John Edwards live

Whatever the outcome of his presidential campaign, this time around Edwards won't regret being an overly cautious candidate.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Poverty, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, Iowa, News, Health Care, Walter Shapiro, Iraq, John Edwards, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak

John Edwards prior to speaking March 27 at the Communications Workers of America National Legislative-Political Conference in Washington.

April 6, 2007 | CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- Unlike the word-for-word repetition that gave a whiff of synthetic glibness to his son-of-a-millworker stump speeches four years ago, John Edwards' style this time around is more improvisational. But even though the language now varies, there is a riff at the core of nearly every Edwards pitch to voters.

Here is how the 2004 vice presidential nominee (an interlude Edwards almost never voluntarily mentions) put it Tuesday night in Cedar Rapids as he spoke to about 800 Democrats packed into the gym at Prairie High School: "We're past the time for small, cautious, incremental steps. And we're past the time for rhetoric. Rhetoric is great -- it makes us all feel good -- but it doesn't change anything. The question is how we're going to bring about the big, bold transformational change that's needed in America."

Unraveling Edwards' subtext does not require a Derrida-spouting graduate student. Hillary Clinton is the obvious apostle of these "cautious, incremental steps," while Barack Obama is the undeniable master of feel-good rhetoric. What is most intriguing about the Edwards 2.0 campaign is how a once carefully calibrated, pro-war, mainstream Democrat has fashioned himself into the candidate of "big, bold transformational change."

The Edwards campaign is surging, partly because of the emotional reaction to Elizabeth Edwards' gallantry in facing up to the recurrence of her cancer, which has been diagnosed as incurable. This was the week that she began her cancer treatment, confiding with cautious optimism in an interview Wednesday night, "I talked to my doctor twice today and she ran through a list of side effects and I haven't had any of them." But neither she nor her husband want to be defined by her disease; when I asked Elizabeth a question about the campaign, rather than her health, she exclaimed, "Yay!"

This week Edwards drew crowds ranging from 500, at a lunch Wednesday in Davenport, to more than 1,500 that evening in Des Moines. These were more Democrats than Edwards would often see in a week during his near-victorious 2004 campaign in Iowa. With Obama and Clinton also attracting the kind of political audiences normally only seen right before the November elections, it is clear that Iowans are reveling in the three-way race in their first-in-the-nation state. But, as Edwards cautioned reporters, "This is so early. We've got a long way to go. I'm seasoned enough, having been through it, to know that there will be a lot of ups and downs."

Even though he had until recently been overshadowed by Clinton and Obama, Edwards has always had built-in strengths in the nomination fight. Ever since his surprisingly close second-place finish in the 2004 caucuses, Edwards has nurtured a rapport with Iowa Democrats, whose verdict next January will set the tone for the nomination fight. As Jeff Link, who ran former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack's now-abandoned presidential campaign (and who is now neutral in the race), put it, "Edwards has worked the state of Iowa as well as anyone. He's stayed in touch with his supporters from 2004 and he's running a very effective campaign."

The former one-term North Carolina senator is also the only candidate who has personally run for president in modern times -- Bill Clinton's 1992 race is ancient history in politics, as is Joe Biden's short-lived 1988 effort. Edwards understands both the Zen-like patience required -- he was seemingly doomed in Iowa in 2004 until he received the endorsement of the Des Moines Register right before the caucuses -- and the whirling-dervish pace of the primaries.

Sitting down with Edwards after the Cedar Rapids speech for an interview in the unlikely setting of a home-economics classroom, I inquired about his new favorite word, "bold," remarking that I did not recall it as part of his 2004 lexicon. "You probably never heard it from me," he freely admitted. Explaining what had changed, Edwards cited the deterioration of everything from the Iraq war to the "dysfunctional" healthcare system.

Then the 53-year-old former trial lawyer, who was mentioned as a presidential possibility from the moment he entered the Senate in 1999, added, "I think it's also combined with me being more seasoned and more comfortable with taking stronger, bolder positions." Edwards returned to this theme in response to an interview question about what he had learned from voting for authorization for the Iraq war. "Making a mistake, which I did, about something that important gives you enormous strength going forward," he said, trying to make a virtue out of necessity. "Because now I have absolutely no hesitation standing behind my independent judgment about what needs to be done. I don't care if it's popular or unpopular. Or what the political considerations are. You probably see some element of that in everything I'm doing."

Next page: A major fault line in the coming Democratic debate