to this media spin.

People want to make up their own minds. Every week I talk to people who are undecided, and many tell me they are thinking about Biden, or Dodd, or Richardson, among others. They didn't listen to the media spin that it's a three-person race, and they won't listen to the media spin that it's now a two-person race.

End poverty.  That is the message.  For more, see johnedwards.com

i think your name suggests why the theme of poverty may confuse you as a central issue

Actually only Edwards is running a campaign that's about something other than itself.

economic populism at home, moral leadership abroad.

Of course, all the GOP candidates are running on the theme, "I'm the most batshit crazy of them all."

But amongst the Democrats, it's Clinton, Obama and Richardson whose themes seem the most in need of definition.

Edwards is clearly about ending poverty, and closing the class divide.

What equally simply statement sums up Clinton, Obama or Richardson's campaign?

unfortunately what the media says does matter. the importance of Iowa is largely a media creation after all.

but it's harder to fundraise when you are getting a fraction of the media attention of Clinton and Obama, and what you are getting is dominated by a haircut. (Notice there was no media scrutiny of how much Hillary spends on her stylist.)

Edwards raised more money from red states than the others. That's because people there understand he would be strong at the top of the ticket. He raised less from the states of NY, CA and IL, where big-dollar donors were listening to the media talking heads.

"All we have to do is do well in Iowa" was, as I remember things, the same strategy used by the Dean campaign. As I remember the Dean campaign's strategy was to focus everything on the first two primaries, and create an inevitability freight train based on those two primaries. As I remember it went quite badly. Somebody else wound up winning the first two primaries, and since the Dean campaign had no contingency plans it was basically over at that moment.

Now, funnily, the "all we have to do is do well in Iowa" strategy did, intentionally or unintentionally, wind up turning out great for the Kerry campaign. Kerry won Iowa and got exactly the freight train effect the Dean campaign was hoping to engineer. Looking at this, and noting that the same person who did strategy for the Dean campaign-- Joe Trippi-- is if I'm not mistaken now working for the Edwards campaign, I kind of have to wonder if the Edwards campaign is purposefully trying to repeat the strategy that didn't work for Dean. I'm kind of wondering if Trippi, or someone like him, walked away from 2004 concluding that Kerry's success proved Dean's strategy-- aim for Iowa and the rest will follow-- was the right one after all, and the only thing that went wrong was that Kerry wound up getting the Iowa nod instead of Edwards.

If this is what's going on, I think the Edwards campaign is potentially in for a rude surprise even if they do win Iowa. It seems to me that the trick that worked for Kerry in 2004 is not a trick that would always work for anyone, but a trick that was, at least for the degree of success Kerry swung it with, particular to the kind of candidate Kerry was and the kind of year that 2004 was. 2004 was a chaotic year, and Kerry was a "safe" candidate whereas Dean was a transformational one. Winning that Iowa primary made Kerry look stable, and gave voters, afraid of the chaos of the Democratic field, the war, the institutional change Dean represented, or all three, something solid to cling to.

---

But Edwards now, as Dean did then, is not trying to position himself as stable; he's trying to position himself as changing the face of what it means to be Democratic. His campaign is more about issues, and not the kind of issues we're used to hearing about from Democrats, than it is about John Edwards as a person. This is not the kind of sales pitch that appeals well to herd instinct. This is all the kind of thing you have to convert people to, not the kind of thing you can get people to jump on as a bandwagon just because somebody won a primary. Meanwhile, Edwards is facing a much more stable field than Dean and Kerry did. The field this time is about as large as it was in 2004, but it's less chaotic. Voters are going to be going in to the primaries having thought much more about the candidates than they did in 2004, and we will not see major candidates dropping out just before or just after that Iowa caucus. Even if Edwards pulls a Kerry and sweeps those first four January primaries, both Obama and Clinton will be doing everything they can to pick up as many states as possible on Feb 5. (If Edwards somehow fails to win Iowa, on the other hand, I'm not exactly sure where his campaign goes from there.) One way or another, I don't think Edwards is in a position to repeat Kerry's trick from 2004.

One more thing. Something I suspect we can learn from 2004 is that the "just focus on Iowa" strategy, even when it works, probably is not a good way of producing good Presidential candidates. In 2004, in particular, the Kerry model of a candidate using a single win in Iowa to sweep from the back of the pack up into an unstoppable frontrunner worked very well just so long as the primaries were going on, but once the primaries were past this didn't take very long to fall away to a kind of buyer's remorse. Kerry took the nomination because he was a safe candidate, because he was inevitable-- not necessarily because anybody really liked him. Once he had the nomination, a lot of people began to realize they didn't particularly like him. There were several reasons the Democrats failed to win in 2004, but one I think cannot be discounted is that the Republicans were excited and energized about their candidate whereas the Democrats simply weren't-- if they were energized, it was about the Republicans not winning, not about John Kerry. I don't think Edwards is going to let us down in this regard the way Kerry did, and surely if nominated he's not going to be disappointing any progressives, even pro-Obama progressives. But I think there is some potential that if Edwards somehow does pull a Kerry and sweeps out of nowhere to gain the nomination, there will be portions of the party who later in the election cycle find themselves asking, wait, who's this guy and why am I supposed to be supporting him...?

Coulter herself said on national tv she wished Edwards had died in a terrorist attack. You think they planned that?

I think the McCain is done headline had more to do with the $2million cash-on-hand and the firing of 50 employees more than the $11 million 2Q take.

I'm sure Edwards has much more than $2million in hand.

ReasonWarrior

You have made the point the original post was trying to make, that the media is demoting Edwards -- and then you use the media to demote him. LOL

Take a look at this on dailykos. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/2/1 51014/9227  I am going to borrow the first line by this poster by the name of ArkDem14:

"Edwards Crushes Fred Thompson!
by ArkDem14
Mon Jul 02, 2007 at 12:10:14 PM PDT
In a recent national poll I've gotten from Rasmussen Reports, a polling organization that normally leans about three points more to the GOP than the norm, Edwards beats Fred Thompson 51-38, Edwards beats Thompson with a majority voteshare even at this early point. Hillary beats Thompson by three points, 47-44, and Obama beats him 43-41."

This poster goes on to list the various polls and even with a republican bias pollster (Rasmussen) Edwards soundly beats them all.

And yet you are using the media to make up your mind that Hillary is beating Edwards. This is exactly what the originator of this topic is worried about. I am hoping we democrats are much smarter than this and that we won't let the media make up our minds. Go read the rest of that blog on dailykos. Then tell us what you think.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/2/1 51014/9227

The media is into the horse race and since polls mean very little at this point they focus on something tangible like fundraising.  Neither are a particular good predictor at this stage but you can't have your fundraising amounts drop from Q1 to Q2 and not expect it to impact your coverage.