Same face. Not even a new wrinkle. Clearly a member of the Dick Clark gene pool.
Same skin. Smooth, but retaining that ever-present deep tan.
Same smile. Flashes on, high wattage and on cue, like a switch.
Same voice. The Southern accent that oozes sincerity.
Same speech. There are two Americas and we need to close the gap between rich and poor. Oh, and, yes, he is the son of a millworker.
The same John Edwards.
In 2004, when the nation came to know him first during his surprisingly strong but ultimately unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination, few would have argued that the then North Carolina senator wasn’t the finest speaker and the most natural campaigner in the race. He had a strange list of burdens: He looked too young, he looked too good and he sounded too perfect. Sen. John Edwards (D-People Magazine).
The consolation prize for the performance skills and the address south of the Mason-Dixon Line was a spot on the ticket as John Kerry’s running mate. All before he had completed his first term in the Senate.
Edwards did little to hurt himself during that run. Except now his title begins with one of the most dreaded words in American politics: “Former.”
Edwards faces the difficult task of matching his big Rose Garden ambitions with the small platform that is afforded politicians who hold no elective office. The competition for attention is fierce. There are at least 11 members of the U.S. Senate alone who are thinking hard about running, and a handful of other “formers” who are seeking headlines of their own.
Kerry is pounding the Bush administration on Iraq, arguing that American troops should be removed by a certain date. Former–there’s that word again–Vice President Al Gore is getting ink and air about his movie on global warming. Newt Gingrich is back on the scene. Not to mention the competition for air time that Angelina and Britney offer.
On top of all that, Edwards came to Washington last week to deliver a lunch speech at the National Press Club, a staid and confining venue for even the rhetorically gifted, to deliver a serious speech on a topic that is as sober and serious as it is unsolvable: poverty.
It would be difficult to accuse him of relying too much on consultants if he thought that a 40-plus-minute address on how he would end poverty in this country within the next 30 (count ’em 30) years would land him on the evening news or the front pages. Nor is his prescription for solving poverty notably original; and it is undeniably costly. If there’s an easy bumper sticker there, we didn’t see it.
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“We will never get what we don’t reach for,” Edwards said. “We have to think big.” That was a good line, one of several in his speech that again reminded us that Edwards, a near political novice, made a credible presidential run in large part due to communication skills honed during his years as a successful trial lawyer. Yet there was a flatness to his speech, even though he adopted a less formal tone than the original advance text.
Edwards is a politician who feeds off a crowd, not off a crowd feeding itself.
And the sense of establishing a personal connection is one of his obvious gifts. He was best in the 2004 campaign when he was talking to crowds. In this speech, he was talking at the crowd.
It would be easy to think of Edwards as a politician whose career fell as quickly as it rose. That he is more market than product, that behind the charm and good looks there is simply more charm and good looks.
For his competitors in 2008, that might be a mistake. A recent Des Moines Register poll of those likely to attend its caucuses asked voters whom they favored. The leader was not Kerry, who won the state in 2004, propelling him to the nomination. It was not Hillary Clinton, the candidate some believe cannot be denied. It wasn’t even Tom Vilsack, the state’s governor.
The leader was the son of the millworker.
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