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.

"Probably not," he answers, noting that the economics of moving those jobs overseas would have thwarted his efforts. "By that time, the company was too far gone," he continues. "We need to be honest with people that a lot of these jobs that have been lost are not coming back." I thought this was a sensible answer and one devoid of the demagogic tone that often creeps into his public remarks. My favorite Edwards conspiratorial rant came after the $400 haircut imbroglio in early 2007, when he told an Iowa audience, "They want to shut me up.... They will never silence me. Never. If we don't stand up to these people ... they're going to continue to control this country and the media.... They hate listening to people like me." (As a member of the media conspiracy, I swear we didn't try to silence you. Kucinich and Tancredo maybe. But not you.)

In other words, Edwards may wax like William Jennings Bryan when he's onstage, but behind the scenes he sounds like an anodyne Democrat in the mold of Harry Reid. Maybe Edwards is just pandering to a reporter from a business magazine, but I don't think so. If you look at the positions he's taken, they're really not that different from those of the other Democratic candidates, even though his rhetoric is decidedly more combative.

At the A.F.L.-C.I.O. debate last August, he ripped Hillary Clinton as the candidate of big corporations. (I should note that my spouse works for Clinton.) But if you look at the Clinton and Edwards health plans, the two candidates' largest single initiatives, they're so much alike that Edwards has accused Clinton of copying his. Both favor an individual mandate that requires everyone to buy health insurance, the same sort of plan that friend-of-business Mitt Romney came up with in Massachusetts, although with more stringent regulation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Edwards' plan is expensive—about $100 billion a year to help employers and individuals pay for coverage—but it's not some wholesale assault on private health insurance, let alone the single-payer idea that many liberals favor. Some businesses may even find that they would shoulder less of the health-care burden under it.

Likewise, if you consider taxes, all of the aspiring Democratic nominees want to roll back the Bush income tax cuts for those making more than $200,000 annually. Edwards would raise the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent for wealthier Americans, whereas Clinton's and Obama's plans would increase it to 20 percent. But that's not an earth-shattering difference, and it's unlikely to be passed by Congress anyway. Rich people ought to be comforted to know that, for all his denunciation of special interests, John Edwards famously worked for a hedge fund, Fortress Investment Group, and he has received more money in campaign donations from Fortress employees than from any other business's staff. Would they give so much if he were Huey Long?

When it comes to trade, Edwards is only marginally more protectionist than Clinton or Obama. He wasn't in the Senate in 1993 when the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, but he opposed it at the time, and he's denounced several subsequent agreements. His positions, though, aren't that much different from those of Clinton or Obama, both of whom have said Nafta needs to be amended. It's worth remembering that while he was in the Senate, Edwards voted to normalize trade relations with China, a sign that he's not a knee-jerk protectionist. Unlike, say, Kucinich, Edwards doesn't talk about quitting the World Trade Organization.

Sure, donations from trial lawyers represent the backbone of Edwards' campaign fund—his finance chair is a former head of the leading association of U.S. trial lawyers—but that's not surprising given who he is and where he came from. It's tribal. In the end, the plaintiffs bar will support any Democrat over the Republicans, who, after all, want to impose caps on damages. And Edwards does have some C.E.O. backing, albeit in left-leaning Seattle. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz has donated to his campaign. Costco's Jim Sinegal is supporting him.

Although both politicians would resent being characterized this way, Edwards reminds me of Mitt Romney. It's not just their Dorian Gray, age-defying good looks or their scant experience in government—one Senate term for Edwards, one gubernatorial term for Romney. Beyond their unbearable lightness, they both have a certain willingness to, shall we say, pander. Edwards is the best at throwing red meat to a labor crowd, and Romney portrays himself as a conservative darling. Each is playing to his party's base. Romney says he's the true conservative, and Edwards vows to take on the powerful. Both are stretching it.

For all his oratorical pyrotechnics, Edwards is, I believe, a man of moderate temperament. When I asked him this past spring what opinion Americans should have about Wal-Mart, it would have been easy for him to whack the left's favorite corporate piñata (after Halliburton, that is) as an antiunion, China-beholden behemoth. I thought his answer was about right: "I think they're a mixed bag. They provide goods at a low cost for a lot of middle-incomes and provide an important service in that regard. I'm sometimes troubled by the way that they treat their employees. I personally would not be demonizing them. I'd just like to persuade them to do the right thing and alter their behavior."

Some firebrand.