I asked some of the folks at Iowa Independent last night how John Edwards' decision to take public financing was playing out there, outside the Beltway echo chamber. Their answer: it's not. It's barely been noted in the local press and is no issue of any kind in the state as far as they can tell. Sometimes it feels like Edwards, more even than the other candidates, is running two different campaigns, one that's about things people in the blogosphere and media talk about, and one in Iowa, where the conversation is quite different. It's sometimes useful to take a step back and recall that approximately 80 percent of what the chattering class is chattering about on any given day is going to have zero impact on what people do on the ground in Iowa in January.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
