campaign was about to hit the airwaves. And that evening Mr. Edwards was flying here to deliver what was billed as a major speech on poverty.That all changed around 2 a.m. Wednesday, when his spokesman, Mark Kornblau, called top campaign advisers to confirm what they had been preparing themselves to hear: It was over.
Faced with the prospect of coming out of next Tuesday’s primaries with only two realistic possibilities — kingmaker or spoiler — Mr. Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, had decided it was time to get out.
“He wanted to have a shot at being president,” said Joe Trippi, a senior adviser. “He wanted to have a chance to change people’s lives, not be a spoiler or a kingmaker and not play political games.”
So Mr. Edwards made the end of his candidacy official on Wednesday where it began 13 months earlier, when he became the first major Democrat to declare his candidacy.
With houses draped in American flags as a backdrop, Mr. Edwards climbed on a riser with his family, who had flown in from North Carolina. “It’s time for me to step aside so that history can — so that history can blaze its path,” Mr. Edwards said, sounding hoarse from a cold he had been fighting for days.
It was the end of his second bid for the presidency, the first derailed in 2004 by Senator John Kerry, who later chose Mr. Edwards as his running mate.
Mr. Edwards had begun setting the stage for this presidential run almost as soon as their losing campaign was over. He publicly reversed himself on his 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war, and taunted Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for her refusal to apologize for the same vote, hoping to appeal to a Democratic base that was increasingly antiwar.
What he did not anticipate was the entry of Senator Barack Obama, who had been against the war in 2002 and who preached, as Mr. Edwards had in 2004, “the politics of hope.”
Mr. Edwards found himself in the role of understudy in what quickly became a two-star play. John C. Moylan, a close friend and campaign adviser, said Mr. Edwards had been constantly frustrated by his failure to grab media attention.