Timing, fate, finances impeded Edwards

Angry populism, shift to left didn't work

John Edwards was making one of his last swings through Iowa. The steelworkers were chanting, call and response: "President ... Edwards." The new campaign anthem -- rocker Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" -- was jacked up over the sound system.

But Larry Anderson, 67, a retired postal worker from Des Moines, wasn't buying it.

"I don't think he can win now," Anderson said, surveying the Edwards rally in downtown Des Moines one day in early December. "He would have won Iowa until Obama got in the race."

Although he liked John Edwards' brand of politics, Anderson -- like a lot of voters -- had written off Edwards well before it was time to vote.

"Timing is everything in politics," said Ray Buckley, the New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman. "He was not lucky," Buckley said of Edwards.

Edwards was caught in the riptide of two powerful currents -- the rise of the first serious African-American and female candidates for president. He was overwhelmed by campaigns with deeper pockets, broader support and greater buzz.

"Nothing was his fault," Buckley said. "The contests became larger than anything he could do or control."

But Edwards also moved his campaign in directions that some saw as politically risky.

He offered the most populist campaign since Harry Truman in 1948. Edwards made poverty a centerpiece more than any major candidate in recent years. He became a familiar figure on union picket lines across the country.

One of the major architects of Edwards' retooling was Joe Trippi, a Maryland political consultant. Trippi is regarded as one of the more innovative minds in Democratic politics. But he is also known for running sharply liberal campaigns for such candidates as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

From the beginning, Edwards sought to be the first alternative to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom most Democrats viewed as the early candidate to beat. Like her husband, former President Clinton, Hillary Clinton had positioned herself as a party centrist.

For Edwards and his strategists, only a liberal-leaning, change-oriented campaign could beat Clinton.

The sunny optimism of Edwards' first presidential campaign became an angrier brand of populism in his second campaign. He denounced the power of wealthy corporations and the growing inequality of American life, telling voters that powerful interests were stealing their children's future.

Populism misfires

The sharp-edge populism backfired on Edwards, said Dennis Goldford, who has observed Iowa politics for more than 20 years as a political science professor at Drake University.

"He was the angry candidate," Goldford said. "Angry candidates do not become the nominee of the two major parties. If they become nominees, they become the nominee of a third party or as a protest candidate."

Edwards also made a mistake when he emphasized poverty rather than stressing economic fairness for the middle class, Goldford said. He said white working people -- even those whose incomes are below the poverty level -- do not identify themselves as poor.

"He had a lot of good will here," Goldford said of Iowa. "But he frittered it away. There were a lot of people who weren't sure who this guy was anymore."

Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University who has written extensively about American populism, said it was not good politics -- however noble it might have been -- for Edwards to start and end his campaign in the Katrina-devastated Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans.

"The main problem," Kazin said, "is you can't run an angry populist campaign without an angry populist movement, and we don't have one."