John Edwards Bets the Farm

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So far, Edwards' spell over Iowa remains strong. A new TIME poll of likely Iowa caucus goers, taken a week after Edwards' seven-day, 31-stop bus tour, gives him 29% of the vote, 5 points ahead of Clinton and 7 ahead of Obama. With the field limited to the top four candidates, his lead over Clinton widens to 32% vs. 24%. Iowa polls can be unreliable since only 5% to 10% of voters go to the caucuses; some surveys have Edwards in a dead heat with Clinton and Obama. But Edwards' real problem is that Iowa may be the only place where the feeling for him is so powerful.

Nationally, he has found it difficult to break through the media's focus on Clinton and Obama. Edwards trails Hillary by double-digit margins, and he may not have the money to compete against their carpet-bomb television spots. "It's still possible for Edwards as well as Obama," says former Senator Bill Bradley, who in 2000 ran an insurgent primary campaign against an entrenched front-runner named Al Gore. "Edwards is the best political athlete in the field—giving a speech, working a room, interacting one-on-one. He has the most detailed domestic policy, and his message [that the system is rigged] has resonance. His challenge is to say what he's going to do to fix it."

Another challenge is that much of the attention he's gotten recently has been the unflattering kind, stories that question his sincerity and assail his image as a fighter for the little guy by focusing on his pricey haircuts, huge house and hedge-fund job. These viral attacks, spreading from the Drudge Report and other blogs to newspapers everywhere, make a dumb argument. They assume that someone who's wealthy can't be a sincere advocate for poor and working people. By that logic, the healthy can't speak on behalf of the sick, or whites on behalf of people of color. But in politics, of course, dumb arguments can hurt you, which is why some Edwards aides urged him not to build such a big house. Their effort failed because the Edwardses—having battled cancer and lost a son, Wade, in an automobile accident 11 years ago, when he was 16—wanted to enjoy the luxuries they could afford. "We live our lives," says Elizabeth. "We're not pretending to be anything we're not. People have said, Don't do this or that. How would it look? But I honestly don't know how much time I've got. So we're going to live our lives."

Here's what would truly be hypocritical: if Edwards spoke out on behalf of the disadvantaged while pushing policies that benefit the rich. This he does not do. He favors boosting the capital-gains tax rate for families earning over $250,000 and closing the loophole that allows fund managers—like those at Fortress Investment Group, where he earned almost $500,000 in 2006—to get taxed at just 15%. "He wants to take money away from the people who paid him," says deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince. "That's not hypocrisy. That's sincerity."

But once a politician is branded as inauthentic, however unfairly, it's hard to shake the label. (Ask Gore.) And the Edwards campaign has not always done a good job of anticipating and shutting down potential lines of attack. In an attempt to paint Clinton as a creature of the corporate establishment, Edwards demanded that all candidates return their contributions from Rupert Murdoch and executives at News Corp., which owns Fox News. (Clinton has taken about $20,000 from them.) Murdoch's New York Post hit back with a story that Edwards had made $800,000 from a coffee-table-book deal with HarperCollins, a News Corp. subsidiary. The advance was actually $500,000, and Edwards had long since donated it to charity; the other $300,000 was expense money paid to vendors, writers and editors. But a more adroit messaging operation might have questioned—before the fact—whether Edwards was in a position to take a clean shot at Murdoch. Campaign manager David Bonior says that when they planned the shot, "I don't think the book deal ever came up."

More serious was the news that Edwards, who launched his candidacy in New Orleans and has denounced predatory lenders' foreclosing on people there, has some $16 million invested with Fortress—and Fortress has stakes in subprime lenders that are foreclosing on people in New Orleans. Edwards told me that when the story broke in May, he sought assurances from Fortress that it wasn't engaging in predatory practices and asked the company to intercede on behalf of a New Orleans mortgagor facing foreclosure. "They said, We'll do that, I said O.K., and then I forgot about it," he said. That was another mistake. By August, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that subprime companies in which Fortress has a stake had foreclosed on 34 homeowners in New Orleans. Edwards announced that he was moving his money out of the relevant funds and would dip into his own pocket to help the foreclosure victims. Of course, he would have avoided the embarrassment if he had cashed out when the issue first surfaced. Hillary and Bill Clinton, it's worth noting, liquidated their portfolio in April to avoid precisely this sort of thing.

"In the political world ... all the rough edges of life are sanded away," Elizabeth Edwards writes in a poignant new chapter of her book Saving Graces. "But the exercise of sanding away the edges has always been a waste of time." Wouldn't it be nice if that were true? Sadly, sanding away the edges remains a political necessity because opponents will grab at anything to pull a candidate off course. Even a diagnosis of cancer. The Edwardses know that some people were put off by their decision to continue the campaign despite her cancer's recurrence, that he is accused of being power-hungry and she of playing the victim card. Elizabeth explains the decision in the new chapter. After her biopsy results came back, she writes, she burst into tears "from panic at the thought that this cancer might take him out of the race. It might have seemed odd to someone who had not spent years in this fight, but this was his life and mine."

When I ask Elizabeth about this passage, she says, "He has to be President. We need someone whose motives are as honest as his. At a level nobody else sees, I know how deeply committed he is to helping people. Which is why I insisted that he stay in this race. I tell people, 'If you don't think he really believes the stuff he's saying, then don't vote for him. I'm not going to convince you.'"