The Best Candidates Never Seem To Win

Honesty usually doesn't work too well in nationwide politics. Honesty leaves a raw imprint on people. They react strongly, either in support, or against. Edwards walked that line, and lost. A class warrior with a $400 haircut and a $6 million home feels like a misfit. Certainly, Edwards earned his money, and his personal life long mission is honorable and will continue. I still believe he would have made the best President in the running. But it wasn't to be. TIME begins the process of understanding why.

"John Edwards didn't really move to the left as much as he began to use the language of class war," said Michael Munger, a political science professor at Duke University. "And that was a tactic designed to appeal to the angry left in Iowa, and the to laid-off factory workers of South Carolina."


The strategy at first seemed shrewd: build on Edwards' surprisingly good showing in Iowa in 2004 and make his native South Carolina his firewall while garnering union support. It was designed to take on the establishment candidate that everyone knew was going to run: former First Lady Hillary Clinton.


What no one, not Clinton or Edwards, was prepared for was the insurgency candidacy of Senator Barack Obama. Suddenly Edwards was running against a version of himself in 2004: the young, fresh, optimistic face, the Washington outsider with a thin resume but lots of charm, ruffling some feathers as he jumped the line. Except this version was an African American celebrity candidate with a cult-like following. Big and small donors flocked to Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, as did the endorsements, and suddenly Edwards seemed like a third wheel.


[..]Edwards leaves the race having made a big impact on the two remaining candidates. His populist rhetoric forced his rivals to compete for union support, and he was the first out of the gate with detailed plans for universal healthcare and education, putting pressure on the field to match him. The former trial lawyer arguably won a majority of the debates, time and again challenging his opponents to refuse money from lobbyists and speed up their plans for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq.