When 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.
