I’ll vote for John Edwards when my state has it’s primary, and you should, too.
As I said in my previous post, the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination will be our next president. So a lot of liberals/progressives/Democrats might have already stopped worrying about the future, secure in the knowledge that next January a grown-up will take office and things will get back to normal. But it really shouldn’t be good enough for any American that the new occupant of the White House will simply not be George Bush.
The Rove/Cheney/Bush years have done more damage to our standing in the world, to our educational system and our health care system, and to the economic viability of our working class than any administration during my long lifetime (that’s six decades). We don’t need to manage the mess. We need to clean it up, and we need to get started on that right away.
Of the three top Democratic candidates, John Edwards seems to be the only one who understands that the concentration of our nation’s wealth into the hands of a tiny minority is not only unfair, but in the end warps the political system itself: Money grants power, and as the money is distributed more and more up the class ladder, so goes the power, until the working people who create the wealth in the first place find themselves disenfranchised, their health care (if they’re lucky) served to them by insurance conglomerates who provide no medicine, but take their profits anyway, their votes directed to one or two preselected “safe” candidates, their judges appointed by an ever more insular ruling class, their laws written by lobbyists, their jobs reduced to low-paid, insecure drudgery as the corporatocracy engages in a global “race to the bottom” in wages and working conditions. John Edwards understands that America’s middle class is being systematically shredded, and without a healthy, educated middle class we will lose our democracy.
Edwards also knows that the wealthy elite in government and business will not relinquish their power and their unprecedented wealth simply because we ask them nicely, or present compelling logic as to why this is important to our republic.
And he is ready to fight them to take back the power. He has made a career as an attorney defending the rights of people who got run over by powerful corporations in their thoughtless scramble to accumulate more and more money. He fought for the little guy and won. He made the powerful pay, and this is what he says he will do as President. That’s the kind of President I want.
The national press and television news, which are owned by the nation’s largest and richest corporations, would like John Edwards to go away. They want him to drop out and leave the race to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They take Edwards at his word that he will be a friend of the people, and so they have tried to defeat him early in this presidential campaign, by making him invisible. He won’t be one of their preselected safe candidates, and it scares them that, despite a virtual blackout on coverage of him, his campaign continues.
I am inspired by the rhetoric of Barack Obama, but I can’t figure out what his plans are to make any of his campaign dreams come true. I look back longingly at the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but those days are over and I don’t believe Hillary Clinton can bring them back. Both Obama and Clinton have been in the Senate since the Democratic takeover in 2006, and they have been unable to stop the current president from getting everything he wants legislatively, even though he is less popular than Richard Nixon. In fact, it doesn’t look to me as if they have even tried. And in national polls taken prior to the early state primaries, neither Obama nor Clinton were as strong against probable Republican presidential opponents as John Edwards.
John Edwards has specific proposals to end the war in Iraq, bring about universal health coverage, reform the tax code, rescue the middle class, and more. He’s known as a smart and tireless fighter in the courtroom, always prepared, always focused. He’s been honest enough to admit that it was a mistake to give George Bush the power to attack Iraq in 2003, and hasn’t tried to hide behind an “if I knew then what I know now” excuse.
I believe he’d be a great president. He says he’ll stay in the race until the nominating convention. That means we all have a chance to vote for him, to poke a sharp stick in the eyes of the corporate media and demand a candidate with a real program. Only two states have held primaries so far. There’s a long way to go. Check out his web site. If he makes as much sense to you as he does to me, and if you’re tired of Chris Matthews telling you what to think, give him your vote in your state’s primary.
Well, that takes my breath away. I don’t believe the Dems have the White House sewn up in ’08 by any means. All it will take is one domestic terrorist to remind everyone that those 3,000 souls burned to death in New York were denied their civil rights, health care, freedom, right to choose, privacy and voting rights FOREVER.
You sure bought the Edwards sales pitch lock, stock and barrel. He’s a class-action ambulance chaser with a sizable investment in hedge funds. It’s parasitic trial lawyers like him who have run up the cost of health care in America, not the pharmaceutical companies, big business or corporate robber barons.
Freedom and capitalism have done more to raise the American middle class than any force in history. By harnessing personal incentive we have a country where even the poorest people live fat, own toasters and color TVs and air conditioners. The big lie of Edwards’ class warfare is that there is no perpetual underclass in America. That’s a constantly shifting pool of people, many of them in entry-level jobs or between jobs. Those who apply themselves move out of it, and those who make poor personal choices (like single motherhood and drug abuse) fall into it. Politicians won’t ever have much effect on the lives and futures of either of those groups.
I guess I’m going to have to come back in here from time to time and help you get your mind straight.
ST
Smokin’ T, you might wanna put down whatever it is you’re smokin’ and actually acquire some facts. Of course, the fact that you think “parasitic trial laywers . . . not the pharmaceutical companies, big business or corporate robber barons” have run up the cost of health care demonstrates how immune to facts you are. Your comments on poverty and the poor demonstrate a similar lack of knowledge. And, I suspect, an unwillingness to have your predjudices examined or challenged in any way whatsoever. It’s Larry’s blog, and he can do whatever he wants, but I sure wish you’d go somewhere else–one of the smug, self-congratualtory right-wing sites–the ones mostly populated by people who’ve been getting corrporate welfare their whole lives–and leave us reality-based people alone.
Smokin’ T – Your name-calling and guilt-by-association is not going to convince me. Conversely, it seems pretty obvious that you aren’t here to be convinced of anything, so I won’t try.
But for the benefit of others who might read this, I don’t think you’re correct in assuming that one terrorist attack will get everyone to vote Republican this November. In August of last year, a Fox News poll showed that 56% of respondents believe that George Bush will be remembered negatively by history on his handling of terrorism post 9/11, compared to 39% who thought he’d be seen in a positive light. And that’s viewers of Fox, the unofficial network of the Republican Party. So it’s not a slam dunk that Republicans benefit from terrorism.
The fact that the American underclass is made up of “a shifting pool” of workers doesn’t mean there is no American underclass. I submit that there is indeed a class war going on: The very rich are waging it, and they are winning. 3.3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since Bush took office. Unemployment currently stands at 5.9%, a figure which does not take into account workers who have been forced out of decent jobs into part-time low-wage work at MacDonalds and Walmart. Meanwhile, there are men like Dennis Kozlowski, CEO of Tyco, who was earning $100 million per year in salary, and is currently in prison for stealing an additional $400 million; and William McGuire of United HealthCare who was on a $124 million annual salary and is currently the holder of $1.7 BILLION in stock options, which were fraudulently backdated as they were issued to artificially enhance their value.
As you say, many people make poor life choices. But I wouldn’t include the 50 million uninsured, or the 50 million underinsured, or the 3.3 million who lost their good jobs to pay for the excesses of the CEO class. I understand that sometimes we are unable even to see all our possible choices. I’ve been pretty lucky in life, even though I’m not making a hundred million. I’m smart and educated. I went to public schools and state colleges, with the cost subsidized by my country. As a result, I’ve been able to see and make good life choices, but I don’t pretend that I could have done it alone, without help from my government and my country, help that has all but dried up in the ensuing decades. I support John Edwards because I think he will try to make it possible for the current and future generations to have the choices that I enjoyed, and I believe our nation will be better for it.
I’m going to take your closing remark as friendly banter. Thanks for reading!
Narya – Thanks for covering my back, sistah!
Smokin’ T, baby, hasn’t anyone ever shown you to follow the money?
Studies have shown that contrary to what the insurance industry would have us believe, that the cost of insurance, including malpractice insurance, goes up when the stock market goes down, and is not tied to the cost of settlements at all.
I know, it’s hard to believe that insurance companies would lie in order to help influence public opinion to help enact anti-tort legislation that would benefit them.
ST, you’ve probably been listening to Tucker Carlson carp about Edwards’s “jacuzzi case” for the last 4 years. Well, if you were really such a big fan of the facts as you claim to be, you might want to check out the facts of that case before you go calling Edwards an “ambulance chaser,” because I guarantee that if it had been your own little girl caught in that jacuzzi being slowly disemboweled by a defective drainage system that the jacuzzi company had willfully ignored despite many warnings and past incidents, that Edwards would have been the lawyer that your own mean, ignorant Republican ass would have tried to hire.
It’s a charming lie that all you need to make it in this country is a pair of bootstraps with which to pull yourself up. Well, my experience tells me otherwise. My uncle worked like a dog his whole life, and the only reason that he was alive to live through his second heart attack was because he had the job, and the health insurance, he earned as a member of the UAW. But protections like that are hard to come by these days, and will continue to be, as long as the corporate interests own our politicians and our media.
How dare you invoke the sacrifice of the secretaries, and restaurant workers, and delivery men, and janitors who died on 9/11, when you so obviously do not give a shit about their lives and what they need from our government in order to get a decent job and educate their children and keep their families healthy?
Grow up, ST. Stop talking out of your ass. Educate yourself. Stop parroting right-wing talking points and use your brain every once in a while, huh?
ST-You should really try to become a more rounded and compassionate person. Your ignorance and attitude are astounding. Really. I try to understand how someone could have your perverse anger and misunderstanding of the strengths of our great nation, but my head starts to hurt and I give up.
No prob, L-man. and it looks like there’s a whole crowd of us behind you, there.
We have a black man, a woman and a gay man running on the Democratic ticket (come onnn, Edwards TOTALLY sounds gay, doesn’t he, admit it. Plus, straight guys NEVER pay that much for haircuts) I point this out to my children almost every day. (not the gay thing, but the black man and the woman thing mostly. I would point out the gay thing but he’s really “not” gay, well, that’s what he says anyway… $400 haircut, people… just sayin’)
At any rate, I am honestly thrilled to be an American these days. It’s finally come to fruition, the fact that anyone can run for President of the United States. Hurray for change! Hurray for the federal government which mandated every single social change that happened in this country, all starting with my state of Alabama. Without the Democrats, there would still be segregation. There would still be ‘ colored only’ water fountains. There would be no black dude named “Obama” running for president.
How proud I am to point out to my children that a black man or a woman may soon be the president of the United States.
And it’s only possible for the thing to continue ad infinitum with the assistance of the ever-fearful working, aka “middle” classes.
S-T is definitely right that there are folks who will always choose the “low road”, and from amongst them will always be some few who, for a multitude of personal (and therefore hard to track) reasons, will rise from those beginnings. That is NOT the issue under discussion, though it does play a part in Class Warfare in so far as folks refuse to acknowledge the effects of mental illness + poverty in the choices individuals do make even when given better options.
Of course, that all misses the point that the U.S. is a democracy with a Constitution written And Amended to effect Equality amongst the whole of its citizenry. This means that all need be giving concern from the government; not JUST those who make the governments job EASY.
Bottom line for me in deciding that I’m going to support Obama is that I think he has the best chance, among 3 highly qualified candidates, to win this election. I believe that that IS BECAUSE of what you said above, Larry. The MSM (and short-sighted, narrow-minded folk such as S-T) have sabotaged Edwards life’s work. I like the man, and have until just recently been leaning towards his candidacy for many of the same reasons you’ve enumerated here.
I just think that the damage is, like that candidacy, done.
{sigh}
Ideals subsumed, I continue on as well I might.
Smokin’ T – Like George Bush in 2004, I didn’t know these swift boaters were going to do this, and I can’t take responsibility for the naughty things they say, or anything else.
All my defenders and Righteous Indignators – Thanks for your support.
SJ – The perfect spin.
Bains – Pragmatic, but I’m standin’ by my man. Remember, Edwards is a favorite son in South Carolina. If he somehow wins there, MSNBC will have to admit that he’s in the race. Then, who knows what might happen? As long as all three candidates are (more or less) acceptable to me, I’m going to vote for the one I think is best. I think any of them can win in November.
Boy, you make Edwards sound like the smartest junkyard dog in the bunch–sounds good to me!