Originally published in the Valley News on December 21, 2007
Edwards Learns His Lessons
Former Senator, VP Candidate Campaigns
As Progressive Populist
By John P. Gregg — Valley News Staff Writer
John Edwards wanted to know what went wrong, and what he should do next time.
It was 1987, and the young trial lawyer had just lost a lawsuit brought against a trucking company on behalf of a man who had been made a quadriplegic in an accident.
Several members of the jury disregarded many of the judge's instructions, and the panel reached a verdict relatively quickly after a two-week trial, according to one of the jurors, Jeffrey Lent, then a caretaker and unknown writer living in Asheville, N.C.
Lent, now a critically acclaimed novelist in Tunbridge, had initially sided with Edwards before he and another holdout bowed to the will of the rest of the jury. Edwards called Lent, who had even tried to speak to the judge after the trial, soon after to learn what the jury was thinking.
"We talked at great length about the different aspects of the trial," Lent recalled. "He really was trying to find out what he could have done better."
Edwards appealed and managed to get a new jury trial, which he then won.
Now, 20 years later, the 54-year-old Edwards is getting a second chance at a bigger prize — a run for the White House.
After a promising but unsuccessful 2004 primary bid, and a frustrating role as John Kerry's running mate, Edwards is a top-tier candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But unlike the moderate he ran as in 2004, the son of a millworker this time is running a more progressive, populist campaign that is trying to break through to Democratic voters disenchanted by the war in Iraq and economic insecurity in the United States. On everything from oil prices to health care, Edwards says lobbyists in Washington have worked to benefit their wealthy patrons at the expense of average Americans.
"We have an epic fight in front of us to make this country work the way it should work, to make our democracy work on behalf of everybody," Edwards said earlier this month during a campaign stop in Claremont, using the skills he honed in the courtroom to appeal to voters. "It is true that the men and women who work in the mill are worth as much as the man who owns the mill."
At a meeting last month with the Valley News editorial board in West Lebanon, Edwards, the first in his family to go to college, made clear what animates his candidacy.
"The centerpiece of my campaign is my belief that everybody in this country ought to have the chances that I've had. The centerpiece of my campaign is to speak on behalf of the kind of people that I grew up with, and give them the chances that they are entitled to, and that goes to trade, it goes to taxes, it goes to the war, it goes to everything," he said.
On the Trail
It is a message that Edwards delivers forcefully on the campaign trail. But it has still, at times, been obscured by other factors.
In the early stages of this year's long race, Edwards drew national attention for two disparate reasons, both of which still swirl around his campaign.
Last March, he and his wife Elizabeth announced that the breast cancer she initially was diagnosed with in 2004 had recurred and worsened, spreading incurably to other parts of her body.
The parents of two young children — another daughter is in law school, and their eldest son, Wade, died at 16 in a 1996 automobile accident — the Edwardses said they would stay on the campaign trail. With Edwards facing Hillary Clinton as a top rival, Elizabeth Edwards has emerged as a crucial campaigner for her husband's cause.
"You know you're not going to get any artifice," Elizabeth Edwards said in introducing her husband to a crowd at Dartmouth last February, before she was rediagnosed. "He's going to give his real answer to things."
Voters regularly inquire about her health, and Edwards gives updates at the start of campaign appearances. "Elizabeth is doing very well," he said in an interview last month. "Both of us are strong for each other, and we're very focused on what we want to do to serve this country."
Edwards has also struggled to get past a seemingly trivial issue — revelations that his campaign had spent $400 apiece for two haircuts late last winter, expenses that challenged his regular-guy image.
Edwards is still asked about the issue, often by local broadcast journalists, and wearily answered such a query this month from a Boston radio station that reaches into New Hampshire. The reporter wanted to know where he had gotten his last haircut, and how much it had cost.
"Some lessons you learn the hard way, and this was one of them," Edwards said tightly, trying, yet again, to put the issue to rest.
What he would rather his campaign be known for are the bold stands he has taken on several major issues, ranging from repudiating his 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq to his early proposal for universal health care.
Edwards would roll back the Bush-era tax cuts for households making more than $200,000 to pay for his health care plan, which also includes an employer mandate and two measures sure to be opposed by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries — a 15 percent profit cap on private insurers, and a proposal to offer cash rewards, but no patent, for certain breakthrough drugs.