. . . until the New Hampshire primary.
Two seemingly-unrelated stories about John Edwards caught my eye today.
In the first, Ben Evans notes that Edwards has raised more considerably money in the deep south in the first quarter of 2007 than any other candidate:
Counting only Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, Edwards raised $2,723,000. That's more than six times Clinton's take of $440,471 and nearly four times the $705,650 raised by Obama, according to numbers compiled by PoliticalMoneyLine.org, an online repository of campaign finance data.
Among Republicans, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney led the way with $1,127,484, compared with $603,723 for Arizona Sen. John McCain and $384,500 for Giuliani.
Although we are very early in the Silly Season, this kind of thing bodes well for Edwards' ability to either win some of the southern states that the GOP has had a lock on for the last ten years, or at least to force the Republicans to devote more resources to defending their majorities there.
Evans suggests that the reason Edwards is raising so much southern dough is because he is a son of the south himself. Sure, that helps--but there another possible (and more disturbing) reason may be found in this post by Matt Stoller:
To really buy into the idea that John Edwards can be a transformational candidate, you have to buy into the idea that he himself has transformed. And while he has certainly shown signs of rethinking his approach to politics, and in particular dropping the centrism that once characterized his persona, he's not there. On January 23, he gave what can only be characterized as a militant and aggressive speech on Iran. After seeing the fallout, he walked back his rhetoric, but I've been talking to friends in the national security community and they have brought up some worrisome points.
Since the south is generally more disposed toward hawkish foreign policy, it's reasonable to wonder whether Edwards' fundraising success there is predicated on his saber-rattling. This in turn leads to the question of whether Edwards is running two campaigns: one designed to appeal to anti-war activists and the other designed to appeal to the bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran crowd.
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