"I cannot sleep," said Grigor Sarkisyan. "I cannot sleep. I don't know when I will be able to sleep again."
It's been less than three weeks since Natalie Sarkisyan, Grigor's daughter, died from complications arising from insurance companies. Nataline Sarkisyan had leukemia, and needed a liver transplant. Her doctors said she needed the transplant. Her nurses said she needed the transplant. CIGNA HealthCare, the Sarkisyan's insurance carrier, said she did not. After Natalie's family, friends, and the California Nurses Association spent weeks picketing in front of their corporate headquarters, CIGNA reversed their decision. Natalie died before her parents were informed of their "victory."
Natalie's parents and her brother were in Manchester, New Hampshire today. Along with James Lowe, a 51-year-old man who spent the first 50 years of his life silenced by a correctable cleft palate, and Sandy Lakey, whose daughter was disemboweled by a faulty pool drain system, they provided emotional ballast to a John Edwards event that felt less like a campaign rally than a midmorning talk show.
To be sure, Barack Obama won Oprah Winfrey's endorsement. But it's John Edwards whose campaign most resembles her famed Oprah Winfrey Show. Edwards has always been comfortable with emotion, with personal drama and narrative. He thanks people for their courage and bravery, comments on their goodness and resilience, bolsters them with encouraging affirmations and applause from the crowd. Where other campaigns routinely feature outside politicians and famed surrogates, Edwards is more likely to tour with the sort of guests you'd see on daytime talk: Ordinary people who have undergone extraordinary hardship. Where the other candidates closed their Iowa campaigns with sincere speeches laying out the arguments for their candidacies, Edwards ran a commercial where a burly Iowan spoke emotionally of the moment when Edwards leaned down, stared his seven-year-old son in the eyes, and promised to fight for his father's job.
This irritates the Press Corps. It's schmaltzy and raw. As Mark Halperin put it in his summary of Edwards' most recent debate performance, "His habit of recounting moving stories about anonymous (and, sorry, random) people sometimes makes him sound like a mayoral candidate in a small Southern hamlet." It's a tribute to Halperin's deep obsession with politics that the nearest example at hand was a municipal politician, but the better comparison is a daytime talk show host. Edwards is comfortable with a level of emotive personalization that many simply cannot abide. It's the difference between those who watch The Daily Show and those who watch Dr. Phil. Edwards' campaign is increasingly aimed at the latter, and that's even truer in his town halls and campaign events than in his debate performances and ads.
The contrast with Obama couldn't be starker. Obama's intelligence is cool and detached; his wit winning and ironic. For a time, the mammoth crowds that greeted him, and the explicitly historic nature of his campaign were eliciting comparisons to Robert F. Kennedy. Increasingly, though, it's the wry, reserved, JFK whose name is being invoked by admiring reporters.
This is the contrast that Edwards seems to want. His strategy now has two components. The first is to overwhelm Hillary Clinton's faltering campaign to come in second in New Hampshire, effectively defining the race as a contest between him and Barack Obama. That's what motivated Edwards' debate performance last night, in which he frequently associated himself with Obama, defending the two of them as change candidates and attacking Clinton as a remnant of the status quo. Responding to an attack she launched on Obama over health care mandates – an attack where he agrees with her on the substance, incidentally -- Edwards said, "Any time you speak out powerfully for change, the forces of status quo attack. That's exactly what happens."
He took the argument a step further at a town hall in Manchester Sunday, arguing that the American people had decisively voted for change in Iowa, and the campaign was now between the two change candidates: John Edwards, and Barack Obama.
Even if this strategy works, Edwards still needs to overcome Obama's formidable momentum and political talents. Which brings up his second argument. "Do you want somebody who has the right ideas and philosophy, or somebody with the right ideas and philosophy and fight?" He asked the audience in Manchester. After the testimonials from Sarkisyan and Lowe and Lakey, Elizabeth Edwards stood up to drive the point home. "You heard John say he was in this all the way to the convention," she told the crowd. "Now you know why."
And the "why" is this: "For me," Edwards keeps saying, "this is personal." That, as of now, is the Edwards Difference. The implication is that Obama may have his heart in the right place, may be a towering intelligence and an exquisite speaker, but it's not personal to him. He doesn't feel the struggle in his gut, he gets it in his head. Edwards, by contrast, gets it in his gut, and that means you can trust him. "If it's a personal call that matters because when the tough fight comes, you won't walk away, you won't back down, you will fight through" he said. "If it's politically motivated or academic or philosophical, when the tough fight comes, you will make a deal, you will cover yourself."
If Edwards can knock Clinton out in New Hampshire, this will be the frame he thrusts on the rest of the campaign. Head versus heart. Oprah's candidate versus the Oprah candidate. And he thinks Americans will tune in. "When somebody is willing to fight for the middle class in a real and personal way," he says, "it cuts through all the money, it cuts through all the glamour." Or so he hopes.
Eds Note: This article has been corrected, Grigor Sarkisyan's daughter is Nataline, not Natalie.
