Can Edwards break out from the rest?

MATTHEWS:  Let’s talk about you and winning this election.

EDWARDS:  Yes.

MATTHEWS:  The way the calendar works, it’s pretty simple.  Right after Christmas, even right up to New Year’s, after that Christmas week, right away Iowa.

MATTHEWS:  How do you knock off Barack Obama in Iowa?

EDWARDS:  The Iowa caucus goers who know me and trust me need to see me in there, fighting on their behalf and energizing them.  And they are going to see from me an energy and a passion that they will respond to because there’s nothing academic about this for me.  It is my life experience that drives what I’m saying.

MATTHEWS:  I have a sense that your people are rougher guys.  They’re labor guys.  They’re tougher.  They get in there with their sharp elbows.  They can show up at these caucuses in Iowa, and the bloggers and the more intellectual crowd, the more academics the like of Barack Obama might be intimidated that night.  Do you think you’ve got a rougher crowd that can actually run that show that night because of the kinds of people you got?

EDWARDS:  I think I got working people and I think...

MATTHEWS:  They’re tougher.

EDWARDS:  They’re tough and they’re organized, and they will be at the caucus standing up for me.

MATTHEWS:  What makes them different?  I’m trying to figure it out.  Are they tougher, more working class, more willing to walk into a room where they’re not popular, more willing to go out at night in the cold? Why are they better than the smart intellectual kid who’s for Obama?

EDWARDS:  Well, I’m not saying they’re better, they’re just different.  And...

MATTHEWS:  But how are they tougher?

EDWARDS:  Because they’ve been through these battles before in their lives.  They had to fight their way up to the place they are now.  They literally fight for survival every day.  There’s not much that intimidates them or scares them.  They come from the same place I come from, Chris.

MATTHEWS:  Let me ask you about this election.

EDWARDS:  Yes.

MATTHEWS:  Last question.  The president of the United States what’s about him, when you get up in the morning and you have to start your day, that you don’t like?

EDWARDS:  That I don’t like?

MATTHEWS:  This president.

EDWARDS:  There’s not much I do like.  I mean, I...

MATTHEWS:  (INAUDIBLE) turns you on and says, I got to beat this system, I got to change this country?  When you say change, you mean change from what that you don’t like?

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