As a die hard, then come back from the dead till they blow your head off, supporter of John Edwards it's taken me a couple of days to get my ahead around the fact that his campaign is over.  I've worked, contributed, and thought about this campaign more than any other.

The campaign, of course, made mistakes.  All campaigns do.  I mention them now, in part, because I resisted mentioning them during the campaign, since harping on minor campaigning problems is usually deflating and counter-productive. Unfortunately, given the celebrity and talents of his two chief opponents, the Edwards campaign probably couldn't afford to make any mistakes.  This is especially true in the national pre-primary momentum game. 

As Marc Ambinder famously wrote the press wanted to write Edwards out of the picture. National media exposure in the pre-game phase helps expand the donor base, sign on activists, and endorsers like labor and political groups. So the press pre-disposition to write out Edwards and  his the campaign's own trivial mistakes prevented the campaign from building the infrastructure it should have going into the primaries.

Chief among the mistakes, and most trivial, was 'the haircut.'  I never heard a regular voter mention the 'house' or his work at a hedge fund, but they did mention the haircut.  And why wouldn't they? That simple billing error at the end of the first quarter dominated coverage of the Edwards campaign for the next three months, robbing the campaign of any momentum over the summer while Clinton rolled on and Obama took off.

The other 'mistakes' are more miscalculations than anything. Onecorps, Edwards's volunteer organization, never quite took off.  John started the organization off with an immediate charge to enlist in charitable volunteer work.  The problem for most of the chapters was that there hadn't been enough, or really, any, community building at the time.  No one knew each other, and no natural leadership had yet emerged. Asked to run, before they could stand, many of them stumbled.

If there had been a few months of community building with house parties, visibility events, selling us all button and bumper stickers, there may have been more success doing service events later and holding onto those supporters throughout the campaign.

The public financing decision also probably hurt among activists, especially those torn between Edwards and Obama.  But, the campaign needed money, and loaning oneself the money has it's own problems.  The quarterly finance reports were always a deflator, it felt like every time we were about to reach parity with the Obama campaign in other measures the finance figures would come up and for a week that's all that would be written about.

But the entire, pre-primary momentum campaign could've been wiped out if we'd been able to pull off one of the early states.  And in Iowa, everything went right accept for the damn kids.  According to my analysis, nearly a third of Obama's 38% in Iowa came from voters under 30, while only one in ten of Edwards 30% were in that age group.  If you play out the numbers then, with second choice votes Edwards picked up in the caucus system, Edwards probably won Iowa among people over thirty.

But, young people, of course, have every right to vote, and their votes count as much anyone else's. So my point isn't that he 'should' have won Iowa, or acheived some moral victory. Young people, however, are among the most voracious consumers of mass media, most likely to be swayed by image, most likely to want to join a movement and, maybe not coincidently the achilles heal of the campaign.