The Wrath of John

There are some things about John Edwards that haven't changed in the four years since he last ran for president. The man who was once featured in People's "Sexiest Man Alive" issue still has that glossy, immaculate head of hair. His Tom Cruise megasmile is still disarming. And if the reaction from a crowd packed into a town hall in Iowa last week is any indication, Edwards's silky Southern drawl can still find its target. "Oh," one elderly woman whispered after the former senator shook her hand. "He is a handsome boy."

Edwards is even sounding the same "two Americas" theme he did last time around—that the rich get richer while the poor and middle class get the shaft. But heading into the primaries—and trailing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in national polls and the money chase—there is an edge, and urgency, to Edwards that wasn't there in 2004. The man who once fashioned himself as a sunny populist who refused to disparage fellow Democrats—if it's attack politics you're looking for, he said in 2004, "I'm not your guy"—now excoriates Clinton at every opportunity.

In Dubuque last week, Edwards stood before a United Auto Workers convention and trashed Clinton as an insider beholden to big-dollar contributors. "The person who has raised the most money from Washington lobbyists," he said, "is not a Republican. It's a Democrat. The person who has raised the most money from the drug industry, from the health-insurance industry … the defense industry … is Senator Clinton." His voice rising, he said it is a "lie" that any Democrat will be a better leader than any Republican. "It does not work to replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats!" At the Las Vegas debate last Thursday, Edwards went after Clinton the moment he got the mike. "I am surprised at just how angry John has become," Sen. Chris Dodd said in a statement last week. "This is not the same John Edwards I once knew."

It isn't difficult to see why Edwards might choose to ditch light for heat. At the start of the campaign, he was leading in all-important Iowa, where he took a surprise second place in 2004. But over the summer, Clinton and Obama caught up and most polls now have the three essentially tied, with Edwards in close second or third place. To stand out, he is returning to the skills that made him rich and celebrated. Edwards made a fortune wooing juries with emotional courtroom performances that depicted his clients as victims of money-grubbing corporations. He's now doing the same thing in the campaign, turning the country into a courtroom and putting the front runners on trial. "Ironically, the guy we are seeing today is probably the real John Edwards, because you're not sweet and nice and positive when you're one of the most successful trial lawyers in the country," says Steffen Schmidt, a Des Moines radio host and political scientist at Iowa State University.

But asking if Edwards is, in fact, newly angry turns out to be the quickest way to make his staff angry. "This is who he has always been," says deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. "He's always been fighting against special interests and standing up for the little guy." At the same time, Prince says the tone of this campaign is different, something he attributes to the candidate's experiences running in 2004 and to his wife Elizabeth's battle with cancer. "He's more passionate, more intense," he says, "but he's not different."

Even so, Edwards is mindful of a backlash against his attacks. NEWSWEEK has learned that his campaign quietly conducted internal polls to see how his new tone is playing. (Aides say their numbers show it hasn't hurt him.) Bob Shrum, who managed the John Kerry–Edwards campaign in 2004, says Edwards's efforts could backfire. Right now, Obama and Edwards are splitting the anti-Clinton vote. But, Shrum says, if Edwards "goes heavily on the attack he may end up hurting Hillary, hurting himself and helping Obama."