Is this guy serious?
Didn't Edwards use junk science to sue doctors? So we can pay more for healthcare?
Can Poverty Define John Edwards? By ERIC POOLEY/APPALACHIA
2 hours, 31 minutes ago
"This is the cause of my life," says John Edwards. "When I die, if I've done something serious to help eradicate poverty, I'll die a happy man." The candidate and I are riding in a minivan from Youngstown, Ohio to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Day Two of his "Road to One America Tour," which Edwards and everyone else has taken to calling the Poverty Tour. It's a three-day, eight-state marathon meant to shine a light on the 37 million Americans stuck on the cold, hard bottom of the economic barrel, and to explore "not just what's wrong," as he says, "but what we can do to make it right... and actually end poverty in America within the next 30 years." Who says our politicians have forgotten how to think big?
Day Two is urban poverty day, so we start in the Mount Pleasant section of Cleveland, a black working-class neighborhood in the grip of an epidemic: local housing activists say predatory lending practices here have recently driven 38 homes in a single square block into foreclosure; Cleveland as a whole has some 13,000 foreclosures a year. Edwards uses the visit to propose a national law against predatory mortgages (those designed to trigger foreclosure) and a Home Rescue Fund to bail out people on the brink of losing their homes. Then it's on to Youngstown for visits to Beatitude House, which helps homeless women and children find their way back to the world, and the Youngstown Business Incubator, which creates high-tech enterprises and jobs that are helping to revive this rust-belt town.
Now, as we roll toward Pittsburgh, Edwards is talking about why he has taken on this issue. His own childhood began amid the working poor in North Carolina, but as his father, a textile mill worker, moved up the ladder, his family became solidly middle class, "which is the way it's supposed to work," he says, but all too often these days it does not. The former Senator talked about the problems of the poor while running for President in 2003-04, and after his run for the vice presidency alongside John Kerry fell short, he spent a great deal of time studying the issue, visiting programs like Beatitude House and founding the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, where he'd attended law school. "I always felt like these people just needed an advocate," he says. "Somebody who would tell the country their real stories."
And that, he says, is what this Poverty Tour was designed to do. In fact, on Day One in Canton, Mississippi, Edwards tells the crowd of reporters and cameras and microphone sticks that "I would request that you focus on the stories of the people we're hearing from and not on me." I think it must be the first time I've ever heard a presidential candidate plead with his media entourage not to write about him. Edwards says he is "taking a break" from his usual campaign routine - no visits to early primary states, no fund-raisers - and he's doing his best to sound like a maverick risk-taker. Asked at one point why he thinks poverty is a vote-winning issue, he says, "I don't know that it is. This is not a political strategy. It's a huge moral issue facing America."
It is certainly something most politicians don't talk about and most voters don't ask about. Democrats with national aspirations have been avoiding the issue for the last quarter century or so, since Ronald Reagan cast them as the party of welfare-queen-coddling big gubment. But with economic anxiety, inequality and private equity billionaires grabbing national attention, Edwards believes all that might be changing. Barack Obama gives a speech on poverty this week. Hillary Clinton has assailed trickle-down economics without the trickle. But no other candidate is talking about poverty the way Edwards does - at length and to the exclusion of all other subjects for three long days. From time to time he tries to link the problems of the poor to the vulnerability of the middle class at large, touting, for instance, his plan for universal health care. ("It's not just about the poor," he says in one speech during the tour. "Everybody's at risk. Everybody's vulnerable.") But mostly - remarkably - he avoids that broader argument and focuses on costly programs to help the truly impoverished: one million WPA-style "stepping-stone" jobs, guaranteed paid sick leave for everyone, a minimum wage that isn't just raised to $9.50 but indexed so it goes up automatically.
The press has been busy assessing the political risk of dedicating a presidential campaign to people who tend not to vote and about whom middle class voters have long been assumed not to care. "There's nothing that you do in presidential politics that doesn't carry risk," Edwards tells me. "And based on what I've seen, this is not that high on most people's list of priorities, so to that extent the risk is probably high." But Edwards is gambling that voters will respond to politicians who put themselves on the line for the things they really believe in - "people want to see a strength and a passion about something you authentically care about," as he puts it. (Al Gore remade himself by dedicating himself to the climate crisis, and now Edwards is trying the same thing with poverty - speaking openly about creating a "movement" while conceding that there is, as yet, no real movement in sight.) Certainly Edwards could use a boost right now. The mill worker's son turned millionaire trial lawyer turned politician has made some colossally maladroit moves for someone who wants to be the advocate of the American poor - working for a hedge fund, paying $400 for a haircut, building a 28,000-square-foot house. They have dealt a blow to his image and helped stall his campaign. (For example, the latest CNN/WMUR-TV poll in New Hampshire has dropped Edwards from third to fourth place, at a dismal 8% support, behind Bill Richardson and tied with an undeclared Al Gore.) Maybe reasons he wants us to focus on the stories of the poor people and not on him.
Those stories demand to be told - they are tales of powerless men and women whose hard work goes unrewarded, who are demeaned and ripped off yet somehow persevere - but we have been moving so quickly from place to place that there is often precious little time for more than photo ops and sound bites. (This is troubling, since Edwards says he learned in 2004 that Americans want substance not photo ops and sound bites.) At sunset on Sunday we took a two-block walking tour of the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where the only things flourishing are the crickets and the neck-high weeds: 35 media types walking backwards along the ruined street, past rubble-strewn lots and gutted houses that sag like wet cardboard, straining to hear what a local housing activist is telling the candidate about the people here who are trying to rebuild their homes and lives. We visited a newly built charter school, and witnessed a photo op in a Head Start classroom, and then another one in a central city soul-food restaurant that helps troubled and struggling young people enter the food-services industry. But Edwards rolled through most of these places so fast that he barely had time to hear the stories, and the media scrum that surrounds him - the biggest press contingent since he announced his candidacy in the Ninth Ward - heard even less.
It isn't until we arrived in the Mississippi Delta town of Canton and settle into the Greater Mt. Levi Full Gospel Baptist Church that the poverty tour slowed down enough to actually hear from some impoverished people. The church is across the street from Peco Poultry, a vast chicken-processing factory, and we met a group of ten poultry workers, most of them Hispanic, who described the struggle that is their lives. They live in a trailer park beside the plant, as many as 10 or 12 of them stuffed into a single trailer with two beds. They stand on a smelly, freezing-cold chicken assembly line and perform the same repetitive tasks for 10 hours a day, five or six days a weeks. They told their stories in voices that are sad, with words that are often halting. A man named Daniel said he broke his back on the job and had to bring in a lawyer before the company would pay his workman's comp. Everyone complained of being underpaid and shortchanged for the hours they work. (A 2005 Department of Labor study of 51 poultry plants found that all 51 hadn't paid workers for some hours worked, and that one-third took illegal deductions. But the Department of Labor, as Edwards points out, has only four bilingual enforcement officers nationwide.) "When we try to complain," said one woman, through a translator, "the first thing they ask is about our immigration status." Edwards drew them out with specific questions but made no rousing speech, no attempt to sum up their situation.
In fact, the message of the moment was crystallized by the candidate's wife, Elizabeth Edwards, who was with us for Day One of the poverty tour. She is undergoing treatment for metastasized breast cancer, but that has not sapped her spirit or prevented her from getting out on the trail. "I'm curious about how many hours ya'll work," she said to the poultry workers, "because there's this perception out there that people who are forced to live in trailer parks aren't working hard enough." The answer - each man and woman works 50 to 60 hours a week for the right to live in a trailer - gives the lie to that perception very efficiently indeed. And Elizabeth's off-the-cuff remark becomes her husband's lead comment during his next press availability. She has terrific instincts, in other words, and displayed them again and again in the course of the day. Visiting the Head Start classroom in New Orleans, she asked about the program's waiting list and learns that it is 600 children long - something her husband would stress to the press a few minutes later. Walking through the Ninth Ward, she pointed out piles of debris that FEMA still hasn't managed to clean up. The Poverty Tour makes it absolutely clear to me that Elizabeth Edwards would be a splendid First Lady. But by the end of Day Two, as we head for Appalachia in the footsteps of RFK, I'm still not sure what sort of President her husband would be. |
