The News & Observer writes glowingly of Edwards’ campaign chief, David Bonior:
Bonior is the new face in the Edwards camp. He is a high-profile Democrat whose appointment reinforces Edwards’ efforts to build bridges to organized labor, environmental groups and party progressives as he tries to outflank New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on the left. …
Few Democratic congressmen were closer to organized labor, a group that Edwards has heavily courted since 2004. Bonior notes that Edwards has walked picket lines all across the country and, on Friday, received the Paul Wellstone Award from the AFL-CIO, the most prestigious award given by labor.
“His activism speaks loudly,” Bonior said. “He has not only talked the talk, but he has walked the walk.”
And like a true union shill, he walked and talked with money taken involuntarily. The “Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity” belongs in the UNC hall of shame, created as it was solely to prop up a favorite son‘s political career to help him. Without our consent, the state of North Carolina has given Edwards a great gift that allowed him to have “activism [that] speaks loudly.”
John Edwards has done nothing with that center other than to use its name in his non-stop campaigning across the country to give the false impression that his bromides against Wal-Mart and platitudes on the minimum wage have some kind of scholarly heft. There have been no studies from that center, only a handful of sponsored talks and a conference. Whoop-te-frigging-do. He never intended to seek actual solutions, certainly not those that would meet the center’s founding mission of finding innovative, creative and practical solutions. There is no way that a real solution to poverty would satisfy the union power brokers or the statist pols who suck up to them.
