and policy the rhetorical cornerstones of his campaign
In the place of Obama’s tiresome feel-good homilies
to togetherness, shared American values and empathy,
Edwards declares that his mission as president
would be to give privileged corporate and business elites “Hell”
He promises to battle and defeat big business
to make policy in democratic accord
with a popular consensus that already exists
for things like universal health care and fair trade
Our companies should be run for the benefit of workers and shareholders as well as insiders.
Today, too many companies in America are putting far too much of their earnings into excessive CEO and executive pay, when this money could be going to increased worker salaries, better benefits and investments in plants and equipment.
As president, I will immediately cap untaxed deferred compensation for executives.
I will also give shareholders new rights and responsibilities so that they can call shareholder meetings, remove directors who aren't acting responsibly, and have a say on executive pay. - John Edwards
Consider, he places second in Iowa without any press attention (accept if its his haircut or his wealth) and only spending a 6th as much as Obama and Clinton, yet the media ignores him still...except maybe to say perhaps his campaign is over.
I suppose I take some solace in Hillary placing third, and I still have some hope that Obama, if indeed he becomes the next President can become more than just someone that talks about change and hope, and actually be the person that can achieve it.
I'm not convinced he understands that to make the changes he speaks of, very, very powerful and corrupt forces must be fought...not compromised with.
My worry is Obama could become another Bill Clinton: someone with enormous political charisma and acumen, but who seeks to compromise too often, so much so that in the end, those political gifts are largely squandered.
Barack Obama has excluded himself from the progressive coalition by the statements he’s made, unfortunately.
He’s a lot smarter than his public statements, which are extremely conciliatory to concentrated power and big business...
The people of Iowa and New Hampshire have to ask themselves: who is going to fight for you...
Edwards raises the question of the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands that are working against the majority of people. - Ralph Nader, MSNBC, December 17, 2007
"The key phrase" in Edwards message, Nader said, is "that he doesn't want to replace a corporate Republican with a corporate Democrat. That's very key."
Nader noted that Edwards' message of fighting corporate power is more stridently left than anything he's seen from an electable Democratic politician in a very long time.
According to Nader, "people in New Hampshire have to ask themselves a question: who's going to fight for you?" The answer, for Nader, is Edwards.
At one point Mathews told Nader he’d “excluded Obama from the progressive coalition."
Nader argued that Obama has “excluded himself with statements that he’s made, unfortunately. He’s a lot smarter than his public statements, which are extremely conciliatory to concentrated power and big business.”
Nader told Mathews that Edwards “raises the question of the concentration of power and wealth and power in a few hands that are working against the majority of people.”
Last Monday, in a Muscatine, Iowa press conference, Nader deepened his support for Edwards.
“The issue is corporate power and who controls our political system,” Nader said, “and it’s not who has experience for six years or two years.” This was an obvious allusion to the ongoing debate over “experience” between Clinton and Obama.
Nader called Edwards a Democratic “glimmer of hope.” He issued a public statement ripping Mrs. Clinton as a “corporate Democrat,” mirroring the precise term Edwards uses to describe Hillary and Obama.
Nader praised Edwards’ more combative and populist posture of fighting corporate power as a heartening signal. “It’s the only time I’ve heard a Democrat talk that way in a long time,” claimed Nader, who rarely praises a leading Democrat.
“Edwards is at least highlighting day after day that the issue is who controls our country, big business or the people”
The admittedly imperfect (from a Left perspective) John Edwards is considerably better than Obama in ways that matter.
The unabashedly partisan, pro-labor, anti-poverty, and “”Jeffersonian” Edwards is running to the Hamiltonian Obama’s “populist” and democratic left.
It’s a bigger contrast than many progressives know or let on.
Obama intones endlessly about “hope” and finding “common ground” and “consensus” with Republicans, evangelicals, and big business. He decries the nation’s supposedly horrid legacy of factional and ideological conflict – an allegedly frightening heritage he pins on the purportedly scary (late) 1960s.
He claims to represent a new generational politics seeking to “get things done” above nasty old divisions.
He claims to represent the glories of an America where hard work is rewarded and anyone can rise from the bottom (where he supposedly originated) to the top.
He tells Wall Street’s global investor class (during an oration last summer at NASDAQ's headquarters) of his purported beliefs that “you are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America.”
And that “your work [is] be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America. I think,” Obama absurdly adds, “the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal.”
Yeah, okay.
Sounding like a droning academic on many occasions, professor Obama has been known to put more than a few of his audience members to sleep.
Meanwhile, Edwards has been delivering a steady diet of red-hot orations against business rule.
Deploying the best stump speech in the campaign, he refers repeatedly to the labor movement as “the greatest anti-poverty program in American history.”
He is willing to lose corporate sponsorship and media fancy in his determination to make “ending poverty” and fighting economic inequality and “corporate domination” of American politics and policy the rhetorical cornerstones of his campaign.
In the place of Obama’s tiresome feel-good homilies to togetherness and shared American values and empathy, Edwards declares that his mission as president would be to give privileged corporate and business elites “Hell.”
He promises to battle and defeat big business to make policy in democratic accord with a popular consensus that already exists for things like universal health care and fair trade.
He says it’s a “lie” that “any Democrat is better than any Republican,” arguing that replacing big money “corporate Republicans” with big money “corporate Democrats” is just a game of musical chairs.
He (rightly in my opinion) mocks Obama’s great healing narrative as singing “Kumbaya” and makes no bones about disliking the Republican right.
His generational narrative is that the next generation of Americans is about to be the first in U.S. history to be worse off than its immediate predecessor.
Passive Democrats who refuse to fight “corporate greed” to “reclaim our democracy” should look their children in the eyes, Edwards says, and "admit that they did nothing to stop the decline of opportunity and the growing inequality of wealth and power.”
Edwards’ autobiographical narrative skips the Horatio Alger claims of heroic upward mobility.
It simply states that he’s running for president on behalf of the working-class people he grew up with in rural North Carolina.
Their hard work was not rewarded, he says, when their local textile mill closed so that its corporate owners could exploit cheaper labor abroad.
Edwards rejects the notion that any but a small minority of Americans can to rise from poverty to riches under current economic and political arrangements. He takes little personal credit for his own ascendancy to wealth.
His campaign’s concept of the division that plagues America is different from Obama’s.
Obama has hitched his quest for power on a pledge to save the virtuous (Alexander) Hamiltonian Republic by reaching out across the supposed great divide between “red state” (white-patriarchal and more rural, evangelical and militarist) Republicans and “blue state” (more multi-colored, feminist, gay-friendly and urban-cosmopolitan) Democrats.
By sharp and relevant (for actual progressives) contrast, Edwards speaks in (Thomas) Jeffersonian terms about the more real and fundamental fissure in the U.S: the split between the public and the country’s corporate-based power centers.
He advocates “fighting and beating” those power centers on behalf of working people and the cause of popular governance.
He’s even better on race than Obama. As Obama’s fellow black Chicago South Sider Jesse Jackson, Sr. noted in the Chicago Sun Times last November:
“The Democratic candidates – with the exception of John Edwards, who opened his campaign in New Orleans and has made addressing poverty central to his campaign – have virtually ignored the plight of African Americans in this country”.
