NYT Magazine: John Edwards' Poverty Platform

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NYT Magazine: John Edwards' Poverty Platform

The Money Issue
The Poverty Platform
By MATT BAI
Published: June 10, 2007
(This article will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.)

(Photograph by Robert Maxwell)

....It makes sense that John Edwards would be emotionally drained from traveling around the country while his wife, Elizabeth, is back in North Carolina, undergoing treatment for cancer. He has always been a more enthusiastic campaigner when Elizabeth, the more gregarious personality and more skillful political thinker of the pair, is at his side. Now he talks to her and his two youngest children several times a day from a cellphone, stealing a few minutes in a van or backstage before delivering a speech.

And yet, even taking that personal ordeal into account, there is something surprisingly arduous, even joyless at times, about Edwards’s second bid for the White House. Modern presidential campaigns tend to be aggressively upbeat and personality-driven; sure, every candidate has his favorite issues, but those issues generally exist mostly to color the candidate’s driving ambition with some shade of higher purpose. Edwards’s campaign feels oddly inverted. There’s no doubt he wants very badly to win, and yet there are times when the entire campaign seems little more than an excuse for him to talk about the issue with which he is now most closely identified: the case for the 37 million Americans living in poverty. The centerpiece of his campaign is a sprawling plan to eradicate poverty altogether by 2036. Echoing Robert Kennedy’s final campaign 40 years ago, Edwards, who has apologized for his Senate vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, argues that Americans can’t prevail in a civil war abroad but that we can — and should — wage another war on poverty at home. Everything else in the campaign, Edwards seems to think, all these carefully orchestrated photo ops and drop-bys and van rides with the media, is the kind of empty political theater from which he declared himself liberated after his last presidential run. He gives the impression that he simply endures it.

In that last campaign, in 2004, Edwards, running as the unflappable optimist in the Democratic primaries, wrote an inspiring book about his days as a plaintiff’s lawyer; this time, his unusual entry into the now-standard field of campaign books is called “Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream,” a collection of bleak and technical essays by leading liberal academics. In 2004, when Edwards repeated endlessly that he was the son of a millworker, he sounded proud and hopeful; now, when he brings up his humble beginnings, it’s mainly to suggest that he knows what it’s like to be one layoff or one X-ray away from destitution. This kind of grim “twilight in America” approach hasn’t been very successful for Democrats in recent decades. And yet Edwards could be poised to profit from the current moment in Democratic politics. Over the last few years, the party’s labor leaders and its left-leaning intelligentsia — Ivy League academics, columnists, economists — have become increasingly agitated about the ever-widening disparity between a tiny slice of wealthy Americans and the growing ranks of the working poor. These progressives see in Edwards’s campaign a test case for what they hope will be a more anticorporate, antitrade message for the Democratic Party.

The significance of what Edwards is saying, though, goes well beyond messaging and tactics. As the first candidate of the post-Bill Clinton, postindustrial era to lay out an ambitious antipoverty plan, he may force Democrats to contemplate difficult questions that they haven’t debated in decades — starting with what they’ve learned about poverty since Johnson and Kennedy’s time, and what, exactly, they’re willing to do about it....

(Matt Bai, a contributing writer, covers national politics for the magazine. His book, “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics,” will be published in August.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10edwards-t.html?adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1181360896-9EMDMDY3AN8wc1qJDK94WA&pagewanted=all