A Republican Who's Taking His Medicine

In the first few years after he was elected in 1992, North Carolina's Lauch Faircloth tried to be every bit as conservative and unbridled as that other, better-known Republican Senator from the Tar Heel State, Jesse Helms. During the Whitewater hearings, Faircloth used his seat on the Senate Banking Committee to accuse Hillary Clinton of having "lied." In the fight over health-care reform, he was one of the most vinegary opponents of the Clinton plan--or Hillary Care, as he liked to call it. And just days before Kenneth Starr was named Whitewater independent counsel in 1994, Faircloth and Helms famously lunched with Federal Appeals Court judge David Sentelle, who headed the three-judge panel that chose Starr. Though Faircloth insists they weren't conferring about Starr, Clinton's friends suspect otherwise.

But times have changed, and so, in some ways, has Faircloth. Last week, at a hastily called press conference in Raleigh, N.C., the 70-year-old Senator went out of his way to portray himself as an HMO reformer and the proud co-sponsor of a G.O.P.. alternative to the Patients' Bill of Rights favored by the President. "It's an important issue, and it's one we're going to address," Faircloth declared.

What explains his sudden passion for health-care reform? The answer is John Edwards. A 45-year-old trial lawyer and self-financed political neophyte, Edwards made HMO bashing the centerpiece of his recent come-from-nowhere campaign to win the state's Democratic Senate primary. In a year when public contentment guarantees most incumbents an extra bit of job security--but when unhappiness over managed care is the issue to watch--Edwards' surge has turned Faircloth's re-election into a fifty-fifty proposition. Democrats are jubilant over a new internal poll that shows the two men in a statistical dead heat. Even Republicans say the race will be close. "It's not every day that you run against a very slick, very glib, very talented, very presentable personal-injury lawyer," deadpans Alex Castellanos, Faircloth's media adviser. "They know how to sell."

On the day before Faircloth's press conference, Edwards was peddling his own health-care elixir at a panel discussion in Raleigh. He condemned "health-care bureaucrats" who overrule doctors in determining a patient's treatment, and asked, "Are we gonna put the law on the side of the patient or...leave it on the side of the big insurance companies?" In the familiar terms of Southern populism, Edwards promised to be an "independent voice" in the Senate for those who "don't have Lear jets to fly them to Washington, don't have lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and don't have the money to contribute to political campaigns."