http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=09&year=2007&base_name=post_4772&1
Rather, it's Edwards, who Dana says " such a "lifetime liberal" narrative," who gets the most mileage out of his backstory. It's the millworker stuff, and his history as an anti-corporate lawyer -- "I beat, I beat them, and I beat them again," he says -- that tends to undergird his support. And that's because spending a lifetime battling with corporations actually changes your view of capitalism, and of corporate power, and of economics. Edwards narrative isn't of a "lifetime liberal" so much as a "professional populist," but it's served him well. In the original draft of my Edwards profile, I spent substantial time on this subject, but much of it got cut out. For those interested, the excised portion is below:
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Edwards’ decades as a trial lawyer are often brought up, but only for their political implications, never their personal impact. That’s a mistake. He spent the bulk of his adult life fighting those cases, and the stories and people and corporations he came into contact amounted to a searing, visceral course in old-style populism. Think of it this way: Hillary Clinton’s caution and political savvy are obvious products of an adult life spent entirely in politics, the last 15 years or so on the national stage. Barack Obama’s broad appeal and talent for consensus building are not unexpected traits for a former community organizer. So what does spending day after day confronting the grievous, heartbreaking damage done to individuals and families by powerful, profit-driven corporations do to a man?
“Every single day,” says his wife, Elizabeth, “what he saw, were good people, in great need, who were being mistreated by big corporations. Corporations that knew that they had done wrong, and often insurance companies that were taking a calculated risk going to trial – though they quit doing that with him after awhile. And that’s what he did. He went to work every single day, and that’s what he did. He did nothing else, except that. If you took that person, a person who chose that as his life, you would end up with the politics that he’s talking about today.”
In 2003, when John Edwards wanted to present himself to the electorate, he, like every other world leader wannabe, wrote a book. But unlike most campaign tracts, Edwards’ effort, Four Trials, doesn’t say a word about his experience in the Senate or plans for the country. Instead, it recounts four trials Edwards fought, two against corporations, two against doctors. More to the point, it introduces four individuals who Edwards fought for – sympathetic, decent human beings, whose hopeful endurance in the face of impossible, deeply unfair circumstances makes clear who Edwards believes the heroes to be. At the close of one climactic, heartbreaking trial, where Edwards is defending a small girl who was literally disemboweled because a pool supply company was too cheap for safety screws, Edwards turns to the jury, and says, “’Now I want you to put those pictures side by side. Absolute corporate indifference’ – and I paused and made a fist with my left hand – ‘and absolute innocence.’ And then another fist with my right hand. ‘And what you have been doing for the last seven weeks is you have been watching what happens when absolute corporate indifference collides with absolute innocence.’ I brought my fists together. ‘That’s what this case is. That is what this case is about. And that is why you are here.’”
In some ways, that is also what Edwards’ campaign is about, why he is here. When we sit down for our interview, one of the first questions I ask him is whether he thinks of himself as a populist. “If I knew what that meant,” he laughed, “I could answer that question.” But as I start to offer a definition, he interjects: “Can I answer first, then you tell me? I don’t want my answer to be influenced by the other definition. If being a populist means standing up for regular people so they don’t get,” and here he pauses, searching for the right word, “stomped on by powerful multinational corporations, the answer is yes.” I abandon my definition, which, in comparison, sounds tinny and esoteric. “The reason I wrote that book the way I did,” he continues, “is I think you read that book and you know, for good or bad, a lot about John Edwards and the way he views the world.”
Edwards, to be sure, is not anti-business, and he’s quick to decry “pitting one group against another” for political gain, but his answers lack the deification of business and business leaders that so often lace elite Democratic rhetoric. This, again, speaks to background. Career politicians spend their lives raising money, not making it. As they ascend in prominence and power, their need for well-heeled supporters grows ever greater, and the caliber and impressiveness of the corporate titans they meet increases proportionately. A good corporate friend is not only a good friend; he’s a financial savior, am indispensable political asset. Indeed, in such a relationship, the politician needs the business leader more than the business leader needs the politician. It breeds, for the politician, a certain, inevitable, idealization of like-minded corporate executives.
Take another Southern politician who occasionally claimed the populist mantle: Bill Clinton. In Survivor, then-Washington Post reporter John Harris’s recounting of Clinton’s presidency, Harris describes Erskine Bowles, Clinton’s third chief of staff and, somewhat ironically, the man who would run for and lose the Senate seat Edwards’ vacated to pursue the presidency. “A Charlotte investment banker and millionaire many times over from his business dealing as well as the family fortune into which he married, Bowles fairly boasted of his indifference to capital customs. ‘I’m a creature of the private sector,’ he liked to say. ‘It’s my natural habitat.’” This is precisely what attracted the President. “The Clintons,” Harris writes, “had organized their lives around politics, not money, yet they were fascinated by people who had made money and understood it, especially when these people were not conservative Republicans. Clinton knew he was just as smart as and usually more experienced than almost any political operative giving an opinion. But an investment banker like Bowles – now, there was someone worth listening to.”
--Ezra Klein
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