Edwards Campaigns Through Freezing Iowa Night [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT/Reuters: Edwards Campaigns Through Freezing Iowa Night
By REUTERS
Published: January 2, 2008

CRESTON, Iowa (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards campaigned through a bitterly cold night into Wednesday to dramatize the urgency of his fight for middle America and capitalize on a recent jump in the polls. Edwards drove hundreds of miles, delivering compressed versions of his main speech to audiences of campaign volunteers and supporters in town offices, a union hall and even in private homes as part of a 16-stop, "36-hour marathon for the middle class" tour to end with a rally in Des Moines with rock singer John Mellencamp.

"We are excited by your energy and enthusiasm. We are sort of running on adrenalin right now," he told an audience of several dozen supporters who crowded into a home in Centerville at 5:15 a.m. CST (1115 GMT). "But we feel very good about how things are going." He later said that he'd grabbed about one hour of sleep and toothpicks were propping up his eyes.

The tactic of nonstop campaigning, which included a visit to a house in Creston at 2:15 a.m. CST (0815 GMT), attempted to demonstrate the intensity of work ethnic the former North Carolina senator says he would bring to the presidency and it echoed Republican nominee Bob Dole's 96-hour campaign marathon in 1996.

Edwards was forced to switch buses during the night after his main vehicle, with its "America belongs to us" logo developed an electrical problem at Council Bluffs.

In his speeches, Edwards barely mentioned wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration or energy policy and focused almost exclusively on fighting corporate greed and "entrenched, moneyed interests," a force he said was preventing ordinary Americans from achieving their aspirations....

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-usa-politics-edwards.html