Edwards's populist message evolves

Fight for the poor not a hallmark of his Senate career

John Edwards was surrounded by staff at a campaign event in Keene, N.H., yesterday. While a US senator from 1998 to 2004, he backed some bills he now repudiates, including a free trade measure and a bill making it harder for consumers to clear debt. (Steven Senne/associated press)

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Buoyed by his second-place finish in Iowa, John Edwards has brought his populist, combative, and fiercely anticorporate message to New Hampshire, demanding sweeping changes in healthcare, trade, and income distribution.

"This fight is deeply personal to me," he said in Saturday night's Democratic debate at Saint Anselm College. "I've been engaged in it my whole life, to fight for the middle class, to fight against powerful special interests. And it is a fight I will wage on behalf of the American people as president of the United States and win, as I have for 54 years."

But an examination of Edwards's record shows that his positions on leading issues, his rhetoric on the campaign trail, and his approach to solving the country's problems have evolved in significant ways since his presidential bid in 2004 and his tenure as a North Carolina senator from 1998 to 2004.

Edwards has made fighting poverty a signature issue of his campaign, using even more urgent language than he did in 2004, when he famously talked about "two Americas" - one prospering, another falling behind.

Edwards, however, was not known as an outspoken champion for the poor during his six years as a senator, and his campaign could point to no major bills in that regard that he authored and got passed into law. He did help push a patients' bill of rights and he joined other Democrats in Congress in backing proposed increases in the minimum wage.

But his fierce condemnation of rapacious corporations today stands in contrast to the more moderate voice he has been in the past.

Speaking to chief executives at the Fortune Global Forum in November 2002, Edwards said, "Nothing is more important to our economy than the success of the people in this room - your success in leading companies, in building wealth for your shareholders, in creating jobs for millions of Americans."

Edwards said in the same speech that widening income disparities were "just plain wrong" and that corporate tax loopholes should be closed, but he also told executives that they could not be blamed for "taking aggressive advantage of legal holes in our tax law.

"Doing the most you can under the law to create profit for your shareholders is your job," he said.

Edwards spokesman Eric Schultz said in an e-mail that Edwards has never taken money from Washington lobbyists or political action committees, and that his fight against special interests "isn't an election-year conversion," and is something he mentioned in his 1998 Senate race.

"He has been fighting corporate greed all of his life and winning," Schultz said. "This fight is personal, from the gut, and will mean real change in Washington when he's in the White House."

On the campaign trail, Edwards has been highly critical of free trade policies, standing with many of his union backers in arguing that free trade has severely damaged American jobs and wages. But while in the Senate, Edwards voted for two such controversial measures that labor opposed on the very same grounds.

In 2000, he voted for permanent, normalized trade relations with China, which gave American businesses access to China's huge market, but which labor and other opponents said would hurt domestic manufacturing. Edwards has called the vote a blunder. He also voted, in 2002, for a bill giving President Bush broad authority to negotiate trade agreements. Edwards says he regrets that vote, too.

Edwards has disavowed other major votes as well. In 2001, he joined 81 other senators in voting for bankruptcy legislation making it more difficult for consumers to clear debt. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who dropped out of the presidential race last week after a poor showing in Iowa, has attacked Edwards for his vote, saying it belied his stated commitment to fighting for the middle class.

Last month, Edwards told reporters that he was wrong to vote for the bill, but that it was an exception.

"I voted hundreds of times in the interests of poor people," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "If you look at anybody's record you'll be able to flyspeck one thing here or there. My life work makes absolutely clear what I'm committed to."

Edwards similarly expressed contrition for his 2002 vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq, saying he was "wrong to vote for this war." And he has apologized for his support in 2001 of No Child Left Behind, President Bush's controversial education initiative requiring public schools to meet certain benchmarks. Edwards has called it one of the worst mistakes of his Senate career.

Edwards's approach to policy-making has evolved as well, as he has grown far more confrontational than the candidate whose sunny disposition, both as a presidential contender and eventual running mate, was a hallmark of the 2004 race.

He often, for example, casts rival Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois, as hopelessly naive for being willing to let drug companies and insurance companies participate in negotiations over healthcare. "That is a complete fantasy," Edwards said last week in Iowa. "The only way we're going to get their power away is we're going to have to take their power away."

In February of last year, however, when Edwards was asked by a writer on the liberal blog MyDD.com about the role of business, labor, healthcare groups, and doctors in the healthcare debate, he said, "I think you try to bring everybody to the table. You want their participation. You want to make the system work for everybody."

Edwards's campaign insists that a focus on inconsistencies in his record misses the larger arc of a career spent representing plaintiffs in lawsuits against corporations, winning accolades from major labor groups even though he came from a right-to-work state, and, in the years between his presidential campaigns, creating an academic center to study ways to reverse poverty.

But compared with 2004, when he was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, his rhetoric has escalated considerably. He now contrasts himself with Obama on the basis of his personal, lifelong commitment to fighting corporate greed.

His shift in tone may have helped him win over some Democrats this cycle. Indeed, his second-place finish in Iowa over Senator Hillary Clinton and his continued viability as a candidate bear that out.

But the more confrontational tone has also turned off some voters who preferred the John Edwards they knew in 2004.

Denise Hawks, a 49-year-old donor relations specialist from Des Moines, said she was with Edwards four years ago, but went with Obama this year, in part because of Edwards's transformation into an angrier, more strident candidate. If he was such a fighter, she asked, where was he when Republican operatives helped sink the Democrats' 2004 presidential hopes with their attack ads?

"Four years too late," Hawks said. "They were asleep at the wheel."

Edwards has said that he wanted to fight back against attacks on his running mate, John F. Kerry, but was overruled by the Kerry camp. Kerry and more than a half-dozen former high-ranking Kerry-Edwards campaign officials, however, have disputed his contention that he favored a tougher strategy, saying Edwards often refused their requests to go after Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney more forcefully.

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