Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Poverty may not be winning issue, but Edwards is taking it on tour

John Edwards is sounding themes similar to those of Robert F. Kennedy's in the 1960s. Like Kennedy, Edwards is embarking on a "Poverty Tour." Excerpts from two Kennedy speeches:

Hearing me, from Boston, you must think I talk funny.

The people of eastern Kentucky want to know how they can bring industry to the area. They want to know what can be done to encourage their people. What can be done to end welfare in the region and replace it with jobs? And I agree with them : Welfare is no answer. Jobs is the answer. And it's here that education is so important. It makes a major difference what kind of educational system exists ; industry goes where the brain power is.

There are great possibilities in eastern Kentucky. But there have to be people who are going to fight for eastern Kentucky. The ones that are really going to make the difference are you - the ones that are committed to get an education, the ones with the spirit, courage and commitment to stay in the mountains and serve.

You can make a difference. One person fighting for his people, his cause, can make a difference.

It is a revolutionary world we live in. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments.

For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked for us.

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American society.

In the past five years John Edwards has lost a chance at the presidency, lost the vice presidency, helped his wife beat breast cancer, volunteered his time for poor people, and then found out his wife again has cancer.

Somewhere in there, the former one-term senator from North Carolina decided he would run for president on an improbable issue: ending poverty in America, where one in eight people is impoverished.

As Edwards, who founded an anti-poverty center at the University of North Carolina, told a packed union hall just outside Las Vegas on Wednesday: "I want America to pay attention to the struggles and plight of millions of Americans."

Next week, he'll take a step further: Edwards will leave behind the important early primary and caucus states - Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina - for a few days, and embark on a "poverty tour " beginning in New Orleans, where his presidential campaign began in December in the devastated Ninth Ward, and ending in Prestonburg, Ky., in the heart of Appalachia.

It's a journey rich with historical symbolism. In 1968 Robert F. Kennedy set out on a similar journey and ended in Prestonburg . The Edwards tour will also visit Marks, Miss., where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began his "Poor People's March," also in 1968.

The images and sounds of those tours are part of American lore.

Peter Edelman, now a law professor at Georgetown University who helped Kennedy organize the tour, said he found the Edwards echo invigorating. "He cares about these issues, and it's not a winning issue," Edelman said.

Indeed, it's not a winning issue.

Here's a fact that encapsulates the uphill struggle of Edwards, once a highly paid trial lawyer: He trails in the polls - among poor voters.

Edwards can only seek solace in the fact that poor people don't usually vote, and vote even less often in the primaries and caucuses he'll need to win to secure the Democratic nomination.

Still, as was readily apparent in front of the 300 or so union members and Democratic activists Wednesday, Edwards remains a top-tier candidate with a shot at the nomination, given the current political and economic landscape.

Although those in the crowd were not poor, the poverty issue resonated , as it has in other early states, probably because these voters have watched the country's wealth and income become more concentrated since at least 1980.

The richest 1 percent of Americans in 2005 controlled nearly one-fifth of the nation's income, the greatest share since the ominous year of 1929.

Despite low unemployment and inflation, Americans tell pollsters they feel economically insecure because of the state of the health care system, exploding college costs and stories of jobs - blue- and white- collar - moving overseas.

Moreover, a recent Pew Center poll showed that Americans have moved to the left on economic issues, with a strong majority saying the government should do more to help those in need.

Liberals see their advantage and are running with it, pulling the Democratic Party and its presidential nominees in their direction. That's helped Edwards and his anti-poverty campaign.

Politics, aside, however, Edwards is clearly deeply interested in the issue, having studied it for the past several years.

He proposes raising the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2012 with regular increases after that. He advocates universal health care paid for by a tax increase on those earning more than $200,000 a year. He wants more union-friendly policies, and he favors giving significant aid to anyone wishing to go to college.

His campaign policy paper on the issue is even more comprehensive. It calls for helping the poor with child care and early childhood development; vastly expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a cash-assistance program for the working poor; adding 1 million housing vouchers over five years; and creating 1 million temporary jobs over five years to help ease people into the workforce.

His goal is cut poverty by one-third during the first decade, and eliminate it in 30 years.

In essence, he would be launching a second War on Poverty in the tradition of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. That war scored early victories, cutting poverty in half during the first 10 years, before stalling. Poverty has remained largely steady since.

Conservatives are calling the Edwards plan misguided and quixotic.

Douglas Besharov, a public policy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the cost of Edwards' plan makes it dead on arrival, especially when the Democratic-controlled Congress is fighting to pay for other programs on its agenda.

"The Democratic Congress is not rushing to enact any of these very expensive proposals because it knows it doesn't have the money and it has higher priorities," Besharov said. "They want to do universal health care and put more money in No Child Left Behind. There are loads of other places to spend this money."

In the end, he said, Edwards' plan will remain a campaign promise and nothing more.

But Besharov acknowledged the issue deserves attention. He said poverty, more so than health care, deserves a turn in the national spotlight, but that public policy should focus on the nation's education and skill gap, instead of raising the minimum wage, which he deemed an "inefficient and blunt" way to combat poverty.

Regardless of Edwards' focus on poverty, his biggest applause line Wednesday was a telling reminder of the issue most important to Democrats: "I have a very simple view of Iraq: America needs to be leaving Iraq."

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