Both The Wall Street Journal and The Economist have just published articles crediting Edwards with setting the policy agenda in the Democratic campaign. Which is partially true. But so much as these tribunes of free market economics are searching for some causal factor in the party's shift towards populism, something they can explain away as a one-time aberration, the reason isn't just Edwards -- it's the facts on the ground.
Edwards' ideas have traction -- and he's advocating them -- because we've had thirty years of median wage stagnation, and inequality is skyrocketing, and health premiums have jumped 80-some percent since 2000, and the subprime lending market just collapsed, and homes are being repossessed, and so on, and so on. For many in America, the economy really isn't very good, and so they're interested in populist solutions, which is spurring one of the mainstream Democratic contenders to become more interested in populist solutions, which is forcing the more establishment candidates to also become more interested in populist solutions.
Edwards is certainly serving a vital role in the transmissions process between base and Obama, as he's credible enough that Obama and Hillary can't cede much ideological ground to him. But to suggest this shift is entirely about the Edwards campaign, rather than about the fact that the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution actually lost ground last year, is to miss the forest for a single tree. The reason his ideas are setting the agenda is that the other candidates think they have broad public resonance. Otherwise, they'd ignore him, and Clinton could just go with whatever mealy incrementalism Mark Penn had dreamt up this month.
