‘Two Americas’ Enough for Edwards?

In the final, frigid days leading up to the 2004 Iowa caucuses, the presidential campaign of Senator John Edwards was struggling. While Howard Dean was packing in hundreds and even thousands at his angerfests, Edwards wasn’t a big enough draw to fill even the double-wide mobile home where one of his supporters was hosting a house party for him in Chariton, Iowa. It was just before Christmas 2003, and there were, Edwards recalls now, “10 or 15 people” waiting to hear him make his case. For the candidate who had been lauded as the next Bill Clinton not so many months before, it was a depressing nadir. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘What are you doing?'” says Edwards. “It just felt like I had no chance whatsoever.”

Edwards was scheduled to deliver one last big speech before the caucuses. It would be his closing argument to persuade voters to take a chance on a sunny former trial lawyer whose political experience consisted of one run for office. That used to be his specialty, charming and winning over skeptical juries to side with his clients on case after case in North Carolina. But for all Edwards’ gifts with language, for all his skill at speaking on behalf of the ordinary men, women and children he had represented in the courtroom, he was strangely at a loss when it came to framing a case for himself.

It was Christina Reynolds, the campaign’s research director and an aide who had been with Edwards since his Senate race in 1998, who came up with the formulation. He was most compelling, she told him, when he talked about the disparities between the way rich people and poor people live in this country: two school systems, two kinds of health care, two tax codes. It was what fired up his passion in those closing arguments; it was the case for himself. “What you’ve been talking about,” she said, “is two Americas.”

The speech got little attention when Edwards first tried it out in Des Moines, Iowa, on Dec. 29. Delivered from behind a lectern, the “two Americas” refrain sounded like the familiar trope of class warfare. “One America does the work while another America reaps the reward,” Edwards intoned. “One America pays the taxes while another America gets the tax breaks.” But as Edwards took it on the road–into living rooms and union halls and diners and high school gyms–it grew and evolved into something much, much bigger, into a cause. “The more I talked about it, the more it became internal,” Edwards says. “I understood pretty quickly after that, this is who I am. This is what I believe. It is my own life story, and I could connect it to parts of my own life–to some of the inequality that I had seen, racial and economic inequality, what I’d seen in some of the schools. All these things started fitting together.”

Within days, overflow crowds were lining up in the snow to hear Edwards and pulling down his posters to be autographed after he had finished speaking. “They were handing up anything that could be signed–napkins, envelopes. Here’s the back of my deposit slip, sign that,” his wife Elizabeth wrote in her memoir. Bill Clinton’s old strategist James Carville marveled at the time that it was the best stump speech he had ever heard. On Salon, Peter Dizikes predicted, “Before too long, the Edwards speech could be like a museum exhibit that political tourists flock to see before it closes.”

The “Two Americas” speech turned out to be not a closing argument but an opening one. It developed the rationale that Edwards’ candidacy had been lacking, one that couldn’t be found in the 60-page booklet of plans and proposals that he had put out as a counterargument to his lack of experience. The Des Moines Register cited the speech in its surprise endorsement of Edwards on Jan. 11: “John Edwards is one of those rare, naturally gifted politicians who doesn’t need a long record of public service to inspire confidence in his abilities. His life has been one of accomplishing the unexpected, amid flashes of brilliance.”

That a stump speech could have such power would seem unlikely in an age when the lingua franca of politics is scripted in 30-sec. commercials by media consultants and pollsters. But the resonance came from Edwards’ own life story as the son of a millworker who grew up to be a spectacularly successful trial lawyer and then a U.S. Senator. “I beat ’em, and I beat ’em again, and then I beat ’em again,” Edwards would declare. “How many times has someone said to you that you can’t do something? That you’re not quite prepared for this, you don’t have the right training or are not experienced enough?”

Edwards surprised everyone by coming from nowhere to place second in Iowa. And while the power of that stump speech didn’t win the nomination for him in 2004, it did propel him to the position of John Kerry’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket. And when they lost the election in November, the speech was the reason no one could count out Edwards for the future.

Elizabeth was diagnosed with breast cancer the day after the election. “We went immediately, full force, especially me, into making sure we got her started on treatment,” Edwards says. “We moved very, very quickly and aggressively.” As their family began to deal with the reality of her illness and regain footing, the couple turned to the question of what John would do next. “We were basically sitting around–me and Elizabeth and some of our friends–talking about what we should do now, what I should do now,” Edwards recalls. “As we talked about it, Elizabeth’s the one who said it. She said, ‘I just want you to know, every time you talk about doing something about poverty in America, you light up. There’s a passion and energy to what you say that is different.’ And I realized she was exactly right. That’s what I wanted to do.”

Not since Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s had any Democrat of national stature addressed the subject with the focus that Edwards gave it. He helped start a poverty center at the University of North Carolina, wrote a book about it and, when the time came to launch his next presidential campaign, chose hurricane-ravaged New Orleans as the place to do so.

There are differences in style and substance this time around. In his newer, more populist incarnation, Edwards 2.0 has hammered away not only at President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and the special interests that he says call the shots in Washington but also at front runner Hillary Clinton. At one point, he even refused to say whether he would endorse her if she won the Democratic nomination. “I am surprised at just how angry John has become,” said his former Senate colleague Chris Dodd, another presidential contender. “This is not the same John Edwards I once knew.” Some of his former supporters feel the same way. Frank Best had originally signed up to lead Edwards’ campaign in Louisa County, Iowa, but has since switched to Barack Obama, saying “Edwards just doesn’t have the same campaign he had four years ago.”

Edwards does not deny that he is a different candidate. “There’s a toughness and a seasoning that comes from going through the experience,” he says. “You have a responsibility to make sure that people know what the fundamental differences are.” But as Edwards sees the lead he once held in Iowa slipping away, with Clinton and Obama taking turns heading up the latest polls, there are also signs that he may be coming full circle.

This week he unveiled a new, softer stump speech that talks of “America rising.” As he explains, “Having laid the foundation of some differences that we have on substance, now it’s my job to assure that [voters] know exactly what I want to do as President, which is what I was doing in the last three weeks last time.” In other words, the moment has arrived once again. It’s time to make another closing argument.