The Edwards Campaign: What Went Wrong?

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted February 1, 2008.

John Edwards must be so frustrated. He and his strategists read the polls carefully, then crafted their campaign to reflect what most Americans really believe. The cost of living keeps going up, while the real buying power of our incomes scarcely rises at all. We worry about how we'll pay for health care, college tuition, and retirement costs. The economic future is insecure for all of us -- except for the wealthy corporate elite, who have rigged the system and bought the government so they can keep us down while they wallow in their skyrocketing wealth.

That is indeed what most Americans tell the pollsters. So the voters should have flocked to a populist champion, a scrappy man of the people who vowed to fight the corporate interests, to stand for the little guy (FDR's "forgotten man") and never quit until the fat cats were all defeated.

But something went wrong. Or, more precisely, some things went wrong. No campaign ever fails for just one reason. Some say the frightened corporate media torpedoed Edwards. Some say Edwards, a sleek rich cat himself, was the wrong messenger. He just wasn't believable. His populist message seemed invented out of thin air to save a failing election bid. All true -- but perhaps not crucial. In the past, wealthy politicians have invented populist messages and done quite well, despite media opposition.

I suspect the critical failing in the Edwards campaign was the way they framed their message. In their frame, America was divided into a small elite of winners and a vast populace of losers. Now it was time for the losers to fight back and even the score.

That frame was a huge gamble. It depended on voters seeing themselves not just as ordinary little guys but as losers: insignificant forgotten people, pushed to the margins of society, neglected by the people who really matter.

That's too bitter a pill for most Americans to swallow. Although most do worry about the future and blame the rich, a majority also tell the pollsters that right now they are not doing too badly financially. They have enough to sustain the time-honored American faith that we are all -- at least most of us -- middle class. More importantly, they cling to another time-honored faith: Through their hard work, they will raise children who will do even better. To label themselves losers would be to label their children losers, and that's just going too far.

Most Americans did not want to believe Edwards was speaking about them. So what they heard was a message about reaching out to help somebody else: the real losers, the poor. It would be a grand and glorious nation if candidates could win elections by saying, "Let's all us middle class folks reach down to pull the poor out of poverty." Maybe some day we'll reach that point. But we are nowhere near there yet, as John Edwards found out the hard way.

What could the Edwards campaign have done differently?

They could have studied the "Community Values Communication Toolkit," put out recently by the Campaign for Community Values (CCV) at the Center for Community Change. The CCV assembled a team to study the same question the Edwards campaign had to answer: How can we frame messages that will swing vast numbers of voters to the progressive side? But they came up with a very different answer.

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