NOTE: I will have a crucial post related to the all-important "hard count" later this morning, which I'll be typing while listening to Russert and everybody else try to figure out what the Des Moines Register poll released last night means....but first, a lengthy John Edwards update from Iowa Falls campaign stop that was happening at the same moment:
Let's start with a bit of recent spin-history: Recall that John Edwards was the "it" candidate of 2002. Major profile pieces about him in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and elsewhere had anointed him the "next big candidate" and heir apparent to the Southern centrist DLC baton handed off by Clinton and fumbled by Gore. (Or "hair apparent," if you like his wavy, weighty flip of his bangs.)
But Edwards just never caught on. There are plenty of reasons for this, and the one to which I still give ample credence to is the fact that the Southern and/or centrist wings of the Democratic Party are no place to build to the nomination. (If you think Clinton did so in 1992, I happily appeal to Kenny Baer - the man who literally wrote the book on the founding and emergence of the DLC: "Reinventing Democrats", Univ. Kansas Press - because Kenny will tell you that Clinton shored up his liberal base and then appended, and when convenient discarded, the DLC along the way to the nomination.)
So part of Edwards' failure was not his own missteps or shortcomings; it was the product of a handicapping based on some faulty logic.
But Edwards has found his stride. It's really a dramatic transformation. Both his confidence and his stump speech - and the reaction by crowds to the powerful cocktail of the two.
At a small event at a community college in Iowa Falls last night, Edwards really was dazzling. The event was scheduled for 7:15, and the room was full by then, and kept growing in size for the next hour and 20 minutes as the campaign entourage, running late, was making its way to this small, 5000-person farming town. (Pigs and soy are major commodities, and the Cargill plant in town processes soy right there.)
What is he doing differently? Edwards is naturally wonky, and he makes a quick plea at the end (like a lawyer in his closing statement reminding you to revisit crucial pieces of evidence from the trial) to read the handbook he hands out because he wants you to know he's not just a bunch of platitudes, but has platforms to back up his boasts. But where he used to struggle by being too wonkish and detailed, he's now fluid and comfortable, and especially good at hitting funny lines and drawing the listeners in. (His best punch line, to make a point about college affordability for public university students willing to work, comes when he says that working his way through college by unloading tractor trailers in the humidity of North Carolina summers was a strong incentive to keep studying. People who went to college get it, and people who worked and therefore never had a chance to go to college, law school and millions in trial-lawyer fees also get it. And his best cheer line is when Edwards points out that he hasn't gone negative the entire campaign, an appeal that also works for him.)
But the real comparison point, the real improvement for Edwards, is between how he sells his populist message in 2004 and how Gore tried, less successfully, to sell his in 2000.
Gore was privy to the same poll and focus group information that Edwards and the other candidates now have - results that show that some variant of "people v. powerful" taps into a raw nerve among a good portion of the American electorate. Now, the easy explanation is that biography matters, and Edwards grew up as first-generation in his family to go to college, while Gore was living in a hotel apartment in DC while his father inveighed on the Senate floor.
But Gore's real problem was that he too-crudely dichotomized America into a non-exhaustive choice - either (a) people or (b) the powerful. Hmmm....I know I'm not powerful, but by "people" does he mean some unreconstructed labor-movement activist, a welfare recipient, an unemployed rustbelt worker? And what if I'm none of those - what if I live in the suburbs or exurbs, am doing ok, but worry about putting my older kid through college while paying for special education costs of my younger kid - in which category do I fall, "a" or "b"?
Edwards has solved this problem with a subtle tweaking of the message to create a pure dichotomy, a choice where you know your category because he creates an exhaustive list by just putting everbody not empowered into a second, "other America." (But not to be confused with the famous use by the late Michael Harrington of the term "Other America.")
And so, Edwards says there is one tax code for (a) those with Gucci-wearing lawyers and tax accountants, and one for (b) everybody else. One school system for (a) those who cannot afford, K-12 and beyond, the best private schools, and one for (b) everbody else. And so on for health care and other issues along the divide. Edwards doesn't, of course, say "a" and "b" - but you know which group you're in, and it's the same group, example after example after example. B, B, and B again - I'm in group B, dadgummit! It's a classic use of us v. themism.
And people are devouring it. What's ironic is that in some ways, at the same time Edwards has figured out Gore's message problems, he is stealing and also tweaking Dean's very successful "it's your campaign, not mine" meme. (Remember, good poets imitate but great poets steal.) He does this by constantly ending each of his mini-closing arguments with a trial lawyers "you and I" can fix it, inclusive appeal.
Unfortunately for Edwards, his problem is that he didn't figure this out even two months ago. Had he, he might have surged and built resources for the fiedl campaign necessary to win Monday. He might win an Iowa "primary" but his organizational and resource disadvantages - which cannot be correct at this late stage - water down his surge in a caucus state. If Iowa were the first primary state, and NH the first caucus state, this thing would break so much differently.
Two final, numerical points about Edwards:
First, his geographic strategy is to flank the others by winning big in smaller areas, among the more numerous (but less populous) smaller precincts outside the larger cities. Just look at the difference between the itinerary yesterday of the two late-surge candidates, Edwards and Kerry. Edwards did events in Iowa Falls (not Iowa City, which is much larger, but Iowa Falls), after stops in Parkersburg and Waterloo. Meanwhile, Kerry did events in Dubuque, Davenport and Des Moines. In a sense, Edwards is trying to do what Bush did in the 2000 electoral college - post enough small wins to exaggerate his actual support in terms of delegate counts assigned by the 1,993 precinct caucuses.
Second, Edwards had 213 people turn out for his Iowa Falls event I witnessed last night. Now, though he showed a full 80 minutes late, people kept streaming in -- while nobody I saw left. (Interim speakers kept people involved.) Let's break the math of 213 turnout down. There are 3 million Iowans, only 600K of whom are registered Democrats. That's one in five. Let's assume that Iowa Falls, just for the sake of argument, is a microcosm of the state, though surely it is not. One fifth of Iowa Falls population of 5,000 is 1,000. Now, of those 600K registered D's statewide, the expectation (which is, again, increasingly conservatively, low by now) is for about 120K to caucus Monday - again, one out of five. Applying that ratio to the 1,000 registered Dem estimate in Iowa Falls, that means 200 people from Iowa Falls should be expected to caucus Monday. Edwards had 213 people. And that means two things - (1) turnout is really going to be astronomical, and (2) Edwards might just do better than people expect.
(Incidentally, one of those warm-up speakers -- an Iowan trial lawyer, 20-year friend of Edwards, and former gubernatorial candidate, Roxanne Conlin - asked how many people in attendance had never been to a caucus before. About 1/3rd of them raised their hands. I talked to a couple - he a pig farmer, she a secretary for the local schoolboard - and they say they have only caucuses once or twice in their lives. But they are turning out, and they say they don't remember their friends and neighbors talking about politics as much as they are this year. And they don't ever remember them being so upset, angry and disappointed with what's going on in Washington.)
Given the buzz I'm about to report to you in the next post about Dean's "hard count", coupled with that Iowa Falls turnout and what Kerry is also doing, I want to predict a caucus-goer statewide count greater than 150K.
The only other prediction that is gathering unanimity among the punditry here: Gephardt is toast. Burnt toast. Some writers are already planning to be at Gephardt's campaign HQ first thing Tuesday for the R.I.P. moment.