The Contenders 2008: John Edwards

Why he's still running.

Fight for the Presidency

Not that long ago, John Edwards felt like yesterday's news. The other guy on a ticket that blew a winnable election. Someone more likely to become a Trivial Pursuit question than a future President.

No longer. Edwards is very much in the public's mind again, though for a reason that is wrenchingly sad. In March, he and his wife, Elizabeth, revealed that her cancer has returned and metastasized -- a cruel turn of events for a family that had already faced the grief of losing their teenage son, Wade, to a traffic accident in 1996.

Both insist that John's quest for the Presidency will go on, however, and with his closest advisor and best campaigner, Elizabeth, by his side. Her courage in the face of incurable cancer adds a poignant personal story to the coming election year, but Edwards has said he doesn't want Elizabeth's illness to define the campaign. "There's not a single person in America that should vote for me because you feel some sympathy or compassion for us," Edwards said on the CBS program 60 Minutes.

Since the news came out about his wife, Edwards has climbed in polls of likely Democratic voters. But even before then, he was emerging as a genuine threat to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The former North Carolina Senator has spent the three years since his Vice Presidential run working tirelessly, often under the radar, to put the pieces in place for a strong White House bid.

He's not the candidate you remember from 2004. Back then, his campaign was built largely around his own story: the son of a millworker who grew up in rural North Carolina, a trial attorney who got huge judgments against corporations on behalf of the injured little guy, a candidate who spoke of "two Americas," rich and poor, from the vantage point of someone who's known both worlds.

According to Elizabeth, that campaign left many people with an incomplete picture of her husband. "He has that easy smile and Southern accent, so people sometimes think he's a soft, cuddly fellow," she says. "It's harder to see the fight in him -- but he's a fighter with unbelievable discipline. He has a steel rod inside him."

There's no mistaking the fight in him now. Edwards is on the stump pushing for what he calls "transformational change" as opposed to "baby steps." Iraq is "a mess," he says, and he forcefully declares he was wrong to vote in favor of authorizing the President to go to war. "It's not enough for Democrats to talk about [the war]," he told reporters in New Hampshire last winter. "We need to stop it. We need to show some courage."

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