John Edwards concludes his Road To One America poverty tour today with a major speech in Kentucky, the site where Robert F Kennedy ended a similar trek in 1968. The washingtonpost.com has a remarkably uncynical interview with Edwards HERE and there's been some excellent coverage in the diaries HERE, HERE and HERE.
Much of the media coverage of the tour has couched it in political terms such as The NYTimes Caucus blog, which wonders if Elizabeth's dig at Hillary yesterday took away from coverage of John or The AP, which feels the need to conclude that by retracing some of RFK's steps, Edwards is "linking himself to a Democratic icon." But last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews asked a more meta question that hit on the larger ramifications of Edwards' focus on poverty:
MATTHEWS: You go to fundraisers, people who go aren't average people, they're big shots, there's a lot of billionaires behind the Democratic Party. They don't want to hear anything that sounds too populist because it threatens their lifestyle. How do you get back to being the party of regular folk?EDWARDS: My party and the Democratic party that I believe in stands up for ordinary people, stands up for the little guy, stands up for people who don't have health insurance, who live in poverty and who don't go to fundraisers. That's what the heart and soul of the Democratic Party is and we can never lose that because if we lose it we lose our soul. And it's gonna require us to have a little backbone and stand up for what we believe is right regardless of who's affected by it.
For me, this harkened back to his stunning California Democratic Party convention speech in April in which he framed his progressive agenda -- fighting poverty, fighting global warming, expanding access to healthcare -- in moral terms: "because it's the right thing to do." In the speech, he was very specific about how this agenda reflected his vision of what it means to be a Democrat:
If my party can't be the party of the poor, the elderly, the disenfranchised, why else do we exist?
I'm glad he's getting back to this. As I've written before, the candidates are running for the Democratic nomination, they have a unique platform from which to help define the party. But it's not just the candidates who hold that responsibility, the congress does as well and under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi they have made great strides. Their success in raising the minimum wage, expanding access to low income housing and increasing Pell grants to help reduce college costs has gone a long way toward helping poor Americans while making a point to remind people which party is doing the helping. I highly recommend watching Rep. George Miller's fiery floor speech attacking Republicans for trying to kill the bill that would lower the cost of college and a close up of the poster he used as a visual aid, which provides a side by side contrast between what Republicans did for low income kids while they were in power and what Democrats are doing.
And remarkably, it hasn't entirely gone unnoticed by the media. Excerpts from a recent The New York Times article over the flip:
Update [2007-7-18 18:21:22 by Todd Beeton]: Interesting that Barack Obama gave a speech about poverty invoking Bobby Kennedy today as well. A more cynical fellow might accuse him of trying to steal Edwards's thunder. Perhaps he's just trying to maximize the impact of Edwards's tour by amplifying the message (that would be the glass half full interpretation.) But no matter how you read Obama's timing, it's telling that his speech doesn't contain the word "Democrat" once.On Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail, Democrats are increasingly moving toward a full-throated populist critique of the current economy.Clearly influenced by some of their most successful candidates in last year's Congressional elections, Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities.
[snip]
...the latest populist resurgence is deeply rooted in a view that current economic conditions are difficult and deteriorating for many people, analysts say, and it is now framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care.
[snip]
Democrats say they are responding to economic trends that the statistics in the headlines do not capture, including middle-class insecurity about jobs, the affordability of health insurance and the costs of education. The times have changed, these Democrats argue, and six years of Republican tax and economic policies have heightened the inequities.
More of this please.
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