Via CrooksandLiars.com, one more reason to support John Edwards… you gotta check out his passionate response to an older man that can’t afford to pay for health insurance.
Neither one of the other Democratic candidates matches Edwards’ passion and conviction on working class issues, and that’s why I’m supporting him.
Via DailyKos.com, poster Cosbo writes:
Obama won with his freshness
Hillary won with her presence
Dodd won with his hair
Biden won with his yelling
Kucinich won with his wife
Richardson won with his um diplomacy?
Gravel won a straight jacket…But Edwards is gonna take it with this….
And I must agree… that’s the sort of talk I want to hear from the Democractic nominee.
One of my favorite observers of the media has done it again, exposing how the cross hairs of the image-making-machine targets its casualties.
Take exhibit A:
Given the power of impressions, however, the media has effectively “taken Edwards apart” in two pictures. (This should not be surprising, though, as any candidate that trends left and threatens to play outside the establishment rules is probably doomed to the same fate.)
On first go around, Edwards was feminized and sissified. On a slow simmer for years, that stage really got hot in early March after Ann Coulter publicly called Edwards a “faggot.” It culminated in late April, however, when Adam Nagourney, Maureen Dowd (viewable via johnedwards.com) and Howard Kurtz, within the same week, not only jumped all over JE’s pricey Beverly Hills haircut, but seemed to relished the opportunity to revive what Nagourney termed the “Breck Girl sobriquet” with all three journalists plugging (read: blessing) the infamous, Edwards-slandering “I Feel Pretty” You Tube video.
[...]
Phase two crystallized this past weekend with the publication of the NYT Magazine, above.
In the cover story, Matt Bai spends an impressive 7,827 words intimating that John Edwards is a filthy-rich hypocrite who is playing the poverty issue for political advantage. “Writes Bai: “Whenever you wrap yourself in the mantle of morality and conviction … even the smallest hypocrisy can leave an indelible stain.”
The entire post is worth a read, see the rest at HuffingtonPost.com.
The LA Times has a nice piece on John Edwards and the major themes of his campaign:
WASHINGTON — When Elaine Ellis began her rounds as a New York nursing assistant one morning this spring, she had an improbable companion: John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, who had accepted a union invitation to spend the day with a low-wage worker.
When Ohio steelworkers went on strike last fall to protest a plant closing, who joined their rally? John Edwards.
Next month, low-income survivors of Hurricane Katrina will have another visit from former Sen. Edwards (D-N.C.), who announced his presidential campaign amid the storm rubble of New Orleans.
For more than two years, Edwards has been methodically building his campaign around an issue long shunned by leading Democratic candidates: the plight of the poor and working class. He has backed up his public appearances with unusually detailed proposals to provide universal healthcare, raise taxes on the rich and eliminate poverty over the next 30 years.
“This is a huge moral issue facing the country,” Edwards said in a telephone interview as he headed into a Memorial Day weekend campaign swing through Iowa. “I don’t see in polls that it is a driving issue [for voters], but it is for me.”
Of course, any establishment media article on poverty and politics wouldn’t be complete, er, "balanced," if it didn’t raise the specter of "class warfare":
But Edwards’ 2008 strategy carries risks, in part because it speaks most directly to a slice of the electorate that has notably little political clout. Perhaps the last major presidential candidate to make fighting poverty a central theme was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in 1968, before his assassination that June. Some analysts warn that an agenda that might suggest “class warfare” risks alienating middle-class swing voters and moderate Democrats who do not want to revive criticisms that theirs is the party of the poor.
Now, as anyone with sufficient sense knows, there’s "class warfare" going on… just ask Warren E. Buffett:
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Some Summer reading to look forward to, from Al Gore — The Assult on Reason:
American democracy is now in danger-not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
