By Staff
John Edwards, the former North Carolina U.S. senator, bid for the White House in 2004, then joined the Democratic ticket with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
In 2008 presidential politics, he seems to have picked the wrong year to be a white guy, with the media fixated on Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., poised to make history.
Though he's been flying beneath the radar in this too-long run-up to next year's Oval Office race, count Edwards out at your peril, even though his platform is the most progressive of the viable candidates.
Clinton and Obama are running media-age campaigns, with big ad buys in delegate-rich states.
Edwards is old-school. His strategy reminds pundits of how Jimmy Carter took New Hampshire in 1976.
While largely absent from the limelight, Edwards has been busy building grass-roots support in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first four Democratic contests next January.
Winning Iowa in 2004 effectively clinched Kerry's nomination.
Win Iowa and the Southerner becomes the candidate to beat in both South Carolina and Nevada – wins that could in turn make him the front-runner a week before the "national primary" in 20 states Feb. 5.
Handlers packaged Edwards a centrist in 2004. His calibrated caution is no longer part of the equation, yet his rhetoric won't frighten away moderates.
This time he is trusting his core beliefs, like his gut feeling that the war was wrong – not consultants.
"We need huge changes," Edwards says. "And it's going to require a president and people who are willing to do some things that may feel dangerous in the short term."
On global warming, Edwards speaks of reducing greenhouse emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
He would cap carbon emissions, auction off the right to emit any gases and use that $30 billion to $40 billion to "transform the way we use energy."
Where Clinton would leave a significant troop presence in Iraq indefinitely, Edwards calls for a complete withdrawal.
His statement on Karl Rove's departure was the most succinct: "Goodbye, good riddance."
We were impressed by Edwards when he spoke to The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake Michigan College Mendel Center in March 2006 about 37 million people waking up to poverty every day in the richest nation on earth posing "the great moral issue in America today."
Three years of traveling extensively persuaded Edwards, then 52, that a "hunger" exists "in America to be inspired and to be involved in something big and important that people can be proud of.
"There's also a hunger for a sense of national community. The American people do not want to believe that they're out there on an island and when something goes wrong they're on their own."
Hurricane Katrina drowning New Orleans confronted many Americans for the first time with "vivid TV pictures that showed the face of poverty for the first time up close," said Edwards, the millworker's son who advocates making it easier for workers to unionize, raising the minimum wage to $9.50, cracking down on predatory lending and providing matching funds to help low-income Americans save.
Edwards never left Iowa after the last election, becoming the first candidate on either side of the aisle, with campaign chairs in each of Iowa's 99 counties.
The trial lawyer is in his element speaking to small groups in the state's 1,800 precincts.
Edwards also has reached out to organized labor, but unlike, say, Richard Gephardt staking his political future to the declining industrial unions, Edwards built ties to the growing unions that represent service and government workers.
Edwards since 2004 has taken part in more than 180 labor events for 20 different unions.
His time investment could pay big dividends in Nevada, with its casino hotel and service workers in Las Vegas and Reno.
He campaigned in six key states for initiatives to boost the minimum wage.
On the stump, Edwards makes labor a central element of his anti-poverty campaign, calling collective bargaining instrumental to "making work pay" and lifting low-wage Americans up from poverty.
While the other candidates play it safe, Edwards was busy building an organization designed to deliver him momentum next winter.
He's swinging for the fences.