The latest TIME magazine notes the absence of John Edwards as North Carolina Democrats choose their presidential candidate this week.
On May 6, John Edwards plans to choose between Obama and Clinton at his local Chapel Hill polling station ? in secret.
Speaking of the former North Carolina senator, his name also appears in the latest Commentary, in a review of two new biographies of Upton Sinclair.
Sinclair popularized the social-scientific ideas developed by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, and Americanized Benjamin Disraeli’s notion of “Two Englands,” a phrase coined by the 19th-century English novelist and political genius to describe the division between rich and poor. In the manner of Disraeli, Sinclair wrote unceasingly of two Americas, a disgrace to the national ideals of freedom and equality.
This theme has enjoyed a long life, surfacing most recently in the high rhetorical dudgeon of John Edwards in his campaign for the presidency and cropping up in the fulminations of other candidates against the evils of Exxon and Haliburton.
