Last chance for Edwards.

Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democratic fundraising dynamo, is scrambling to catch up with his rivals for the Presidential nomination after spending the first few months of his campaign focused entirely on accumulating the most cash. With polls showing him near the back of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire, Edwards is suddenly meeting with as many voters as possible.

Following the Real Solutions Express--a red, white, and blue campaign bus with "John Edwards, President" emblazoned on the side--I watched as Edwards worked small crowds of mostly elderly, white voters at a Perkins in Cedar Rapids, a restaurant in Independence, and a modest living-room social in Oelwein, Iowa.

The early word on Edwards was that he's the most electable candidate. Richard Machacek, a member of the Iowa Democrats' central committee, introducing Edwards at the Two Brothers Restaurant in Independence, echoed that assessment: "I think this guy can win. He's got the personality, the charisma, the demographics from the South."

Machacek, who, like Edwards, was wearing a black short-sleeved shirt and khakis, joked, "We're dressed alike, but he's the good-looking one. He's worth $40 million, and I'm a farmer." Looking good and having the most money are two things you often hear about Edwards. Ever since he made the short list of Al Gore's potential running mates, his name has come up a lot as a Democratic rising star. His support for the Iraq War also endeared him to Washington pundits. But in an election season that won't stick to the official script, the money candidate is not meeting expectations.

Howard Dean, the outside-the-beltway, anti-war candidate, is "sucking all the air out of the room," as one Edwards staffer put it rather bitterly during the Iowa tour. Newsweek and Time have run cover stories on the Dean phenomenon. Attracting hordes of supporters and loads of small contributions through a brilliant online organizing effort, Dean has managed to raise lots of money and get out and meet the voters. This has prompted the rightward Democratic Leadership Council to launch broadsides against the former governor of Vermont, warning darkly that failing to support the Bush Administration's tax cuts and the war in Iraq will doom the Democrats' chances to retake the White House. But DLC efforts to squash the enthusiasm of its party's base are not likely to make the difference in this election. And as the conflict drags on in Iraq with more people dying and the odds of a clear resolution fading, Americans may get increasingly fed up.

Edwards can't tap into the anti-war sentiment that enlivens the Dean campaign. In Iowa, he barely mentioned Iraq--a rather glaring omission. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he said in answer to one question that he supported the war because he was worried about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons--the very issue that other committee members are most outraged about. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, for example, was attacking the Administration's weak and distorted intelligence on Iraq's nuclear capacity long before these lies made headlines.

Still, Edwards has his appeal. Though he is no great liberal (but then, neither, really, is Dean), he takes some good shots at Bush's "radical plan to shift the tax burden from wealth to work" by eliminating the inheritance tax and the tax on dividends. He quotes Warren Buffett, saying, "Something is wrong in America when I'm paying a lower tax rate than my secretary." He gets a laugh when he rolls his eyes at Bush's "jobless recovery." And he tells an affecting story about a woman in her fifties who lost her job when the local textile mill in North Carolina closed down and moved to Mexico.

Edwards is too new to the Senate to have cast a vote on NAFTA. But he says he campaigned against it and supports fair trade.

Overall, his policy positions are centrist and fairly vague. He speaks forcefully about health care in America being "a birthright." But his plan calls only for universal coverage of children, through a system of tax credits to their families.

"Everything I propose is completely achievable. There is no pie in the sky. No outrageous proposals," he says.

At the Perkins in Cedar Rapids, Edwards chatted with Mary Schlichte, the president of local 199 SEIU and a nurse at the University of Iowa hospital. She has been meeting all the candidates in Iowa, wearing her "I'm a Health Care Voter" T-shirt. She and State Representative Ro Foege, a school social worker, are proponents of Iowa's health care program for kids, and were glad that Edwards wants to offer health care coverage to all children. "I like the idea of the buy-in to the Medicare program," Schlichte said. But most of all, "We need to get Bush out," she said. "I have a grandson in boot camp--this is about his health," she added. "That guy couldn't lead him out of a paper bag."

On farm policy, a huge issue in Iowa, Edwards failed to back the Wellstone-Johnson Amendment, supported by Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, among others, to ban packer ownership of livestock--a practice that allows giant corporate food companies like Cargill and Tyson to dominate the market and push out independent producers. Recently, Edwards supported legislation that would cut air and water pollution from giant livestock operations--a shift from his generally factory-farm-friendly voting record.

As a one-term Senator and former trial lawyer, he is, perhaps, the least experienced politician in the field. This could be a liability, but it is Also--to me, anyway--the greatest source of his appeal.

As a lawyer, Edwards took on big drug companies on behalf of injured clients and won. He is the trial lawyers' favorite candidate, and says he won't take industry money. With Senator John McCain of Arizona, he co-sponsored "truth in advertising" legislation targeting direct-to-consumer ads for drugs, and he talks ruefully about being defeated by the industry lobbyists who have so much influence on health care issues. This puts him on the opposite side from pro-corporate politicians like George Bush and Joe Lieberman.

Talking about his background in the living room of Peg Sherret's split-level home across from a corn field in Oelwein, he sounded passionate and sincere. "I spent most of my adult life standing in courtrooms fighting against big companies," he said in answer to a question about whether he has the guts to beat Bush. "The big drug companies and their teams of lawyers were all sitting on one side of the courtroom. On the other side was just me, representing people like you, and sometimes just kids. I was all they had."

He doesn't mince words about big corporations, borrowing Ralph Nader's line that while CEO pay has increased 3,000 percent over the last few decades, ordinary workers have seen their pay go up by only 10 percent.

"There's nothing easy or soft or nice about them," Edwards said of the corporations he sued. "They'll do whatever it takes to win. The most important thing is to believe in your heart and soul that what you are doing is right. For these kids, it was a lifetime issue. I gave them absolutely everything I had. The people we were fighting against were much better armed. But we won, again and again."

Edwards also emphasizes his modest Background--being the first person in his family to go to college, the son of a millworker and a post office employee. He could be the next "Man from Hope." You can already see the biographical film.

Of Bush, Edwards says, "His values are not our values. What he values, honors, and respects is one thing: wealth. He wants to make sure that those who have it keep it. This is the world he comes from, where wealth is mostly inherited, not earned. My grandmother was a sharecropper in North Carolina. My father had a high school education and worked in a mill all his life.... I believe in an America where the family you are born into doesn't control your destiny."

He bashes Bush for cutting Pell grants and making college unattainable for people like him. Edwards's "College for Everyone" program would give one year of free tuition to public universities and community colleges in exchange for ten hours a week of community service, adding that he worked his way through college, in part by unloading tractor-trailers.

"You unload a tractor-trailer in Iowa or North Carolina in the middle of the summer, you'll get up and study the next morning," he said to an appreciative audience of elderly farmers.

The grim truth is that, except in the extremely unlikely event that Ralph Nader's favorite candidate, Dennis Kucinich, gets the nomination, the general election will be a hard battle to elect a Democrat whose centrist politics and governing style are essentially the same as Bill Clinton's. Edwards, Dean, or Kerry ... take your pick.

"There are a lot of similarities," Edwards admitted when asked what distinguishes him. "In the end, what matters most is, does it come from the gut? Do you believe in it? ... Bush is pretending to be something he's not. He's not like regular people. The way you see if someone is a counterfeit or a phony is you put the real thing beside them. I want to be on a stage with George Bush and let people decide."

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.