The Salon Interview: Elizabeth Edwards

Right afterward I was on MSNBC with Dan Abrams and he asked me, "If you were Elizabeth Edwards' advisor, would you have told her to make the call?" And I said I didn't think anyone advised you -- I thought it was your idea, nobody tells you what to do.

Yes, well, I knew she was doing "Hardball," and I knew it was a call-in show. So I called the [Edwards] campaign about getting the number, and they were like, Oh, that's a good idea. And then I mentioned the 2003 column [where Coulter mocked John Edwards' discussion of their son Wade's death in a car crash] and you could see them get worried, like "Oh, my God, she's carrying around in her mind a 2003 column? Maybe we don't want her calling ..."

Maybe they just wouldn't bother getting you the number.

Right. And later on, I talked to somebody, not an advisor -- I really don't have anybody advising me -- and not someone in the campaign. She'd been in a previous campaign, and she said, "Oh, I wouldn't have done that. I think that you put yourself at risk, subject to criticism unnecessarily." I understand the advice -- if you were advising somebody you might say that -- but that exact attitude is what protects somebody like Ann Coulter. Nobody wants to jump in the mud puddle with her.

The thing is, actually, she doesn't agree to many debates; it's very rare. She seems formidable, but she's a coward because she ducks debates.

So I got the number in case I wanted to call in. And I sat and watched [the show], and I thought, well, there's really nothing to call in about. It was getting close to the time I had to leave. I might have gotten on a plane and left -- I really might not have ever called. Maybe Chris [Matthews] brought some of those things up because he knew I was watching.

Well, he was told you might call, and Coulter was told you might call, right?

Yes, I saw what ["Hardball" producer] Tammy Haddad said on television; she is a completely straight player, which is why I knew she would tell [Coulter] that I'd gotten the phone number and I might call. But I almost didn't. I sat there and watched her say all these things that weren't true -- Saddam actually did have WMD, just not huge stockpiles. I thought, if that's true, we don't hear Cheney saying this? Or this discredited idea that Saddam's top aides were working with al-Qaida. So she's saying things with which I completely disagree, but I'm not calling in. She's wrong, but that's OK -- we can disagree. Then she started in again on John: She misdescribed what Bill Maher said [Coulter falsely claimed the HBO host had said he wished the failed Cheney assassination attempt had succeeded] and then she used it as an excuse to be able to say it about John. But if it's repulsive for Bill to say it, then isn't it repulsive for her to say it?

And you were able to raise money around it?

Yes. John is trying to run a substantive campaign. It's not about window dressing. These are the policies, like them or not, and it's the exact opposite of what she's saying and doing.

But weren't you also saying that it's time for Democrats to stand up for themselves, which so many Democrats haven't? To fight back?

Yes, and we were saying, Here's a way you can do it. But I didn't put her on TV at the end of the quarter. That's when we were going to be making a push to raise money; that's when everybody's doing it.

How much money did you raise?

I honestly don't know. The campaign probably knows.

But you did well.

We did. It was hard to get to our Web site for a few days. And you know, in some ways I'd like to continue what I started, just hammer home the unacceptability of Ann Coulter and what she's doing to the dialogue. I'd like to follow her around and harass her. Maybe Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh too. But then I become what I'm trying to fight -- I think it's counterproductive.

OK, we've given Coulter enough time. So why a poverty tour?

We have short attention spans. What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty. So the audience for the tour -- well, in fact, the audience when John does these things is really him. At the poverty center in Chapel Hill, N.C., we say there are all these students, but there's really only one student -- it's John, soaking it all in.

He has been criticized for using the poverty center politically, and he has been criticized for being paid to give a speech on poverty at UC-Davis -- how do you respond to that?

Well, that speech didn't come through the poverty center, it came through [a speaking agency]; both of us are signed up and get speaking fees. I don't have a job anymore; this is the way we pay for everything. So yes, we periodically get paid to give speeches, and this one was about poverty. Can you never give a paid speech about poverty? Let me say, John speaks about poverty for free a lot. A lot. And he did make more for that speech than he made at the poverty center for a year, where he talked about poverty all the time, where he taught classes.

Well, you must wonder: Why isn't it equally big news that Rudy Giuliani blew off his Iraq Study Group meetings to get paid much more to give his speeches, which weren't about poverty? Why doesn't that story follow Giuliani around?

A number of reasons. There's just a lot less investigative reporting on political campaigns than there should be.

But when that story came out -- Newsday broke it -- it seemed like a big scoop to me.

I think that maybe the Romney campaign, the McCain campaign, are not pushing it to the other outlets ...

Are you saying some other Democrat pushed the poverty speech story to the media?

I don't know about that one, but I do know that some of these stories are being pushed by other Democrats. Come on, we talk to the same people. But it's not like we have completely clean hands; our research people will share things with reporters -- not this kind of nonsense, this is irrelevant. But John has a lot of loyal supporters who know poverty is not a sexy issue and who respect him for caring about it. How do you unseat those people? You suggest that his interest is disingenuous, that he has taken money for a poverty speech, he paid too much for a haircut, he has a big house.

Next page: On Hillary Clinton: "She acts like [her approach] is going to make healthcare affordable to everyone. And she knows it won't"