John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator whose movie-star looks overshadowed his merely workmanlike performance as John Kerry's vice-presidential running mate two years ago, has been carefully fashioning a presidential run of his own for 2008. He gives speeches, floats ideas, and tests themes. This is a good idea for any hopeful presidential candidate, of course, but particularly for Edwards. He needs it more than most. After the self-immolation of Howard Dean in the early 2004 campaign season, Edwards emerged unexpectedly as Kerry's only plausible opposition in the Democratic primaries. For much of that period of sudden fame, he looked like he didn't know what hit him. His campaign became a series of shifting rationales, a textbook instance of the chameleon candidacy. First, Edwards billed himself as a policy wonk, issuing detailed position papers on every conceivable national issue. This scattered approach, however, never congealed into a personal identity that could fasten itself in voters' minds, so Edwards soon abandoned talk of allocation formulas for post- secondary student loans in favor of stressing his own life story: the horny-handed son of a South Carolina mill worker who clawed his way up the entrepreneurial heap to become a self-made millionaire.
That touching narrative lost much of its pathos on examination. Edwards's father, though never wealthy, was in fact a member in good standing of the textile industry's managerial class. John's entrepreneurial energy, moreover, had been consumed by his work as a personal-injury lawyer, a profession even less attractive than the textile executives who shut down mills and, as Democrats say, ``ship the jobs overseas.''