The Real Liberal: John Edwards is Third in the Polls, But Don't Count Him Out

It's a smoggy Monday in late June, and Edwards is padding down a backstage hallway at NBC Studios in Burbank wearing purple jogging shorts and a blue T-shirt soaked with sweat. His grin, away from the cameras, is easy and unguarded, the weight of the campaign swept aside by the buzz of endorphins from a three-mile run. Stripped of his trademark chinos and blue blazer, Edwards is built like a point guard, taller and leaner than you'd expect. His goal this afternoon is to break down the defenses of his TV nemesis: Jay Leno, who has spent months skewering the candidate for his $400 haircut. John Edwards "said it was a mistake," goes one Leno line -- "especially in the back, where they didn't feather enough."

The Tonight Show offers Edwards a rare opportunity to move beyond the beauty-shop jokes and lay out something that has received only glancing national attention: his agenda. If you last tuned in to Edwards during the son-of-a-mill-worker days of 2004, the difference in his vision will surprise you. Gone is the cautious centrist groomed by uberconsultant Bob Shrum as a sort of Bill Clinton Lite. For 2008, he has been replaced by what the campaign hopes will play as the Real John Edwards, a shoot-from-the-hip progressive who won't scare away moderates. "Incremental steps don't work," Edwards says today. "We are not in that place in America anymore. We need huge changes. And it's going to require a president and a people who are willing to do some things that may feel dangerous in the short term."

Take global warming: While Clinton spouts happy talk about ethanol and "clean coal," and Obama focuses on a technocratic proposal to lower the "carbon intensity" of auto fuel, Edwards has a plan that would make the Union of Concerned Scientists proud. "We need an eighty percent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050," the candidate told Rolling Stone in a wide-ranging interview. "You start by capping carbon emissions in America. Beneath the cap, you auction off the right to emit any greenhouse gases. And you use that money --$30 to $40 billion -- to transform the way we use energy."

Or poverty. Ending deprivation at home -- by 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 -- remains the hallmark of his candidacy. But informed by his travels in Africa, Edwards now proposes spending $5 billion a year to educate 100 million children worldwide, improve drinking water and sanitation in developing countries, and slow the ravages of HIV and AIDS.

When he's not echoing Bono and Al Gore, Edwards sounds a bit like Michael Moore. He was the first contender with a plan for universal medical coverage, and his proposal goes further than Obama's by mandating that every American be provided a health plan. And where Clinton would leave a significant troop presence in Iraq indefinitely, Edwards calls for a complete withdrawal. He has issued the most forceful repudiation of Bush's "war" on terror, and in July he proposed a tax hike for wealthy investors.

"Edwards is swinging for the fences," says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a progressive think tank. "He's got strategy reasons for doing that -- he's got to get on the board differently. But given where we are as a country right now, his transformative rhetoric is right on the money."

Such unabashed progressive stances have made Edwards a hit among the party's Netroots activists. His climate-change plan was the runaway favorite in a MoveOn.org straw poll that followed the Live Earth concerts. And in a recent survey of more than 16,000 Democrats on Daily Kos, Edwards emerged as the top choice, registering forty percent support to Obama's twenty-two percent. "Edwards' proposals go the furthest -- they're like the ideal," says Moulitsas of Daily Kos. "Everybody else is playing it so safe it's dreadful."

The Edwards campaign presents his progressive evolution as a return to his core beliefs. "In 2004 he was consultant-driven," says Moulitsas. "In his gut he was against the war, but Bob Shrum talked him into co-sponsoring the authorization." That line is echoed by the candidate's chief adviser: his wife, Elizabeth. Sitting in a stuffy dressing room at The Tonight Show, she tells Rolling Stone that her husband is no longer deferring to consultants. This time, she says, "He's reaching for the brass ring."

Elizabeth Edwards has emerged as the campaign's liaison to the activist base, reaching out to constituencies that the candidate can't court directly. In June, ignoring her husband's nuanced support for civil unions, she openly endorsed gay marriage at San Francisco's pride parade. She also serves as the campaign's chief attack dog. In our couch-side chat at The Tonight Show, she launches a broadside against Clinton, accusing the senator of "not addressing women's issues. Health care is a woman's issue; the face of poverty is a woman's face. Yet she's got nothing on these issues. Where are the programs? They're completely missing."

But the pivotal question is how the candidate's progressive stance will play in Iowa: Unlike Clinton and Obama, Edwards has no other options. "He's only got one strategy -- he's got to win Iowa," says Carrick, who was a key adviser to Dick Gephardt in 2004. "If you get that slingshot effect out of Iowa, you can really take off in New Hampshire." Win them both, history suggests, and you're a lock for the nomination. "Edwards has a game plan," says Lehane. "You can see how it can work if everything comes into alignment."

To solidify his support in Iowa, Edwards has been quietly crisscrossing the state for the past two years, cultivating local party leaders and dropping in at picnics and ice cream parlors in towns like Tama and Sac City. "He's been campaigning in Iowa ever since 2004," says Gordon Fischer, a stout, goateed Des Moines lawyer who served as the Democratic chair in Iowa in 2004. "He never left." Edwards was the first candidate, on either side of the aisle, with campaign chairs in each of Iowa's ninety-nine counties. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, produced an internal memo that floated the idea of bypassing Iowa altogether and focusing instead on "winning this new national primary" on February 5th.

Iowa plays to Edwards' gifts as a trial lawyer, speaking to small groups in the state's 1,800 precincts. "Coming from North Carolina, he's particularly effective communicating to conservative Democrats in rural Iowa," says Fischer. "He's leading in the polls, and he's got the most superior organization -- head and shoulders above the others." Much of that organization comes from those he calls his "brothers and sisters" in organized labor. Where the failed Gephardt campaign staked its political fortunes in Iowa to the declining industrial unions, Edwards has forged ties to the rapidly expanding unions that represent government and service workers.