By Sasha Issenberg
Globe Staff / January 1, 2008
KNOXVILLE, Iowa - John Edwards tells Iowans that he learned all he needs to know about effecting political change when his father taught him to "never walk away from a fight." In the stemwinder of a speech he began delivering last week, Edwards uses a version of the word fight dozens of times - along with a few struggles and a battle or two - in a depiction of America filled with violent imagery.
"This corporate greed is killing the middle class, killing American jobs, and it is stealing your children's future," Edwards told crowds in towns across the state.
Edwards's rhetoric - and the passionate response it is engendering from his loyalists in the days before the caucus - might be the most fervid by a major presidential candidate in many decades, according to historians.
"What's surprising is that he has made the calculated decision to return to this unvarnished populist message that's unfiltered, unrestrained, and recalls the legacy of earlier Democratic campaigns," said Stephen M. Gillon, a University of Oklahoma historian. "The question is whether the world has changed so much in the past 40 years that the language can still work."
With few programmatic differences among the Democratic candidates, the top three are distinguished from one another largely by their readings of the national condition. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York has emerged as the field's realist, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois as its idealist, and former senator Edwards of North Carolina as its cynic, beseeching Americans to realize they are victims of a corporate conspiracy.
---EOE---
SOURCE: BOSTON GLOBE
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/01/edwards_brings_fighting_words/