Up Close and Personal With Edwards
"These people have a stranglehold on your democracy!" John Edwards exhorts a crowd of true believers packed into East High School in Des Moines on Saturday night. Who is Edwards excoriating? The drug companies, the insurance companies, the lobbyists and American CEOs. Edwards singles out Exxon Mobil and the presumably perfidious head of an unnamed health insurance company for greed. He's like a small-town early twentieth-century preacher decrying the Seven Deadly Sins. "We have an epic fight on our hands," Edwards says -- not once but twice. "Corporate greed is killing the middle class," he goes on, and his audience boos and hisses when he mentions, in passing, NAFTA and CAFTA. A young man waves a homemade sign lettered SMART TRADE FAIR TRADE. "I have not taken a dime from a special interest lobbyist or special interest group." No mention, of course, of the trial lawyers who have bankrolled his Iowa campaign. "There will be no lobbyists in my White House!" The room gives him back a fusillade of cheers.
This is a leaner, more focussed John Edwards than the man I saw on the stump in San Francisco several months ago. I had been curious to see what Iowa has done to him. The anger, palpable and occasionally inchoate earlier in campaign season, has been transmuted, as if in refiner's fire, into message. Succinctly now he says what he's about. No more scattershot ideas about free tuition here and democracy schooling abroad. "This is the great moral task of our generation," Edwards declares. And what he means, as he tells his own family's story several times in several ways to illustrate, is the task of leaving our children and grandchildren a better life than our own.
If John Edwards uses the word "mill" once in Des Moines, he uses it a dozen times, as he recounts the now familiar stories of his father's and grandparents' sacrifices. He talks about returning recently with his parents to the house he "was brought home to." He remembers "waiting to have breakfast with my grandparents" when they returned from work. Twice he talks about the grandmother with "a fifth or sixth grade education, who came from a family of sharecroppers" -- the grandmother who helped raise him, who cooked for the family, when she wasn't working in the mill herself. It's hard to gauge the response of the Des Moines crowd. The personal testimony doesn't seem to resonate as much as the excoriation of free trade and big business. Maybe it's because they've heard it all before. Maybe it's because the mean poverty of a southern sharecropper family is far away in space and time. The Des Moiners are a nice bunch, bundled in anoraks and plaids and bright puffy jackets -- all white folk, of course, but also all ages. It's a family occasion, with children crowded into the window embrasures, and mothers walking babies. I notice how well-behaved all the children are, even the older ones. Bringing good behavior and manners back to New York and California children would be, in my opinion, a "moral task for our generation" that John Edwards could add to his list.
It's a manipulative speech, crafted well enough so that I have to remind myself of that. With John Edwards, there's always that moment when even the most cynical press pulls himself or herself up short before falling under the Edwards spell. But then he brings up Cleft Palate Guy, "humble, gracious and grateful, like my grandparents," and Elizabeth's breast cancer, and the little girl denied a liver transplant by her insurance company. "I will never sit at a table and negotiate with these people. Never!"
Most interesting about the evening is the yeasty anticipation of winning. Like a contender for a Shakespearean kingdom, John Edwards can feel it, can taste it. It's his -- almost. There are several jokes about "Mr. President." His wife Elizabeth radiates a gracious empathy, but her face is etched with exhaustion. The children Jack and Emma Claire appear gentled but stunned -- too many big rooms with too many strangers in too many days. But John Edwards himself is buoyant, shaking hands with enthusiasm but dispatch before disappearing into the night.
Posted December 30, 2007 | 10:29 AM (EST)