Sen. John Edwards talks and autographs with
Ryan Lyerla ’08. AMI FREEBERG
John Edwards’s speech last Tuesday was notable not for what he said, but what he didn’t say. The third-place Democrat and firebrand did not mention Hillary Clinton.
Well, Edwards brought Sen. Clinton up once, during the question and answer session after his speech, to politely mention that the New York senator had voted for the Senate resolution declaring the Iranian National Guard a terrorist group. “She’s entitled to her vote,” Edwards said. “I just strongly disagree with it.” A critique, yes, but for the candidate who had been leading the anti-Clinton charge for the past several weeks, including on nationally televised debates, it was striking in its mildness.
Edwards also did not use the opportunity of his visit to Grinnell College to critique Clinton’s campaign for dishonesty. It was a Grinnell student, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff ’10, who created national news when she told the S&B that the Clinton campaign had given her a planted question to ask Clinton at a Newton event. Edwards helped fan the story by mentioning it in his speeches, and his campaign even put up a temporary website called “Plants for Hillary” to draw attention to the issue.
But standing on Grinnell’s campus, the angry man of the Democratic race did not draw the comparison. He did not make an oblique reference, even when talking about how much he valued Iowa democracy and students’ questions.
This tip-toeing around Clinton was even more notable given that Edwards had plenty of angry words to go around. President Bush, the Republicans, lobbyists, drug companies, special interests and multi-national corporations all came in for their share of populist rage. But on Clinton, Edwards was silent.
Moreover, after the event, reporters asked Edwards whether his comments on a lack of trust in politicians were meant to imply that Clinton was untrustworthy. He said no, and attacked President Bush for “destroy[ing] the trust relationship between America and its president.”
This is a standard Edwards talking point. In the Nov. 15 CNN debate, he attacked Bush for this, and said that because of that destroyed trust, “there are fair questions to be asked of all of us, including Senator Clinton.” From there, he launched into criticisms of Clinton for double-talking on important issues. For about a month, this kind of attack from Edwards on Clinton was commonplace. At one point, he even suggested that he might not support Clinton should she win the nomination. (Edwards later said he would.)
So what lay behind the newly docile John Edwards vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton?
One factor might be a poll released the day before Edwards’s speech. That poll had good news for anyone opposed to Clinton’s candidacy: the New York senator, once a front-runner in the state, was now trailing Illinois Senator Barack Obama (though technically in a statistical tie) in Iowa.
But Clinton’s support hadn’t fallen. Obama’s had gone up, and his increase in support appeared to have been at Edwards’s expense.
Iowa voters have been famously averse to mudslinging campaigns. In 2004, the then-statewide frontrunners Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt engaged in a pre-caucus exchange of negative ads—and then came in third and fourth respectively, behind Sens. John Kerry and Edwards himself (who was then noted for running a relentlessly positive campaign).
So maybe Edwards has toned down the personal attacks because he thinks that they were hurting him more than they helped him. Or maybe the fact that suddenly Clinton is no longer the Iowa front-runner makes her a less pressing target. (It wasn’t just a fluke—other commentators have noticed the same thing over the past week.) Or perhaps the Edwards campaign planned all along to go positive in the last month before the caucuses.
Regardless of why Edwards has changed his tone, it clearly marks a new phase in his campaign. By Jan. 4, we’ll know if it is a winning strategy.
