Earnest style gets Edwards traction in Iowa
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa
THE TORTOISE was back at it here last week, making a rational but engaging connection between curbing the influence of big shots and serving the interests of people who live off their paychecks and pension checks.
What is most refreshing about John Edwards's campaign for president is the fact that it doesn't need to be refreshed -- by a fresh batch of polling data or daily decisions about which other candidate might be gaining and therefore needs to be attacked.
When he started a year or so ago, the North Carolina senator was advocating a prescient batch of sensible proposals to shore up family economic life in wrapping paper that targeted the influence of special interests, not merely George Bush and never any of his Democratic opponents as the obstacle to progress.
Still is. What's different in the days before Iowa begins the choosing process is that the other candidates have caught on. Suddenly, the wounded, fragile condition of ordinary households is all the rage in the nomination contest. Since this is among Democrats you have to wonder what took them so long to grasp what Edwards grasped a long time ago.
Forgetting the horse race madness that has now infected this lovely state, the Des Moines Register's cartoonist, Brian Duffy, caught the essence of the Edwards distinction the other morning. The supposed frontrunners -- Dean, Dick Gephardt, and John Kerry -- were mimicking professional wrestlers in their donkey suits; while they gouged and kicked, Edward with a tortoise shell on top inched his way forward in the background. After the most recent televised debate the political crowd was fixated on how much this thrust or that parry had helped or hurt Dean; many caucus-goers wanted to talk about Edwards.
He deserves the compliments, and he continues to earn them. Last week, he put out a new booklet in New Hampshire, showing how important it is to families to combine tax relief with other incentives to increase savings; he also unfurled a new umbrella here over his proposal to curb the influence of lobbyists and other narrowly focused big shots in Washington by making it harder for them to spread their money and weight around. You have to agree, as he says, that it's hardly an accident that a seven-figure coupon-clipper pays a lower federal tax rate than his secretary.
For those in his party who have trouble keeping track of real life in Bush's America, two vital books should have been memorized as preparation for the campaign. One is "The Two-Income Trap," by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Warren Tyagi, her daughter, detailing with fresh data how ordinary expenses have crunched ordinary incomes and produced crushing debt burdens. The other is "The Betrayal of Work," by Food and Commercial Workers Union expert Beth Shulman, detailing with equally fresh data how pervasive low-wage incomes are in a country that continues to undercut what it should value most.
From the beginning, all this has been the essence of Edwards's campaign. There was never a detour into personality-driven presentation, tactical notions of how to take Bush on over national security issues, calculations about how angry Edwards should be about the status quo, arguments about how prominent his wife (she's smarter than he is) should be in the campaign. It has always been a campaign to improve the economic condition of ordinary Americans and to keep special interests from getting in the way.
He led his opponents into proposing ways to make public universities financially accessible to all kids willing to work. He alone would have the government match every dollar a family can sock away as savings (up to a grand a year). And he was among the first to draw the line at ordinary Americans' tax cuts in advocating repeal of the breaks legislated under Bush for those making more than $200,000 -- an issue finally getting into the headlines because Howard Dean's repeal-it-all economics left out the people Edwards never forgets.
Despite his cheery demeanor, Edwards is no patsy. He sharply chastised Gephardt last week for falsely claiming to be the only NAFTA critic advocating fair trade policies, just as he called Dean to account on his silly remark about Confederate flag decals. The difference is that Edwards does this so rarely, people get the impression he really means it.
I wish I could say something profound about his youthful appearance and good hair, but it intrigues me more that the framework within which he has campaigned is now center stage in a still-fluid race.
Not bad for a rookie. If the voters here give him a break, and he's still alive after the voting on Feb. 3, watch out. The horse race syndrome of modern media politics is not kind to those who advocate more than they attack, but it is no accident that the rest of the field, even Dean, have begun to ape Edwards's relentless focus on paycheck-dependent Americans.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
