"Edwards Sends Video to 70,000 Iowans"

Ben Smith (Politico):

John Edwards is mailing DVDs to more than 70,000 Iowa households this week, an aide said, introducing the audience of likely caucus-goers to his plan for universal health care with a combination of passion, wonkiness, and implicit comparison with his rivals.

Edwards’ video – which you can watch on Politico.com -- is the first effort this presidential cycle to reach voters directly and in numbers beyond those who tune into announcement speeches on television or on candidates’ websites. The mailing reflects continuing centrality of Iowa in the presidential primary process, and to Edwards’ campaign in particular.

“I keep hearing people describe me as a ‘populist’,” Edwards says late in the six minute, seventeen-second video, which alternates between the candidate and unnamed Iowans speaking about their health-care worries. “If being a populist means you feel deeply and strongly committed to regular people having a real chance and not getting run over by big, powerful interests – oh yeah, if that’s true, I’m a populist.”

Edwards ability to stay even, in the key early measures of fundraising and media attention, with his two rock-star rivals, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, has hinged on polls showing him with a lead among Iowa’s caucus-goers. He has paid 17 visits to the state since November, 2004.

“This is just another way to continue the conversation he's been having with Iowans since 2003,” said his Iowa director, Jennifer O’Malley, in an email.

Without his rivals celebrity – or even a platform in government -- Edwards has kept himself in a perceived top tier of presidential candidates by scrambling to stay ahead of his rivals organizationally, ideologically, and in the details of his policy.

The video and accompanying glossy mailer embodies all three. It will be the first mailing of the 2008 campaign season for most Iowans, and it presses the point that he has a more thoroughly fleshed-out plan to reform the nation’s healthcare system than do his rivals.

“I’m actually very proud of the fact that I was the first presidential candidate to lay out a detailed, substantive, truly universal healthcare plan,” he says in the video.

The plan, which is detailed on his website, contains some elements similar to the plans in place in Massachusetts and California, the sites of the country’s largest scale attempts to ensure entire populations. It includes a mandate that businesses either pay for their employees’ care, or contribute to a regional pool. Americans, then, would be able to choose between private insurance carriers and a government-run program similar to Medicare, which currently serves only the elderly.

In talking about it, as in the video, Edwards addresses concerns about government control by repeatedly stressing that consumers will retain choices.

Edwards appears to address concern about the role of government in his plan – to establish regional healthcare markets and run one of many competing plans – by – when cast by the insurance industry as meaning a “government-run” plan – helped doom word “choice” repeatedly in describing his plain, in which, he says, “government plays a very important role.”

“There’ll be choices from which people can choose the healthcare plan that they want,” he says in the video.

His plan has won praise from influential voices in Democratic politics, including the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who is quoted on the mailing that Iowans will receive with the video.

Edwards’ video also represents a move to keep to the left of his rivals in a state that is thought to favor liberal Democratic candidates. The economic populism Edwards has embraced, in the form of organized labor and of his health-care plan, dovetails with his push to pull soldiers out of Iraq more rapidly than his rivals would.

And Edwards, like his rivals, also makes a bid for the elusive quality of authenticity.

The video closes with an Iowa man telling the camera, of Edwards, “He keeps talking about ‘the right’ and ‘the truth,’ and we haven’t heard that in a while.”