Insight on Iowa

The NY Times on the candidate carrying the mantle of reform of absolute corporate power:

Now, Mr. Edwards, a former trial lawyer, is offering yet another closing argument to his jury of voters here. And there is evidence — from the size of his crowds to the decision by an opponent, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, to challenge him more directly in the past few days — that it may be working.

In the process, though, Mr. Edwards is raising questions about his political identity that have followed him throughout this campaign ....

[H]e is issuing a defiant pledge to fight big business, to voters in a state that has been buffeted by national and global economic forces and is still reeling from the closing of Maytag plant in Newton in October. He is accompanied on some of his stops by one of the 3,900 Iowans who used to work there, and points to the closing as evidence of the damage that trade agreements have done to the middle class.

The Obama Campaign's attacks on Edwards have mainly to do with questions over whether he appeals enough to the big money contributors to compete with the locked-in-to-donor Democrats and Republicans.

I doubt that we will see any other candidate this committed to common middle and working class interests if the field narrows without Edwards. Big money has a way of beholding. And, excuse my jadedness, but the survivors are going to owe some rich people some suck-up.