The Politics of Personality

Ed Kilgore, reflecting on the lessons of John Edwards' campaign, makes an interesting observation:

While no one will ever know how Edwards would have fared had he won Iowa, his campaign ultimately appealed to the same kind of voters he won in 2004 with a very different message: moderate-to-conservative white men. His exceptional weakness among African-Americans, in 2008 as in 2004, provides a cautionary tale about the breadth of appeal of "populism."

But doesn't this seem like an unduly narrow reading of the point? Edwards adopted a very different political and policy approach in 2008 from what he did in 2004, but the results were very similar. The interesting fact here is that neither policy shifts nor messaging shifts trump the basic fact that the core constituency for a southern white dude is moderate-to-conservative white men. This is one of these things that everyone kinda sorta knows, but that often seems to drop out of the picture when it's being discussed.