Bob Shrum, political adviser to many Democrats including Al Gore and John Kerry, started out before the 2004 campaign as a supporter of John Edwards.

That soon changed, as this story in The New Republic shows:

Shrum discovered Edwards during the North Carolinian’s first Senate campaign in 1998. Shrum writes that, after his encounter with Edwards, he telephoned his business partner and declared, “I think I just met a future President of the United States.” But that view would change dramatically.

Shrum went on advising Edwards for several years, including as Edwards was contemplating his vote on the fall 2002 Iraq war resolution. In the one passage of the book already widely leaked, Shrum recounts how he and other political advisers pushed Edwards into a vote for the resolution that Edwards–and, even more so, his wife, Elizabeth–didn’t want to cast. The episode didn’t make Shrum look great. But the real damage is to Edwards, who comes across as a cipher taking orders from his handlers. As Shrum puts it: “[H]e was the candidate and if he was really against the war it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn’t.”

It goes on to infer Edwards really didn’t want to vote for the Iraq war but let his advisers tell him how to vote.

Shrum decided to go with Kerry. By now, he was coming to see Edwards as a lightweight–”a Clinton who hadn’t read the books,” as he puts it. Edwards didn’t take the news well. Shrum writes that, in a dramatic early 2003 phone call, Edwards told him: “I can’t believe you would do this to me and my family. I will never, ever forget it, even on my deathbed.” The relationship has been poisoned ever since.

That surely helps to explain why No Excuses repeatedly portrays Edwards as a hyper-ambitious phony. Nowhere is that clearer–and more startling–than in a passage recounting Kerry’s first meeting with Edwards during the summer 2004 running-mate selection process. Kerry had qualms about Edwards from the start, Shrum writes, but grew

even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else–that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before–and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn’t pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

It’s a stunning story–enough so to strain credulity. When I asked one person close to Edwards about it, he argued that Shrum’s account makes no sense because Edwards had publicly recounted similar versions of the funeral home story before–and thus wouldn’t possibly have claimed on either occasion that he was telling it for the first time. The person cites a 2003 Boston Globe story in which Edwards’s pollster, Harrison Hickman, recalls warning Edwards that his first run for the Senate could be a nasty experience: “And John looked at me and said, ‘If you’ve ever had to get up on a medical examiner’s table and hug your son goodbye, you know that there’s nothing worse that can happen to you,’” Hickman recalled. Whether this disproves Shrum’s account will be up to readers to decide. (An Edwards campaign spokesman adds that, as with other instances in the book, Shrum wasn’t present and is relaying secondhand information.)

It has to be difficult for a parent to lose a child, but for that parent to tell the most sacred secrets of that moment to a virtual stranger for the sake of demonstrating his ability to be a Vice Presidential candidate is something beyond the pale to me.

But the two men didn’t coexist happily. The Kerry campaign was upset that Edwards didn’t use more aggressive rhetoric on the campaign trail, Shrum writes. And Shrum portrays Edwards as not entirely ready for prime time. In a prep session before Edwards’s one debate with Dick Cheney, Shrum writes, “Edwards came across as unsure and nervous.” The session adjourned so Edwards could spend more time reading his briefing books. Shrum writes that Kerry later told him “that Edwards called [Kerry] before the debate in a state of ‘panic.’ He was worried; maybe he wasn’t ready; could he pull this off? Kerry, who thought Edwards was suffering a peculiar but baffling case of stage fright, told his running mate that he’d … do a great job.” (Though Kerry was ultimately disappointed in Edwards’s performance, Shrum writes.)

Shrum says that, in the end, Kerry “wished that he’d never picked Edwards, that he should have gone with his gut” and selected Dick Gephardt. And the feelings between Kerry and Edwards seem fairly mutual. After Kerry reached out to Edwards in the wake of his wife’s disclosure of a recurrence of cancer, Shrum writes, “Kerry told me that the Edwardses simply stopped returning calls or talking to him and Teresa.”

And, this insincerity, my friends, is why Edwards doesn’t stand a chance to win the Democratic nomination for president.