Edwards video casts him as the rural candidate, but may be too hokey for Iowa, and he trails in rural $

John Edwards' presidential campaign is mailing a 12-minute DVD to voters in rural Iowa, where the first votes for president will be cast Feb. 3. With a background of banjos, fiddles and high-lonesome bluegrass music, "For the Country" casts the former senator from North Carolina as the candidate of rural America in general and rural Iowa in particular.

"I feel like presidential candidates don't talk about what's going on in rural America," Edwards says in one of several film clips. Much of the DVD is biographical, with repeated appearances by his parents. His father, Wallace Edwards, recalls how he told his son to punch in the nose anyone trying to pick a fight with him and says that as president, "He'll fight and he'll fight and he'll win."

Edwards' chief rural adviser, David "Mudcat" Sanders, talks about Edwards' rural platform and says farm policy has left Iowa with 9,000 family-owned hog farms, far below the 60,000 it had in 1978. He also touts his candidate's electability. Edwards was running third in the latest Iowa poll, but isn't counted out because he has an organization from his 2004 campaign and the Democratic caucuses give disproportionate weight to rural precincts, which tend to be smaller.

Dien Judge of the Iowa Independent writes, "Edwards should be commended for his commitment to the issues facing the people who live out here in the country. . . . But the video, with bluegrass music playing over the entirety of its 12 minutes, is about as hokey as a possum wearin' bib overalls. It's the kind of stuff that makes some of us in rural Iowa grumble. Sometimes we get the feeling that a rural rube stereotype is being unfairly perpetuated, and some of us don't like that." (Read more)

Though Edwards is campaigning as the rural candidate, he was far behind Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in contributions from rural ZIP codes in the third quarter of this year, the most recent reporting period, according to an analysis for the Daily Yonder by Tim Murphy Bill Bishop. To read that story, click here.