A sample of Edwards' stump speech

[JohnLocke]

A sample of Edwards' stump speech
Los Angeles Times
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Former Sen. John Edwards used this week to establish poverty as a central theme of his campaign. He spoke to audiences on the topic in number of cities, including Memphis, Pittsburgh and Prestonsburg, Ky. Each was a version of a stock stump speech, although Edwards, a seasoned trial lawyer, embellished and improvised often. Here is a sampling of some of his core ideas, from a speech delivered Monday at the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Assn., a Memphis nonprofit that provides services for the poor:

"I'm here to tell you we've got two different Americas. We got one for all those who are doing very, very well, and then one for everybody else. During the course of today, I have seen these two Americas very vividly and very clearly.

"Last night we were in New Orleans. We were walking in the 9th Ward.... It was fascinating to me. First of all, the government's been a mess in New Orleans. Everybody knows that. But we were walking through the 9th Ward, and the incredible strength and courage and resilience of the people of the 9th Ward is absolutely amazing. People who were rebuilding their homes really pretty much on their own, right? They're rebuilding their homes. They're rebuilding their lives.

"But the first place we went, the woman ... said to me, she said, 'Please go out and tell the people of America that people like me, yes, I was hit hard by the hurricane. Yes, we have suffered. Yes, we are struggling. But people get this image sometimes that the only people who are poor in America are the homeless. That's not true!'

"She said, 'I get up and go to work every day. I've been working my whole life. I don't know anything but hard work, and I want people to know: We're doing everything right, everything we're supposed to do, and we're still struggling.'

"That's what America has to understand. There's an extraordinary range of people who live in poverty in the United States of America, and they live there for very different reasons....

"Have we made some progress in America? Yes, we've made some progress. But we are still confronting that huge, major issue.... It is not OK in the richest nation on the planet that 37 million people would wake up every single day worried about feeding and clothing their children. We're better than that. America is better than that....

"I've had reporters asking me all day long the same thing. I've been asked ever since my presidential campaign started: Why do you do this? Why do you talk about this issue? This is not a good political issue. The American people don't care about this....

"America cares! And we have to convince the media and the world that America cares....

"But we can't stay home and hope that someone else is going to do this for us. We can't. We have to take responsibility. We have to take action.... To paraphrase Gandhi, you have to be the change that you believe in."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-edwardsspeech21jul21,1,3963608.story?coll=la-news-politics-national&ctrack=1&cset=true