Edwards Keeps Trying Out Change Theme
By Kate Phillips
John Edwards in New Hampshire today. (Photo: Jim Cole/Associated Press)Democratic candidate John Edwards jump-started his “One America’’ campaign with a bus-tour in New Hampshire today, a four-day rollout that began with a speech replete with the populist, anti-establishment themes he’s been pounding home elsewhere on the stump and at recent debates.
His campaign called it a major speech, but much of it weaves together what he’s been saying lately.
He once again challenged his fellow Democrats to eschew lobbying money – something Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has refused to do – and he again painted himself as an outsider versus the Washington insiders. (Though he was a senator from North Carolina and the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee.)
You could say that, in some ways, he’s honing his voice on these themes, and in the Granite State, trying to appeal to the same independents as Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton and others. You can also read the veiled digs at his rivals threaded through the words, as he urges his listeners not to rely on the policies of the 70s, the 80s, or the 90s:
The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.
The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent, and lobbyist money can no longer influence policy in the House or the Senate.
It’s time to end the game. It’s time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over. It’s time to challenge politicians to put the American people’s interests ahead of their own calculated political interests, to look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no.
And one of the other ways in which he has tried to distinguish himself is through the universal health care plan he offered months and months ago. (Senator Clinton today offered several more proposals, promising to outline her full plan for universal health care next month.) Mr. Edwards:
I have a bold plan to finally guarantee true universal health care for every single American and cut health care costs for everyone. My plan will require everyone — business, government and individuals — to contribute something to reach universal coverage. And I am honest about the cost: $90 to $120 billion a year, and I’ll pay for it by repealing the Bush tax cuts for families above $200,000. If we end the game in Washington, we can finally have a health care system that treats the health of all our people with equal worth.
The question is whether repealing, or letting the Bush tax cuts expire, will really be enough to cover the full costs of such a mandated health care plan, especially for the 45 to 47 million uninsured. Mr. Edwards has been pretty explicit that his plan would indeed be costly.
Senator Obama has also offered a plan, but he does not call for mandated coverage for adults. Senators Clinton and Obama also favor getting rid of the Bush tax cuts to help pay for health care coverage.
Mr. Edwards also repeated his call for withdrawing some troops from Iraq immediately, and demanded that Congress – faced with more confrontations with the Bush administration over funding for the troops in the coming months – cut off the money spigot:
And let’s support our troops and end this war in Iraq. We should immediately withdraw 40-50,000 combat troops immediately and have the rest out in about a year. And when President Bush refuses to act, Congress should use its funding power to force him to act.
That stance has made him a thorn in the side of the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill, which has had to juggle the unhappiness of its constituency with the war in Iraq against the anticipated taint of being anti-troops that would wash over it were it to cut off funding. And some of his Democratic rivals in the presidential primary race want to leave some forces there to offer what they believe may be a stabilizing force.
The rest of the speech is fairly familiar. Mr. Edwards talks about his father, the mill worker (we thought his wife Elizabeth told him to stop mentioning the mill background though mind you, we’re not inclined either way except that we too lived through the mill-closing era).
And he keeps talking about how he can beat back, beat those corporate interests because he did it in the courtroom against corporate lawyers when he was representing plaintiffs. (And made his family fortune that way, too.)
Granted, the candidates right now are vying for the activist, liberal base of the Democratic party and the independents in places like New Hampshire. How “beating back” the big bad drug companies or the big bad oil companies will work for any of them in a general election campaign, when candidates traditionally move to more centrist positions, and adopt a more modulated voice, to capture moderates on either side, remains a question.
Is the critical voting bloc so upset about the war that it’s no longer simply a “change” election, but an “anger” election? Will the domestic economy, beset at the moment by the mortgage lending debacle, overtake the war as an issue and drive more of the debate in mid-2008?
Questions that linger far longer than speeches. |
