The steroid-enhanced political campaign that has already gone on forever and will run another year before we vote has taken on an surreal certainty in the media — at least on the Democratic side.  All the polls show Senator Clinton far enough ahead that the media can’t imagine how anyone else could get in the game.  The meta-narrative on Senator Obama is that he doesn’t have the experience, and no one else is near enough to count. 

And yet, Edwards on the hustings has a kind of purity that seems to be eluding Senators Clinton and Obama.  His campaign is unabashedly about the little person, against the lobbyists and the powers that be.  He favors health care for all, jobs for Americans, and, well, little people everywhere. 

His speech at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner showed all his strengths.  After a surprisingly inept introduction from Nancy Pelosi, Edwards launched into his progressive themes of health care, jobs, and making America better for our children.  He’s running on behalf of the downtrodden, the sick, the needy, the people without health care, his buddies in the mill town where he grew up, the forgotten, and so on.  He told a pitch-perfect story about a man with a cleft palate who couldn’t get the operation that would allow him to speak because he had no health care.  Finally, someone took pity on him, and gave him the operation for free — when the gentleman was 50 years old. 

"America is better than that," says Edwards, and the crowd roars in agreement. 

As fed up as Americans are with the Bush administration, that rather simple progressive message may yet stick.  Don’t count Edwards out yet.  If he can get past the suspicion that he’s too cute for politics, and too opportunistic to be real, his messages may be the ones that carry the day.