Edwards has been talking about poverty for some time now, telling stories about individuals he has met across the country, slamming the big lie that poor people are lazy, decrying Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest while slashing the budgets for Medicaid, children's nutrition programs, Pell grants, and so on.

Then Edwards talks about what we should do to reduce poverty: increase the minimum wage substantially, expand the earned income tax credit, and so on.

Here's where the speech ventured into new territory, as far as I know. I did not have a tape recorder and was holding my baby so could not take notes, but this is a pretty decent paraphrase:

Edwards said we need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to organize in this country (big applause from crowd).

He talked about spending time helping to organize hotel workers (can't remember in what city). Said hotel workers without unions earn about six bucks an hour with no benefits, while hotel workers who are unionized may earn $15 an hour or more, with benefits.

Then he said that you hear a lot of politicians talking about the great manufacturing jobs that we're losing, that are leaving the country, and how these great manufacturing jobs built our middle class and are so important to our economy. What they don't say is that those manufacturing jobs weren't so good before unions.

This got a huge response from the crowd. You could view this as a smart tactical move to get union endorsements (I doubt ex-Wal-Mart board member Hillary Clinton will be getting many of those!).

Personally, I don't care if it was political calculation. I absolutely loved hearing a Democrat embrace unions, say we need to organize more workers, and remind people that it was unions that created so many "good jobs" in the first place. Getting more service sector workers organized is absolutely critical to reducing poverty in this country, and I am glad to hear Edwards talking about this.

Too many Democrats seem afraid to embrace unions, which the GOP have painted as a "special interest." It's idiotic, since research shows that belonging to a labor union is correlated with greater likelihood to vote and vote for Democrats.