"It’s Edwards the Fighter in the Iowa Homestretch"

NY Times:

OTTUMWA, Iowa — More than 150 Iowans were rustling in their chairs at a community college here the other night, waiting for John Edwards. Mr. Edwards’s bus was parked and running outside the door, but it was nearly 45 minutes before he finally made his characteristically late entrance.

When he did appear, Mr. Edwards strode in as if he were climbing into a boxing ring. For half an hour, he talked about fighting special interests and battling corporations. He urged his audience to “rise up” against health care companies and insurance executives. Pugilistic until the end, he loudly told a story of how his father ordered him to go out and “kick that guy’s butt” after he came home from school with a bloodied nose, suggesting that was a lesson he would carry into the White House as well.

“We have an epic fight in front of us, and anybody who thinks that’s not true is living in a fantasy world,” Mr. Edwards said. “How long are we going to let insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies run this country? Every time this has happened in our country, the American people have risen up and taken action.”

Mr. Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat, almost won the Iowa caucuses in 2004 by introducing, in the final weeks of the contest, a closing argument that drew huge crowds and, polls suggest, rallied supporters to his corner right up until the night of the vote. Now, Mr. Edwards, a former trial lawyer, is offering yet another closing argument to his jury of voters here. And there is evidence — from the size of his crowds to the decision by an opponent, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, to challenge him more directly in the past few days — that it may be working.

In the process, though, Mr. Edwards is raising questions about his political identity that have followed him throughout this campaign. There is, in this final appeal to Iowa Democrats, no more talk about “two Americas,” and barely a whisper of the optimism that distinguished him from the field in 2004 and which he exhibited as recently as a few weeks ago. He has dropped the attacks that he was aiming just weeks ago at Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Washington politicians, and Iraq is an issue that he mentions almost in passing, albeit with fervor.

Instead, he is issuing a defiant pledge to fight big business, to voters in a state that has been buffeted by national and global economic forces and is still reeling from the closing of Maytag plant in Newton in October. He is accompanied on some of his stops by one of the 3,900 Iowans who used to work there, and points to the closing as evidence of the damage that trade agreements have done to the middle class. In his speech here, he used the word “fight” about a dozen times in 25 minutes. And in nearly every appearance, he tells the story of the schoolyard bully, complete with his father’s salty counsel.

In an interview, Mr. Edwards, a former senator, said his sharp-edged message, which at several stops brought people to their feet as he urged them to “rise up,” was barely different from what he told voters when he ran in 2004 or, for that matter, what he was telling them six months ago.

“I think the message is very similar,” he said, sitting in a room off stage at the Center for Performing Arts in downtown Des Moines. “It’s just not couched in ‘two Americas.’ It’s couched in what we need to do to get things done.”

Yet it was different enough to catch the disapproving eye of the editorial board of The Des Moines Register, whose support in 2004 was a critical factor in his showing here, and which endorsed Mrs. Clinton on Sunday.

“Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination,” the editors wrote. “But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the positive, optimistic campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.”

Mr. Edwards acknowledged, and rejected, the perception of some voters that he was not genuine, that he was tacking to adjust to changing political winds.

“These people don’t interact with me,” he said. “They are reading it somewhere. When they interact with me, they don’t feel that way. I think most Americans believe what I’m saying.”

And he said he did not think his campaign stance would prove counterproductive in Washington or, as one Iowa reporter asked him, off-putting to Iowans. “I only know what I see in the audience: People respond powerfully to it,” he said.

The signs of his progress have been increasingly evident, not least in the attention he is drawing from his rivals.

Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, questioned Mr. Edwards’s ability to continue to run a strong campaign even if he won in Iowa and, should he win the nomination, to prevail in the general election. Mr. Plouffe cited Mr. Edwards’s difficulty competing with the other leading Democrats and Republicans in raising money, and his decision to accept federal matching funds and the spending constraints they impose.

The practical effect would be to limit his campaign’s ability to spend money between the primaries and the convention at the end of the summer, although he could make up that shortfall to some degree by relying on the party and outside groups to take on the Republican nominee for him.

“Edwards is really a one-state candidate in terms of his competitiveness right now,” Mr. Plouffe said.

Joe Trippi, a senior adviser to Mr. Edwards, said the campaign was confident that a victory in Iowa would bring him enough in contributions to carry him through the nomination. “We have a plan to execute this,” Mr. Trippi said. “Nobody understands that.”

“A lot of things have to go right for this to go through,” he said. “But so far, it’s gone the way we planned for.”

Mr. Edwards’s strength here is also a function of the political operation he has built over five years. Mr. Edwards’s aides said he had not one but two precinct captains in 90 of the 99 precincts. They have been going through caucus drills to master the tactic that worked so well for Mr. Edwards in 2004: to quickly recruit caucusgoers who, on the first ballot, supported a rival candidate who gets less than 15 percent of the vote, and is thus eliminated from the competition.

And he is arguing that he is far more electable than Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton, an argument that, like his economic populist pitch, has resonated in the past with Democrats in this state.

But more than anything, Mr. Edwards’s success in these final days appears to rest on the resonance of this fighting-words appeal with which he has now identified his candidacy. And did Mr. Edwards take his father’s advice and beat up the schoolmate who pummeled him?

His answer was elliptical. “I’m sure I won some and I lost some,” he said as an aide brought an end to the interview.