John Edwards and "You"

By Mimi Kennedy, PDA Advisory Board Chair
August 4, 2007

Progressive Populist Candidate hosted by PDLA Member

This is the fourth in a series of articles on the Edwards and Kucinich campaign.

John Edwards appeared at an Aug. 1 San Fernando Valley campaign fundraiser hosted by, among others, PDLA Vice- President and CA Progressive Caucus founding member Brad Parker.

The candidate appeared well-rested and energetic when he walked in, speaking personally with everyone he encountered on his way to the back yard. PDA activists Mary Pallant and Erin Flynn were two who got his ear early on.

That’s it for reporting. The rest of this is personal analysis, because I find it impossible to encounter this candidate without subjective interpretation of what I see.

Edwards surprised me by looking well-rested. His energy bristled. When his voice tired—he spoke forcefully to a hundred people on a lawn with no microphone for almost an hour—he sensibly said so, and continued taking questions privately, one-on-one.

The conclusion I inevitably draw, and this it the fourth time I’ve seen him up close, is that Edwards feels the urgency of our country’s crisis both personally and politically. He’s got his eye on the clock. Martin Luther King warned us there was such a thing as “too late”. John Edwards acts as if he understands this, but he conveys no gloomy pessimism or fear. He’s ready to fight. He is full of the energy I’ve seen in activists who put everything on the line as citizens to challenge, resist, and oppose the unconstitutional lawlessness, corruption and decay of the Bush-Cheney Administration.

"I wish I could say this is gonna be nice, and it’s gonna be easy,” he told us. “But it’s not. This is a battle…Washington is broken and the system is rigged against you.”

No other candidate speaks quite this way. And I say that with unflagging devotion to Dennis Kucinich’s truth-telling as a presidential candidate. Dennis was doing it four years ago, when Edwards was sani-wrapped into the Kerry campaign, and does it even better today. But what strikes me about Edwards, when he speaks, is his emphasis on the pronoun you. Most candidates understandably give us a lot of I. I would do this…I don’t agree with that… As President, I would…John Edwards does too, but his curriculum vitae has taught him, in a way that is unique to this political moment, the precious value and necessity of you. Life has taught him not to take you for granted. No doubt his law training helped; he can address a jury. But he also seems to grasp personally the founders’ fundamental proposition that all men (adjudicated to mean humans) are created equal. You has equal weight with I. He takes himself—and you—seriously.

Paradoxically, he laughs pretty hard when he laughs, and can make us laugh. There aren’t awkward attempts at scripted jokes. He makes actual comic asides. “I got back to the hotel last night early, around 10, and turned on Larry King and there was Dick Cheney saying the arms sale to Saudi Arabia was a good idea—well, that’s all I needed to hear.” He derided the sale of more weaponry to the mid-east. He went on to mention he’d cut offensive weapons in space and the billions-wasted-defense missile shield from the defense budget. Dennis has said the same things. Haven’t heard that from Clinton or Obama.

He bristled with immediacy, covering his agenda without notes. Health care for all, with unequivocal condemnation of the insurance-pharma industry (he noted that it entirely wrote the Medicare prescription drug legislation); end the Iraq war and re-establish American moral credibility with international efforts like primary school for all children, access to clean water; treat poverty like the moral outrage it is. He quoted a fact that shocked many in the audience, though I had heard it: the wealthiest 300,000 wealthiest people in the U.S. have more money than the bottom 150 million!

On a day when Obama told us that if he were President, he’d take military action in Pakistan to clean out terror camps, whether Pakistan liked it or not, Edwards mentioned that the problem of radicalism in Pakistan was largely due to the lack of primary education except what is offered by fundamentalist madrasas. Obama is being sucked into celebrity solutions: kill the man on the Wanted poster and your problems will be over. Edwards—thinking of that you again as equal to I—sees whole nations, peoples and societies as the as the key to American security. They’re made up of people who, by our founders’ light, are created equal to us. Edwards doesn’t play Talk-Tougher-Than-Thou to show he’s a fighter. He’s fighting. And the enemy he identifies- lies, corruption, neglect and yes, racism (he said we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t recognize the heavy racial component, African-American and Latino, in American poverty)—is one that would attract allies worldwide to help him fight.

He wants to return to voting on paper. Again, it’s his own life experience that creates his commitment. He supports audit protocols to a statistical accuracy of 99%. This is what most activists have realized is necessary and what statisticians have said requires far more than the current standard of manual recounts of paper in a random selection of 1, 2, or at the most, 5% of precincts.

The mainstream media infuriates and alienates the public by exhausting us with a million-dollar mouth-match between two Democrats. It was bracing to see John Edwards. As a man who’s lost a lot that was important to him in life, with the death of his son, and one who must be brave-hearted on a daily basis, living with his wife Elizabeth’s cancer, (she is, by the way, in Venice, Italy with her daughters, enjoying a well-deserved moment of summer vacation) he is fighting with that same stout heart for his country—loudly and with no fear of telling the truth—on the big stage of an American presidential campaign.

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John Edwards and "You"

By Mimi Kennedy, PDA Advisory Board Chair
August 4, 2007

Progressive Populist Candidate hosted by PDLA Member

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In This Section:

John Edwards and "You"

By Mimi Kennedy, PDA Advisory Board Chair August 4, 2007

Progressive Populist Candidate hosted by PDLA Member

By Mimi Kennedy, PDA Advisory Board Chair
August 4, 2007