David Bonior Announces Edwards's 'Road To One America' Tour
Earlier today David Bonior held a conference call with media to announce John Edwards's Road To One America tour kicking off next Sunday with a walking tour of the 9th Ward in New Orleans and continuing through 8 states and 12 cities over 3 days. Edwards's purpose is to raise awareness of poverty in America with the stated longterm goals of elevating 12 million people out of poverty in 10 years and eradicating poverty altogether within 30.
A couple things stood out me about Bonior's statements on the call.
First of all, Bonior made a point to note that none of the stops on the tour would be in an early primary state nor would any of the events throughout the tour be for the purpose of fundraising. This seemed pretty significant to me considering it's a presidential primary campaign, but as you might expect, some of the media immediately pounced with the obvious political questions: "What does Edwards hope to get out of this politically?" "What is the strategy behind this tour?" Yeah, it's a presidential campaign and you can't separate anything the candidates do from the political theatre of the campaign trail and everything they do to raise their own profile is inherently self-serving, but the cynicism that oozed from the questions (not to mention from the comments over at NYTime Caucus blog) was a bit sickening. Is it too much to believe that Edwards' super secret plan is to raise awareness of an issue that doesn't get nearly enough media coverage simply because he feels "it's not ok" that "1 in 8 Americans wake up in poverty?" At some point, you gotta think Edwards's sheer persistence would wear the media down. It'll be interesting to see if they can manage to cover the tour without mentioning haircuts or hedgefunds.
I was also intrigued by the straightforward yet deferential tone Bonior took with the media on the call. He seemed genuinely appreciative of the participation of those that joined the call -- he said it was a great turnout -- and that they're looking into getting a media plane to go along with the tour and invited everyone to join for a leg or the whole thing. While I've always liked Edwards's somewhat combative tone with the media, I wonder if Bonior might be trying to take a softer approach in hopes of less antagonistic (to put it mildly) coverage. I actually think the Edwards folks have done a pretty decent job of managing the media narratives (especially vis a vis fundraising) but the haircut thing does seem to have gotten away from them. And that's not to say, by the way, that his appreciation wasn't genuine, I suspect it was. He made a point of saying that Edwards's years long advocacy on the part of the poor was one of the reasons he joined the campaign.
It's easy enough to bash the media, of course, but Edwards is challenging us as well. Poverty, New Orleans, the plight of rural Americans and those left behind in our devastated cities are people, places and things we all can be writing about more and I'm glad Sen. Edwards is giving us and the media that opportunity.
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