http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071018/OPINION01/710180366/1035/OPINION Yepsen: Don't make mistake of writing off Edwards just yetOctober 18, 2007
To some in American politics, John Edwards is toast.
They believe the former North Carolina senator - who ran for president in 2004, was his party's vice-presidential nominee that year and is running again this time - has simply had his turn.
He's not raising the money other candidates are collecting and he's been caught in some hypocritical, unpopulist acts - like trying to be a candidate of the poor while getting $400 haircuts or building a big mansion for himself.
Edwards doesn't get the cheering 20-somethings Barack Obama attracts to his huge events. Nor does he attract the hundreds of women who show up for Hillary Clinton's. And he doesn't have a bubble of security officers or self-important staffers ushering him around and keeping reporters away.
But watching him work in the sweaty auditorium of a Waukee elementary school Tuesday night, one gets a different feeling: Iowa Democrats may still give this guy a new lease on political life.
Why? John Edwards is tenacious and still in the hunt for first place. While the latest Iowa Poll shows Clinton at 29 percent, Edwards slipping to 23 percent and Obama at 22 percent, it's also important to remember that both Clinton and Obama have dropped millions on television commercials in the state. Edwards has yet to make his big media buy. He's also getting his share of union endorsements, although those don't produce the results they once did.
He spends more time in Iowa than his rivals. (His wife jokes that if someone asked the couple for directions in Iowa, they could provide them.)
While Obama and Clinton have only recently discovered the fact that 49 percent of Iowa's Democratic caucus-goers live in rural and small-town Iowa, Edwards has been mining those tiny lodes for years.
For example, his schedule for Wednesday called for him to spend the day in far-northwest Iowa, where Democrats are ordinarily found only on endangered-species lists. (I know Democrats running for governor who don't make it to Rock Rapids.) Yet Edwards was to campaign there, and end his day on a hog farm near Cylinder, population 110.
While he didn't get a rock star's crowd in Waukee this week, he did get 257 local Democrats to show up: Retirees. Farmers. Teachers. Working folks. A few suburbanites In short, he attracted a crowd that looked exactly like the types of people who actually show up at a Democratic caucus in January. (Or December.) "I come from small-town America," he tells them. "It's where I grew up. My folks still live in the town
I spent most of my time growing up," he said. "It's important to me personally that we take the steps we need to strengthen small towns and rural America."
Edwards would help rural America with a variety of new federal spending programs. He wants to spend more on rural community colleges, provide a $1 billion fund to provide loans and management help to those starting businesses in rural areas and more aggressively fight methamphetamine use.
Edwards also wants to enforce country-of-origin labeling on meat products, impose a ban on packer ownership of livestock production and a $250,000 cap on farm-subsidy payments. He favors a federal moratorium on big hog lots, which he says he could do by using federal air- and water-quality laws.
All that has a lot of appeal for farm liberals who form an important part of the Democratic constituency in Iowa.
Perhaps the best argument for Edwards' candidacy is his potential for electability. While Clinton and Obama make the case they could attract new voters, like women and minorities, in a general-election fight the case for Edwards is that he's not as risky. He doesn't have the polarizing negatives Clinton has and is a more seasoned candidate than Obama, though some of his positions smack of class war. His campaign believes he would help congressional Democratic candidates.
Edwards has argued he could attract votes just about anywhere in the country. And as y'all know, Democrats historically don't win the White House without a Southerner on the ticket.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
