Ezra Klein in the American Prospect on Edwards

For progressives, this translates into an important difference: John Edwards can speak truths about the country that the other Democratic candidates cannot. At the AFL-CIO's annual Wellstone Award dinner last December, where Edwards was being presented with the yearly decoration, he ruefully responded to a particularly powerful video of the late Paul Wellstone's fiery populism by chuckling, "I'm a southerner; we don't know how to talk like that." But as a southerner, as a trial lawyer, and as an experienced presidential campaigner, Edwards knows how to talk about that without marginalizing himself or unsettling his audiences. It's a difference in style that allows a difference in substance -- one that could decide whether, in 2008, the Republicans face off against a Clintonian or a populist.

This would seem a time for the latter. The Democrats swept to victory in 2006 by delivering an economically populist, antiwar message. When the Campaign for America's Future asked voters to name the three most important issues of the election, "Iraq" topped the list, followed closely by "gas prices and oil companies" and "health-care costs." In 2004, 53 cents of every dollar in salary increases went to the top 1 percent of earners. Inequality has gotten so bad that even George W. Bush has given a speech decrying its rise and the attendant spike in CEO pay.

In short, it would seem an ideal moment for the class-conscious son of a millworker. But populism is traditionally a hard sell in American presidential politics, even when the timing is fortuitous, and Edwards has compounded that problem by declaring war on poverty as well. That's not exactly a proven combo for winning the nation's highest office, and the electorate may not want to hear such harangues from a mansion-dwelling lawyer worth tens of millions of dollars. But it's been a long time since a presidential campaign featured a populist as authentic as Edwards, and he's spent a long time proving his talent for winning over skeptical groups of ordinary Americans. For Edwards, those groups used to be called juries. Today they're called voters. The question is whether there's really a difference.

http://www.blueoregon.com/2007/02/ezra_klein_on_j.html

I honestly think the infighting of the other candidates just might put him in the top spot!

Thanks for finding these :hi: