Long feature on Edwards by Matt Bai for the Sunday magazine; a good read, and pretty fair-minded. Here's a snippet:
<From a political standpoint, the specific policy details of Edwards’s antipoverty agenda matter less than the fact that he’s standing up for something he believes in — or at least that’s how Edwards sees it. After watching Bush and the Republicans turn John Kerry into the caricature of a vacillating politician, Edwards came away from the 2004 campaign with a critical insight: campaigns are about who you are, not what policies you propose.
“Presidential elections are not just about issues — they’re about character and integrity and values,” Edwards told me when we met for coffee in Chapel Hill last year. “I didn’t realize when I went into it that what you stand for is more important than all the rest of it put together. I believe that very strongly now.” In other words, whatever one might say about the details of Edwards’s proposals, he is betting that voters will see two things: first, that he is a serious thinker who has offered detailed plans for the country (something they did not necessarily see in him in 2004), and second, that he is a man of such character and resolve that he is willing to talk about poverty in rooms full of wealthy lawyers and Iowa farmers, whether or not they share his passion for the poor.
There is a kind of meta-politics at work here, as there so often is in the modern campaign, where candidates feel compelled to telegraph their authenticity to cynical voters. Several times while we were together, Edwards pointed out to me, as he often does in interviews, that no one in politics thinks poverty is a winning campaign issue, and thus, the fact that he harps on it can’t possibly be helpful to him. He says this to underscore the fact that he is not the kind of candidate who exists to give the people what they want. But of course, as Edwards surely knows, the mere act of taking a stand on an issue that is considered a political loser makes him, in the eyes of many liberals, a candidate of uncommon courage, even though he isn’t saying anything that most Democratic primary voters don’t already agree with. So, in an odd way, building a campaign around poverty — while at the same time calling for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, which thrills liberal partisans — turns out to be a very shrewd primary strategy, after all. It’s not that Edwards doesn’t believe in what he’s saying; it’s just that he surely knows, at the end of the day, that it isn’t really a liability, either.
Edwards has assiduously courted the party’s powerful service unions, whose members often work low-paying jobs with little security or benefits. He seems to have determined early on in the race, from the time the contours of the field began to take shape soon after the 2004 election, that he alone had the star power to come at Hillary Clinton from the left, to position himself as the credible Democratic candidate who would lash out against the war and side unequivocally with the party’s liberal interest groups. The unexpected entry of Barack Obama into the race certainly complicated this calculus. An exciting new face, Obama is also trying to play Robert Kennedy to Clinton’s Hubert Humphrey, running hard against the war and trying to peel off labor and minority voters. Obama has, for most of this year, pushed Edwards to the periphery of news coverage and fund-raising. Still, Edwards seems to be counting on the notion that Obama, as inexperienced a candidate as Edwards was last time, will lose some of his allure along the way. Although Edwards trails his two principal rivals nationally, polls have shown him running strongly in Iowa and South Carolina, two critical early states.>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10edwards-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
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