=="This is the cause of my life," says John Edwards. "When I die, if I've done something serious to help eradicate poverty, I'll die a happy man." The candidate and I are riding in a minivan from Youngstown, Ohio to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Day Two of his "Road to One America Tour," which Edwards and everyone else has taken to calling the Poverty Tour. It's a three-day, eight-state marathon meant to shine a light on the 37 million Americans stuck on the cold, hard bottom of the economic barrel, and to
explore "not just what's wrong," as he says, "but what we can do to make it right... and actually end poverty in America within the next 30 years." Who says our politicians have forgotten how to think big?==
==Now, as we roll toward Pittsburgh,
Edwards is talking about why he has taken on this issue. His own childhood began amid the working poor in North Carolina, but as his father, a textile mill worker, moved up the ladder, his family became solidly middle class, "which is the way it's supposed to work," he says, but all too often these days it does not. The former senator talked about the problems of the poor while running for president in 2003-04, and after his run for the vice presidency alongside John Kerry fell short,
he spent a great deal of time studying the issue, visiting programs like Beatitude House and founding the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, where he'd attended law school. "I always felt like these people just needed an advocate," he says. "Somebody who would tell the country their real stories."
And that, he says, is what this Poverty Tour was designed to do. In fact, on Day One in Canton Mississippi,
Edwards tells the crowd of reporters and cameras and microphone sticks that "I would request that you focus on the stories of the people we're hearing from and not on me." I think it must be the first time I've ever heard a presidential candidate plead with his media entourage not to write about him. Edwards says he is "taking a break" from his usual campaign routine — no visits to early primary states, no fund-raisers — and he's doing his best to sound like a maverick risk-taker. Asked at one point why he thinks poverty is a vote-winning issue, he says, "I don't know that it is. This is not a political strategy. It's a huge moral issue facing America."
It is certainly something most politicians don't talk about and most voters don't ask about. Democrats with national aspirations have been avoiding the issue for the last quarter century or so, since Ronald Reagan cast them as the party of welfare-queen-coddling big gubment. But with economic anxiety, inequality and private equity billionaires grabbing national attention, Edwards believes all that might be changing. Barack Obama gives a speech on poverty this week. Hillary Clinton has assailed trickle down economics without the trickle.
But no other candidate is talking about poverty the way Edwards does — at length and to the exclusion of all other subjects for three long days. From time to time he tries to link the problems of the poor to the vulnerability of the middle class at large, touting, for instance, his plan for universal health care. ("It's not just about the poor," he says in one speech during the tour. "Everybody's at risk. Everybody's vulnerable.") But mostly — remarkably — he avoids that broader argument and
focuses on costly programs to help the truly impoverished: one million WPA-style "stepping stone" jobs, guaranteed paid sick leave for everyone, a minimum wage that isn't just raised to $9.50 but indexed so it goes up automatically.==
Read the rest at
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1644425,00.html
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