Help The Poor? Edwards Can't Be Bothered

Heading Back to the Better of the Two Americas

Erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards promoted an appealing rhetoric: The working poor in America should get a larger piece of the very large national economic pie. In the interests of equity and social harmony, this was the right stance to take, especially after years of government sponsorship of class warfare against society's most vulnerable members. Edwards, it appeared, had made a personal and moral commitment to creating a fairer America.

But as soon as it became clear he would not obtain his party's nomination, John Edwards quit. It reminded me of something I had almost forgotten: On election night 2004 I went to bed having heard vice-presidential candidate Edwards promise to explore every legal channel in Ohio in a bid to move that state's electoral votes into the Democratic column and potentially propel the putative opposition party into the White House. By the very next morning, though, the great American appeaser had capitulated and that was the end of the matter. His running mate John Kerry went back to his cushy job as a senator, and our nation got four more years of George W. Bush.

This time around, knowing full well he would end his presidential bid the next day, John Edwards found himself in a union hall in St. Paul, Minnesota, urging the gathering (along with potential donors) to stay in the election fight with him. I guess announcing the campaign's end at that time was inconvenient from the standpoint of publicity generation, but there should have been great compunction about leading supporters on for such self-serving reasons. Edwards took advantage of the union members, hiding his real intentions until one last opportunity to grandstand before the national press during prime cable news hours.

If Edwards really cared about poor Americans as he claims, he would stay in the race until the Democratic convention in August and broker a deal there on their behalf. But clearly this cause of the poor is not worth another few months of work for the former senator. When the going got tough, he folded. Meanwhile, 37 million poor Americans will remain that way, without an explicit champion on the national stage.

The disingenuous Edwards had this to say as he threw in the barely-perspired-upon towel: "But I want to say . . . . this son of a millworker's gonna be just fine." With that reassurance, America's working poor must have breathed a tremendous sigh of relief. The system actually works, at least for half-hearted politicians with millions of dollars to fall back on.

John Edwards Talks Some Sense on the Military

Retreat or Advance?

"Military leaders are warning about 'breaking' the force. It is tempting for politicians to respond to this situation by trying to outbid one another on the number of troops they would add to the military . . . But the problem of our force structure is not best dealt with by a numbers game. We must be more thoughtful about what the troops would actually be used for."

--John Edwards, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007

Alone among so-called major presidential candidates, John Edwards appears to understand that the raw number of troops the US military can muster ceased to matter with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Further evidence of this fact came with the American defeat in Vietnam, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, nearly every day for the past four-and-a-half years in Iraq, we have been taught the lesson again. The ability to apply massive, blunt force no longer helps a "superpower" very much at all.

To the contrary, large-scale spending on the military diverts scarce financial resources from economically productive activities, and removes our youth from civilian life, where they could have become teachers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Instead, they are added to the ranks of trained killers in an anachronisitc insitution that is tantamount to a federal jobs program. In other words, militarization stunts and diminishes our nation, without making us any stronger or safer.

As an alternative, Mr. Edwards proposes establishing a new organization -- the Marshall Corps -- consisting of "at least 10,000 civilian experts who could be deployed abroad to serve in reconstruction, stabilization, and humanitarian missons." He predicts such a corps will be useful "to stabilize weak and failing states and provide humanitarian assistance to the victims of disasters across the world." This is both an enlightened and prgamatic idea that surely would serve US foreign policy interests better than the application of violence, as in Iraq. Unfortunately, Edwards' support of just this sadistic and reckless action when he was in the Senate greatly undermines his credibility now.