The Real Liberal - John Edwards

Some highlights from Rolling Stone's piece by Tim Dikinson: "The Real Liberal: John Edwards is Third in the Polls, But Don't Count Him Out" From Issue #1033 and online here

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But counting Edwards out would be a big mistake. Flying below the radar, the former vice-presidential candidate is pulling off a feat that Democratic consultants have long considered impossible: staking out the most progressive platform among the viable candidates while preserving an aura of electability. In head-to-head polling against the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, Clinton and Obama have managed to post only modest leads. Edwards, by contrast, not only bests every Republican candidate in the race, he trounces them -- by an average of twelve points.

"Edwards' message is more left than it was in '04, and it's attracting the right kind of people for the primaries," says Bill Carrick, a veteran party strategist. "But the general electorate still sees him as mainstream. He's doing a good job of threading that needle."

While Clinton and Obama are running media-age campaigns that focus on big ad buys in delegate-rich states, Edwards is taking a decidedly old-school approach. In a strategy reminiscent of the way Jimmy Carter captured New Hampshire in 1976, Edwards has focused on building grass-roots support in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- the first four Democratic contests, all of which will be held in January.

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If you last tuned in to Edwards during the son-of-a-mill-worker days of 2004, the difference in his vision will surprise you. Gone is the cautious centrist groomed by uberconsultant Bob Shrum as a sort of Bill Clinton Lite. For 2008, he has been replaced by what the campaign hopes will play as the Real John Edwards, a shoot-from-the-hip progressive who won't scare away moderates. "Incremental steps don't work," Edwards says today. "We are not in that place in America anymore. We need huge changes. And it's going to require a president and a people who are willing to do some things that may feel dangerous in the short term."

Take global warming: While Clinton spouts happy talk about ethanol and "clean coal," and Obama focuses on a technocratic proposal to lower the "carbon intensity" of auto fuel, Edwards has a plan that would make the Union of Concerned Scientists proud. "We need an eighty percent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050," the candidate told Rolling Stone in a wide-ranging interview. "You start by capping carbon emissions in America. Beneath the cap, you auction off the right to emit any greenhouse gases. And you use that money --$30 to $40 billion -- to transform the way we use energy."

Or poverty. Ending deprivation at home -- by making it easier for workers to unionize, raising the minimum wage to $9.50, cracking down on predatory lending, and providing matching funds to help low-income Americans save -- remains the hallmark of his candidacy. But informed by his travels in Africa, Edwards now proposes spending $5 billion a year to educate 100 million children worldwide, improve drinking water and sanitation in developing countries, and slow the ravages of HIV and AIDS.

When he's not echoing Bono and Al Gore, Edwards sounds a bit like Michael Moore. He was the first contender with a plan for universal medical coverage, and his proposal goes further than Obama's by mandating that every American be provided a health plan. And where Clinton would leave a significant troop presence in Iraq indefinitely, Edwards calls for a complete withdrawal. He has issued the most forceful repudiation of Bush's "war" on terror, and in July he proposed a tax hike for wealthy investors.

"Edwards is swinging for the fences," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a progressive think tank. "He's got strategy reasons for doing that -- he's got to get on the board differently. But given where we are as a country right now, his transformative rhetoric is right on the money."

Such unabashed progressive stances have made Edwards a hit among the party's Netroots activists. His climate-change plan was the runaway favorite in a MoveOn.org straw poll that followed the Live Earth concerts. And in a recent survey of more than 16,000 Democrats on Daily Kos, Edwards emerged as the top choice, registering forty percent support to Obama's twenty-two percent. "Edwards' proposals go the furthest -- they're like the ideal," says Moulitsas of Daily Kos. "Everybody else is playing it so safe it's dreadful."

The Edwards campaign presents his progressive evolution as a return to his core beliefs. "In 2004 he was consultant-driven," says Moulitsas. "In his gut he was against the war, but Bob Shrum talked him into co-sponsoring the authorization." That line is echoed by the candidate's chief adviser: his wife, Elizabeth. Sitting in a stuffy dressing room at The Tonight Show, she tells Rolling Stone that her husband is no longer deferring to consultants. This time, she says, "He's reaching for the brass ring."

Elizabeth Edwards has emerged as the campaign's liaison to the activist base, reaching out to constituencies that the candidate can't court directly. In June, ignoring her husband's nuanced support for civil unions, she openly endorsed gay marriage at San Francisco's pride parade. She also serves as the campaign's chief attack dog. In our couch-side chat at The Tonight Show, she launches a broadside against Clinton, accusing the senator of "not addressing women's issues. Health care is a woman's issue; the face of poverty is a woman's face. Yet she's got nothing on these issues. Where are the programs? They're completely missing."

Indeed, no Democrat has made a stronger play for union backing than -- Edwards: Since 2004, he has participated in more than 180 labor events -- including a hunger strike for immigrant janitors in Miami -- for twenty different unions. In 2006, while Clinton was burning through $30 million on her shoo-in re-election campaign in New York, Edwards was campaigning for initiatives to increase the minimum wage in six key states. While other candidates have little time for labor-hall rallies -- the PR firm of Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, has actually engaged in union busting -- Edwards has made labor a central element of his anti-poverty campaign. On the stump, he calls collective bargaining the key to "making work pay" and lifting low-wage Americans out of poverty.

"This is a true commitment on his part," says Anna Burger, chair of the labor federation Change to Win. "He was doing this when there were no cameras watching him. We needed a spotlight on workers, and anything he could do to raise their profile, he was willing to do that. His special relationship with labor is forcing the other candidates to play catch-up."