First Stop: Des Moines

We begin in Iowa. For the next six days, I’ll be crisscrossing the Hawkeye state, where the uniquely influential Jan. 3 caucuses loom like a silo over a cornfield. For most of my time here, I’ll be traveling with the Edwards campaign, but I’ll also try to chat up some ordinary Iowa voters. That is, if there are any Iowans left who haven’t already been picked clean by the hordes of pollsters and journalists who descend here quadrennially.

Edwards has bet it all on Iowa; few people believe he can win the nomination if he doesn’t have a strong showing here. So far, he appears competitive with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—although most polls put him in third place, just slightly behind the two frontrunners.

One big question: which of Edwards’s two conflicting styles will come through in these waning weeks? There’s the blithe, above-the-fray Edwards, familiar to many North Carolinians from his time as a sunny U.S. senator. It’s the John Edwards who is reluctant to go negative, and it worked for him in Iowa in 2004, when he came in a surprise second place by staying out of spats between Dick Gephart and Howard Dean. But during the ’08 campaign, we’ve seen an increasingly angry Edwards, who lashed out at Hillary Clinton in at least one debate and consistently rails against powerful Washington interests.

Over at the excellent Talking About Politics blog, Gary Pearce, a Democratic consultant in North Carolina, sees signs of a shift for Edwards—away from the angry approach that has defined his current campaign, and back toward the optimism that is perhaps more natural for him. I’ll be closely watching Edwards’s style as I join his campaign midway through an eight-day tour of Iowa.