It may well lead to a dead end. He’s still not a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He has barely clawed his way out of the also-ran status that has dogged him for so long. But events over the weekend have finally given Edwards at least a small amount of that elusive and coveted political commodity known as “traction.”
The biggest windfall to drop into the senator’s lap was a surprise editorial endorsement from Iowa’s biggest newspaper, The Des Moines Register. The paper admitted that it didn’t take Edwards very seriously for most of the campaign leading up to next week’s party caucuses. But “the more we watched him,” the editorial said, “the more we read his speeches and studied his positions, the more we saw him comport himself in debate, the more we learned about his life story, the more our editorial board came to conclude he’s a cut above the others.”
And the paper made it clear that its choice wasn’t just a matter of picking the least of the evils. There were elements of that. (Dean was deemed too mean, and Gephardt has been there, done that.) But the editorial went beyond that, going so far as to say Edwards has shown “flashes of brilliance.”
Edwards’ detractors in his home state will pooh-pooh the endorsement. They will be quick to point out that The Register doesn’t have a very good record of picking winners. In 1988, the paper endorsed Sen. Paul Simon. (Gephardt won the caucuses, and Michael Dukakis won the nomination.) In 1992, The Register picked its own home-state candidate, Sen. Tom Harkin. (Bill Clinton won.) In 2000, the paper backed Sen. Bill Bradley, who lost to Al Gore.
But the Los Angeles Times said the Register endorsement had made Edwards “a reinvigorated man” and noted that the polls had “begun to register fresh interest in a presidential bid that, for weeks, seemed stalled.” The polls, indeed, indicated that Edwards was closing in on John Kerry for third place behind Dean and Gephardt in Iowa.
There have been a number of other signs here and there that people within and without the media are beginning to sit up and take notice of what significant numbers of outsiders seem to welcome as a fresh face in an otherwise lackluster pack. Edwards appeared on NBC’s “Today” show, attracted overflow crowds in campaign appearances across western Iowa, drew some new endorsements, and was featured in a front-page profile in The New York Times.
All this left him telling one crowd that he had “a fire inside me about this that you just cannot imagine.”
It may turn out to be no more than a bad case of heartburn from all that rubber chicken and barbecue on the campaign trail.
Then again, if Edwards should happen to rack up respectable showings in Iowa and New Hampshire and top them off with a win in his native state of South Carolina (admittedly a pretty tall order) then it will be hard to deny that he has worked up a healthy measure of what former President George H.W. Bush used to call “Big Mo” — momentum.
