How poverty became the central issue in John Edwards’ campaign:
It wasn’t until after his unsuccessful bid for the presidency, and then the vice presidential nomination on John Kerry’s ticket in 2004, that he sharpened his message.
His wife, Elizabeth, talks about the meeting where the decision was made in the last chapter of her book. Advisers were ticking off possible vocations, but Edwards looked restless and uninterested until a friend mentioned poverty.
“It was as if a flame had suddenly been ignited in John,” she wrote in “Saving Graces.” “He became so animated, happy, really. To him, all the other ideas had felt like holding patterns that were not so much efforts to accomplish anything real as decent ways of filling the time until he made the decision to run or not to run for office.”
Edwards was also on Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert asked him about his work with Fortress Investment Group, pressing Edwards on how “associate yourself with a hedge fund like that, when you’re decrying the existence of two Americas?”
There was a long pause before Edwards non-answered:
I think this is a perfectly fair question. And let me answer it. First of all, I was the first candidate, Democrat or Republican, to lay out an aggressive plan to get rid of the tax breaks that are available, including the offshoring that you just spoke about, that are available to hedge fund managers. They’re not right, they’re not fair, and they don’t—are not available to ordinary Americans like the ones I spoke about just a few minutes ago.
Number two. If you look at what I have spent my life doing, including the time since the last election—which is exactly you’re focused on right now—I did a whole variety of things. Number one, I ran a poverty center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which I started; I traveled the country, helping raise the minimum wage in six different states; I was personally involved in 20–with 23 unions in organizing campaigns, organizing thousands of workers into unions. My wife, Elizabeth, and I started a college-for-everyone program, for kids who are willing to work when they were in school to be able to go to college; I personally did humanitarian work in Africa.
These are the things that I spent my time doing, and I don’t apologize for them. I’m proud of what I’ve spent my life doing. I—my whole life and the arc of my life has been about one single thing, which is to try to make sure that everybody in this country has the same kind of chance that and opportunity that I’ve had. And that’s why I want to be president of the United States.
