John Edwards does not have the right message for a winning presidential campaign, according to National Review White House correspondent Byron York.
York assessed the Edwards campaign this afternoon during his Headliner appearance in Raleigh for the John Locke Foundation. York cited pros and cons of all the leading Republican and Democratic contenders, saving North Carolina’s most familiar candidate for his final comments.
York says Edwards gets 12 percent of the support from Democrats in the latest Washington Post poll.
He’s doing well in Iowa. He’s campaigning hard there. He’s doing well in Nevada. He won South Carolina in 2004.
The thing that seems interesting about him is he’s morphing from the “Two Americas” candidate in 2004 to the anti-war candidate of today. And I’ve never seen a candidate go around, and his entire appeal seems to be: “I made a mistake. I made a mistake. I made a mistake.”
He knows that Democratic voters want someone who will repudiate their vote in favor of the war in Iraq, and so he’s running around at every opportunity saying, “I made a mistake. I was wrong. Please vote for me.” I don’t know that is going to work.
The other problem for Edwards is I think he’s the candidate who is most addicted to pledging sweeping change. “There’s going to be sweeping change. We need to do this to eliminate poverty. We need to get out immediately in Iraq.” And I think that most research shows that voters will say they want sweeping change, but they don’t vote for sweeping change.
And I think Edwards has stuck himself as the candidate representing sweeping change in a country that really, really doesn’t want it. He misreads the polls, and he misreads the political journalists who are misreading the polls saying that there is some sort of momentum for sweeping change when there in fact is not.
So I don’t look for him to actually to score big on that front.
