Business Should Not Fear Edwards

THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE Edwards is running as a populist, but his positions belie the claim.

Image: Joshua Lott

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On a crisp autumn morning in Iowa, the local headlines are perfect for a candidate on the attack against the privileged and the powerful—and here is John Edwards seizing the moment. The Maytag washer-and-dryer plant in Newton closed its doors the day before, and the Des Moines Register is filled with sad pictures of laid-off workers leaving the factory for the last time. Fortuitously, Edwards is already scheduled to give a speech about corporate responsibility, and he uses the occasion to lash out at Maytag executives for their lavish buyouts after the company was sold to Whirlpool a year earlier. Naturally, cheers and applause burst forth from the couple hundred voters gathered in a Des Moines theater. "It takes strength to say no to the lobbyists and special interests, but I will never compromise my principles for the sake of politics," says Edwards sanctimoniously, implying that unmentioned others do compromise.

Edwards is the most populist of the major presidential candidates, and there's an understandable tendency on the part of business executives to recoil from him. (View slideshow of former populist candidates.) After all, he's a trial lawyer who built a 28,000-square-foot mansion and a multimillion-dollar fortune by suing companies and winning. It's no wonder campaign contribution records show that far fewer Democratic-minded executives are backing Edwards than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. (Voters seem wary too. Edwards is competitive in Iowa but far behind nationally.) Among the few is Edwards' leading economic adviser, Leo Hindery Jr., a managing partner at the private equity firm InterMedia Partners. Hindery acknowledges that fellow masters of the universe "think I'm completely nuts."

But should business really fear a President Edwards? I don't think so. His public record and private comments suggest someone who's less than a ferocious populist and more like the moderate Southern Democrat he was known as before this presidential bid. I see that side of him almost immediately after the Maytag speech, when I hop in his minivan to travel with him to the next event, a town meeting in Boone, about an hour away. I ask him whether he would have been able to save the Maytag plant if he had been elected president in 2004, when he first ran for the nomination.

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