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Obama used to annoy me when he did things like attack trial lawyers. Trial lawyers defend people against large ruthless corporations, and they are often the only recourse for the defenseless. It's not an exaggeration to say that, with weakened labor rights, trial lawyers are a key foundational element of a just civil system, and becoming a trial lawyer is actually a much less lucrative and safe career path than becoming a generic corporate lawyer. Now I just find myself believing Obama; he genuinely thinks that being a trial lawyer is a greedy career choice, just like he endorses the war on terror, the central premise of the Bush-Cheney governance model. It's his right to believe that, I just hope that we're all clear-eyed that this guy is pretty conservative and does not share our values.
I bring this up because I was randomly listening to Edwards on NPR with my Mom, and I was like, 'his speech is good'. And it was. And I realized that I had not heard him speaking very much, and now I am because there's just more reporting on him. I don't have data on this, but it's pretty hard to argue that a recent Newsweek cover isn't an improvement over his former lack of mention in the press.
What's interesting is that this creates a special dynamic of making Edwards sound fresh, even though he's been running longer than anyone. Because his campaign has been so undercovered, with Edwards receiving slightly more media than his wife and far less than his competitors, his message of economic populism is new to most voters.
With right track/wrong track numbers for the country at 22-63, new-sounding candidates tend to have a short positive burst of positive upswing. It happened with Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, and Barack Obama on a national level. And then it seems to be about consolidating your gains, which Thompson could not do, but Obama did.
Anyway, I could be wrong and I could be reading data into an argument I want to believe. I was just struck by how new his speech sounded when I heard it on the radio, though it's quite possible that sitting on the floor in New York listening to NPR does automatically put me in touch with Iowa. But since Edwards is surging right now in Iowa, why not pretend like the two trends are related?
UPDATE: Jed Report at Dailykos fleshes this out with data. Here's a lovely chart.
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