EYE ON EDWARDS
Edwards takes jump to the left
JIM MORRILL
jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com
John EdwardsWhen he ran for president in 2004, just as when he ran for the U.S. Senate five years earlier, Democrat John Edwards cast himself as a Southern moderate.
In Congress, he joined centrist coalitions and built a voting record the National Journal said set him "comfortably apart from Senate liberals." Exit polls in Southern primaries showed him winning votes from moderates and even conservatives.
Now, as he throttles toward 2008, Edwards has veered left, outflanking Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and several other presidential rivals for his party's liberal base.
He has staked out positions on the war and health care popular with liberals. He has marched with union pickets and championed a new war on poverty. He crusaded across the country to raise the minimum wage, joining one rally alongside Sen. Ted Kennedy, a liberal icon.
"I, like all of you, have evolved," Edwards, 53, told a Dartmouth College audience last week.
Edwards adviser Ed Turlington said that while Edwards hasn't changed his core beliefs, he brings more "energy and focus" to this campaign. But he has also brought a change in tone.
In 2004, Edwards was relentlessly upbeat. He passed up digs at party rivals. Now he questions the experience of Sen. Barack Obama, a freshman senator from Illinois, and has suggested Clinton, of New York, should apologize like he did for voting to authorize the war. Both are leading Democratic candidates.
Last month, in comments widely seen as aimed at Clinton, he criticized congressional Democrats who hadn't spoken out against President Bush's troop increase in Iraq.
"Silence," Edwards said, "is betrayal."
"The cynic in me would say it's Howard Dean's rhetoric with John Edwards' smile," said Chuck Todd, editor of The Hotline, a daily political digest. "He seems to have adopted sharper elbows. He's not going to be running the same tone of a campaign that he ran four years ago, when he never, ever wanted to go negative."
A different candidate
Nowhere has any leftward tilt been more pronounced than on Iraq.Running for vice president in 2004, Edwards criticized the Bush administration's management of the war but defended his own 2002 vote authorizing it. A year later, he recanted that vote.
"I was wrong," he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece.
Last week, he criticized a nonbinding resolution opposing the president's troop surge as an empty gesture, implicitly chiding Democrats who support it. Edwards got 80,000 people to sign electronic petitions to Congress to block funding for what he calls an "escalation."
"He's shown a real capacity to grow and learn," said Tim Carpenter, executive director of the Progressive Democrats, an anti-war group. "A lot of people are kind of romanticizing a little bit in watching his transformation."
Edwards acknowledged to The New York Times recently that he's a different candidate. And he is.
Running for the Senate in 1998, he talked of his "mainstream North Carolina" values. In his first four years in the Senate, he compiled a clearly centrist record. The National Journal, which rates congressional votes, said his "consistent moderation placed Edwards among the center-right of Senate Democrats."
Those votes became more liberal as he ramped up his first presidential campaign.
"He sort of felt cut free from the restraints of a North Carolina electorate," said John Aldrich, a political scientist at Duke University, adding that he believed the transformation also is rooted in Edwards' tenure as head of a poverty center at UNC Chapel Hill.
"He's found his voice on this inequality issue," Aldrich said.
But why the shift?
Edwards was an economic populist in 2004. The "two Americas" -- one for the rich and one for everybody else -- was a constant refrain. That hasn't changed.
"It's not rich versus poor in his mind; it's the greedy versus the rest of us," said adviser Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a Democratic consultant who specializes in appeals to rural voters.
But some positions have clearly shifted to the left.
Critics see Edwards' evolution, particularly on the war, as little more than political expediency, a way to capture his party's liberal base and differentiate himself from rivals such as Clinton.
"To be fair to him, it could be a conclusion based on the evidence that he was profoundly mistaken in his own views, or it could be an effort to pander to an increasingly anti-war primary electorate," said John Hood, president of the Raleigh-based John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank. "My suspicion is pandering is a factor."
Edwards' supporters dismiss labels altogether.
"I'd reject this whole `right-middle' thing," said Turlington, who chaired Edwards' last presidential campaign. "His policy proposals genuinely reflect what he thinks is the right place this country needs to go."
Jim Morrill: 704-358-5059.
Then and now
IRAQ
2002: Voted to authorize the war: "Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave threat to America and our allies," he said then. "We know that he has chemical and biological weapons today, that he's used them in the past, and that he's doing everything he can to build more. Every day he gets closer to his long-term goal of nuclear capability."In 2004, he publicly defended his vote.
2007: Apologized for vote in 2005. Says he would withdraw 40,000 U.S. troops immediately.
GAY MARRIAGE
2003: Did not endorse gay marriages or civil unions. Left decisions on those issues to states.
2007: He said, "It's very easy for me to say, `Gay civil unions, yes; partnership benefits, yes,' but it is something that I struggle with."
This week, he added, "The question is whether I, as president of the United States, should impose on the United States of America my views on gay marriage."
HEALTH CARE
2004: Favored extending coverage to 21 million uninsured children. Called health care "a birthright" for Americans but stopped short of calling for universal coverage.
2007: On Monday, he unveiled a plan for universal health care that would cost up to $120 billion a year.
TAXES
1998: Vowed not to increase federal taxes. Called for tax cuts.
2007: Would pay for health care plan in part by rolling back tax cuts on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.
"Getting the deficit down in the short term," he said in Columbia recently, "is not as important as steps we need to take on universal health care and other issues."
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As it reports extensively on the entire presidential race, the Observer will focus frequently on the Edwards campaign because of its unique ties to the Carolinas.
John Edwards
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