Edwards offering retorts to GOP

Edwards has sung this tune before, standing before average people and imploring them to do the right thing, to make sure the wrongdoers are punished. Now he's adapting the tactics that made him a legend in the courtrooms of North Carolina to the presidential campaign. He's approaching the New Hampshire electorate as a giant jury, wooing it with Southern charm and then insisting it make the big corporations pay: He's become Bill Clinton with vengeance.

Edwards's record-breaking career as a personal-injury lawyer was supposed to be his undoing, as if that fact would remind people that while he is the son of a millworker, he's also made tens of millions of dollars through the victims of medical malpractice.

Republicans certainly thought Edwards's legal career was a vulnerability. President Bush even journeyed to North Carolina to unveil his tort-reform proposals, in Edwards's political backyard. Those proposals are the centerpiece of Bush's efforts to control medical costs -- claiming that the fear of lawsuits is destabilizing the medical profession, obliging doctors to perform unnecessary procedures, and even driving good people out of the profession.

Leading the GOP charge for tort reform, which would impose limits on awards for pain and suffering caused by malpractice, is Dr. Bill Frist of Tennessee, the popular Senate majority leader. Betting the public likes doctors more than lawyers, many in the GOP hoped to frame the tort-reform debate as a doctors vs. lawyers fight, with Frist and Edwards standing in for their professions.

But now, as Edwards moves to the front rank of presidential contenders, he seems to have turned the tables on the administration. While he doesn't talk directly about his legal career, he refers to having "spent my whole career fighting big corporations." And his regular stump speech now features an array of corporate villains: credit-card companies, oil companies, HMOs, big insurers.

"The problem is the law is on the side of the insurance companies," he declared yesterday, at Page Belting in Concord. "You know that. The law is always on their side. We need to change that. We need to put the law on your side."

Supporters of tort reform aren't taking this lying down. A group called the American Tort Reform Institute claims to have analyzed all the names of Edwards's campaign contributors and concluded that 61 percent of his donations came from personal-injury lawyers -- or, as they put it, "Learjet lawyers."

But Edwards's success on the stump, which vaulted him into a strong second place in the Iowa caucuses, bodes ill for those who want to restrain jury awards: After all, Americans may hate personal-injury lawyers, but they often agree with them in the jury box.

As John Edwards is discovering, the presidential campaign is the biggest court of all.

Peter S. Canellos can be reached at canellos@globe.com.