What About John Edwards?

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 6, 2008

National political reporter Joel Achenbach is set loose on the Granite State, as Tuesday's primary approaches.

11:47 a.m.

CONCORD -- What about John Edwards?

Since the Iowa caucuses, the news has been filled with the names Obama and Clinton, Clinton and Obama. You've got the fresh young senator from Illinois against the famous, long-controversial senator from New York. But what about that former senator from North Carolina, who, with less money than his rivals, came in second in Iowa (as he did in 2004) with nearly one of every three Democratic votes?

Edwards is one of the most ferocious campaigners on the trail. At one point, he campaigned 36 hours nonstop in Iowa. He had the earliest event Friday morning (6:15 on the schedule) and will stump all day today with hardly a break to prepare for the night's crucial debate. There is no margin of error for Edwards, no backup plan: He has to find a way to stay at the center of the primary narrative, despite the almost reflexive tendency of the news media to frame the race as Front-runner and Challenger.

At a Shriner's hall here this morning, Edwards walked in with his million-dollar smile, without any obvious hint of the fatigue so evident among some other candidates. He's disciplined on the stump, sticking not only to the standard themes but also using identical sentences, even identical stressed syllables, regardless of venue.

If there's anything new this morning, it may be the extra dollop of sarcasm that drips from his words when he talks about his chief rivals. For example, he took what sounded like a shot at Barack Obama's politics of hope, suggesting that it's naive to think that the entrenched special interests of Washington can be wooed into changing.

"You can't nice them to death. It doesn't work. They will drive through you like a freight train."

He mentioned a woman who had to raid her child's college fund to pay for a cancer operation.

"She needs more than a hug," he said.

Don't replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats, he said, because it won't make any difference -- an apparent shot at Hillary Rodham Clinton. The only change, he said, would be that "different people will go to the cocktail parties in Washington."

He twice jabbed the national news media for casting the race as a two-person contest, when, in fact, there are three leading candidates. Only late in his stump speech did he mention his two rivals by name.

"I'm going to be fine when this election is over. So is Barack Obama and so is Hillary Clinton. . . . The question is whether America will be fine."

4:24 p.m.

LEBANON -- Edwards had way too many people turn out for the small room at Lebanon High School where he was to speak, so the crowd spilled over into the gym and listened to him on a loudspeaker. That was kind of lame (Did the Edwards team fear that it couldn't fill the gym? That a camera might pick up empty seats in the background?), and to make up for it, Edwards showed up briefly in the gym for a demonstration of his set-shot prowess.

No snark is intended when we report that he has a pretty shot -- a smooth stroke, with excellent ball rotation. He clanged a few off the back of the rim and blamed the ball ("I need a boy's ball! This is a girl's ball!"), but eventually he got warmed up and sank four in a row from just beyond foul-shot distance.

This part of New Hampshire is progressive -- it's practically Vermont, to the point that Vermonters were all over the event today. Many progressives all over New Hampshire may be thinking strategically about Tuesday's vote. Both Obama and Edwards are viewed as progressive -- and Dennis Kucinich, too -- but many voters today told me they want to make sure that Clinton doesn't win. So even if they like Edwards or Kucinich more, they might vote for Obama in hopes that he'll beat Clinton.

"I think she's a Republican in sheep's clothing," said Kate Devine, a physician in the Upper Valley (of the Connecticut River) town of Lyme. People in this area, which includes Hanover, home to Dartmouth College, "tend to vote more like Vermonters. Even though the student population of Dartmouth is very conservative, the faculty and staff is less so."

"I will not vote for Hillary Clinton," said John Corrigan, a "hard-core Democrat" in Concord. "I'm looking for the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton. That could be Obama, or it could be Edwards."

This isn't a scientific survey, of course. And Jesse Wolfson, 22, a Yale student from Hanover who will vote Tuesday, told me he thinks the national news media have been vicious in their coverage of Clinton.

But he's voting for Edwards, for sure.

6:33 p.m.

MANCHESTER -- "Change" is so popular that even candidates who represent stasis, inertia, government paralysis, hidebound ideology are embracing it. Where are the candidates who take a stand for Steady As She Goes? Who speaks for Torpor?

Obama campaigns beneath a banner saying Change We Can Believe In. The side of Edwards's bus says Real Change Starts Now. Clinton declared on Friday that America needs not just a president who will call for change, or one who will demand change, but "a president who will produce change."

I walked into a Mitt Romney event Friday night in Manchester, and he was already heavily into change mode.

"Change! Change! And how to bring change. . . ."

The word began to take control of his tongue.

"Don't send us the same people to fill different changes -- different chairs. . . ."