How far a positive aura can carry Edwards

In public appearances, he is smoothly upbeat, usually, proclaiming America's need to be "lifted up" by a leader who can bring people together. It is a message of hope tinged with anger at the widening gap in America between the haves and have-nots, punctuated by his own up-by-the-bootstraps biography.

For now, that pitch has served John Edwards well, and earned the North Carolina senator close scrutiny by New Hampshire Democrats after his surging second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. But campaign analysts warn that Senator Edwards has to be careful not to oversell his new image as Mr. Positive. Campaigns are by definition a lively public dialogue of point and counterpoint, and the higher a candidate rises in the polls, the more he will be challenged - and forced to fight back.

"People are misreading this Edwards phenomenon," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Point No. 1: While Edwards did not attack in advertising and speeches, he did attack in debates - coming back hard at Howard Dean over his Confederate flag comment and at Dick Gephardt over charges on the trade issue.

Point No. 2: Edwards has been able to lie back and avoid attacking the front- runners, because others were doing the dirty work for him. Some analysts say that Governor Dean and Representative Gephardt seriously damaged their candidacies in Iowa by going so hard after each other, allowing John Kerry and Edwards to overtake them.

As a highly successful trial lawyer before his election to the US Senate five years ago, Edwards is a shrewd tactician. For him, sunny optimism will never be mistaken for empty-headedness. But, analysts say, he also needs to understand that for his candidacy to keep thriving, he's going to have to be negative at times about his opponents without appearing overly so. Attacks over policy positions and voting records are fair game - and in fact, voters rely on that information. Personal attacks, or anything seen as unfair, such as the ad that ran briefly last month linking Dean and Osama bin Laden, are out of bounds.

"What Edwards has picked up on is the deep sense of retreat among Americans from politics and public life," says Richard Harwood, who runs an institute on civic life. "He's got a dilemma on his hands, if he wants to be true to his word. Playing with hope is like playing with fire. If you do not fulfill your promise, you will further deepen people's sense of cynicism."

Generally, negative messages get greater play in the media than positive ones, and that may explain why it took Edwards longer to start attracting attention.

"It is the negativity bias," says Spencer Tinkham, professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Georgia. "Negative information inherently has a greater impact; it is remembered longer. Positive messages take a lot of repetition and multiple exposures to sink in."

In New Hampshire, where the candidates are in full sprint to next Tuesday's Democratic primary, voters expect a level of combativeness in the campaign.

"To an extent, we still have that Yankee mentality of being independent and being feisty," says Katherine Mitchell of Hopkinton, N.H., attending a Kerry event in Concord, N.H. "Nobody wants a lot of mudslinging, but it's important to clarify distinctions between candidates."

Page: 1 | 2