When John Edwards spoke in Prestonsburg, KY today, RSI decided to be a good father and drive the 1 1/2 hours with my daughter to hear him speak.
The speech was advertised for 2pm, but Edwards had already started speaking at 1:55 when we arrived. No surprise for the Appalachian poverty belt, his theme was the "Two Americas." The One America was the very rich and the "Other America" was the rest of us who work for a living and struggle to make ends meet. All of Edwards' stories were about the Other America"--the hospital workers who could not afford health care, the families that were still poor despite being fully employed, and the tortures of the disability system. The same was the case with his policy prescriptions of universal health coverage, making unionization easier, raising the minimum wage, and making college available for everyone. Edwards embraces the values of equality, work, and responsibility, and all of his policy prescriptions were geared to making things somewhat easier for working people to get by.
Edwards is a skilled speaker but his speech was not rousing and he really needed to rouse this crowd. The people at the speech clearly enjoyed the celebrity aspect of John Edwards speaking in Prestonsburg and wanted to get excited about him as a presidential candidate. In the final analysis, they didn't get excited though. Edwards didn't deliver the goods as a candidate and people were still thinking of him more as a celebrity as they walked away from the speech.
I read once on MyDD that Edwards was a disappointment because he wasn't opposing anything. You could really see that weakness in his Prestonsburg speech. Edwards desperately needed some stories of the excesses of the wealthy and the powerful to balance off his stories of poverty and vulnerability. And he didn't have any. To give the most obvious example, there were no anecdotes of insurance companies rewarding employees for thinking up new reasons for denying coverage. Likewise, Edwards didn't condemn the high price of drugs or the enormous profits of pharmaceutical companies. He didn't say anything about CEO salaries or golden parachutes for fired executives, or anything like that at all. There wasn't a single reference to Michael Moore or Sicko.
Edwards may want to eliminate poverty in thirty years, but his speech almost cried out that he did not have the political backbone needed to take on the institutional interests of the big corporations, K street lobbyists, and their political allies. This is where the stuff on Edwards' appearance comes in. It's not just $400 haircut and the Breck girl jokes, it's also his perfect--and I mean absolutely perfect--tan. As long as Edwards isn't more aggressive, accusatory, and abrasive in his speeches, people are going to focus on his looks and keep wondering if he's a hypocrite or a dilettante.
It was also pretty obvious from watching Edwards that he is not a natural as a politician. Two of the fundamental gifts of politicians are remembering names and making happy small talk while working a crowd. I don't know about Edwards and names, but he definitely neither smiled nor seemed to say anything while he was signing autographs after the speech. In fact, Edwards had the kind of determined look that people have when they're doing something that's difficult or unpleasant for them.
As far behind as Edwards is in the polls, he needs to make it all look easier. Otherwise, he's going to continue to be what he was in Prestonsburg, a political celebrity rather than a political contender.
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It was good to see you Ric. I have to say, I noticed some of the weaker points you have mentioned though not all. When the speech began, the crowd was pretty enthused. We cheered him on. But he did start to lose us toward the middle and to the end for the reasons you mentioned. More stories about the people he has met on this tour. Health care horror stories, stories about how unions made life more tolerable for families like that of his parents. So I do agree, there were...weaknesses on display. The good news is, he has embraced and was willing to mention the problems associated with poverty. I felt he kind of shafted LBJ. Those programs of which he spoke were Johnson programs. No Kennedy did anything other than support those initiatives. In doling out credit for anti-poverty efforts it was too much RFK who visited in 1968 and not enough LBJ, who made visit three or four years earlier. Indeed, it was through Johnson's efforts that poverty was cut nearly in half during his tenure as President. I do have to wonder whether Edwards has the gravitas to push that kind of progressive legislation through the House and the Senate as Johnson did. particularly given the fact that the Democratic party enjoyed a huge majority in the mid-to-late 60s and for quite a few years beyond until the 1980 elections. Edwards would be up against slim majorities in both houses of Congress and I'm not sure at all whether or not he would be able to do the things (very necessary things), that he spoke of. I guess time will tell.
I wanted to attend but had a terrible bout of insomnia. It's plagued me for about two weeks now.
It's pretty apparent from Robert Caro's brilliant books on Johnson, that the Democrat majority you referred to Todd was not the sort we think of today. Many of those Democrats were conservatives from the South, who were no more interested in helping people than conservatives from the South are today. Johnson relied on his friendship with Senator Russell and the other conservatives to keep them silent, but he still had bare majorities to work with.
I love Caro's books!
Maybe he did not give those anecdotes about the rich and powerful because he is the posterbody for the rich and powerful, and it comes across as incredible hypocritical. As far as the proposed anecdotes about insurance companies rewarding employees for coming up with new ways to deny coverage, that is likely because that does not happen within the industry, at least not in my experience. I am sure that your perch in the ivory tower likely has more insight into these matters than someone who works in the industry though. Why must the Left always turn to demonizing the pharmaceutical industry? It would be interesting to see how their net profits, after R&D, compare to the net profits of the plaintiff bar. Maybe pharmaceutical companies should just start handing out their products on the streetcorner, though it would not take long for them to go out of business that way, and then we would lose their products altogether. You really think Edwards will talk about executive salaries given his income? Maybe he can condemn some hedge funds. He likely did not reference Michael Moore or Sicko because he would come across as even more of a sideshow than he already is.
All I want is to pay the same price for pharmaceuticals that people pay in France. Given that we're right and the French are wrong about everything, my sense of patriotism is offended by the fact that we pay more.
That thing about health insurance employees being rewarded for thinking of new ways to exclude coverage was all over the internet a couple of weeks ago. The anecdote I remember was about someone coming up with the great idea of excluding people with pre-existing conditions that they "should" have known about.
As for Edwards, he's running a campaign about creating more equality. If he wants to do that successfully, he'll have to take a lot more shots at the people who are making things tough on poor people. People like the merger specialists, health insurance companies, and the pharaceutical companies. People like you.
People like himself.
Stay in the shallow end "Anonymous". Anyone who would believe the trash that Caro spewed in his effort to trash Johnson is an excellent prospective buyer of the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course he had to work with those idiots in the south to pass what needed to be passed. But to suggest that he was in league with them is utterly without merit. He counted on the now extinct northern liberal, or Rockefellar Republicans to pass his progressive agenda as well. The Democrat who winds up in the White House will not have a reasonable opposition minority party to work with as Johnson had. He/she will face a vitriolic, spiteful Republican minority who will block his/her legislation just for the sake of blocking it. My point was that Johnson had the political will to do all that he did on the domestic front AND he had a Congress made up of rational Republicans who could counter the irrational, and by that time, nearly extinct "Dixiecrats". Those people and their political heirs ARE the modern Republican party. So my concern about Edwards is that he might not be able to handle the unbelievable extremism and shockingly untutored thinking and disgusting Lee Atwater/Karl Rove "Take No Prisoners" style of what I hesitate to call governing. Because that is what he or Hillary, or Barak, will encounter in dealing with Congressional Republicans. People like you. So brave and proud of your right-wing heroes that you are willing to put your name....oh wait, I forgot, you didn't want your name associated with them. "Anonymous?" I can't say I blame you.
Todd, I didn't put a name on it, because I didn't want the Goldstein fanatics to know I was posting here too.
As for your Caro points, I hesitate, as someone who has read all three volumes of his Johnson biographies and listened to the fantastic interview he did with Kurt Vonnegut, to ascribe Mr. Caro's writings as "trash." Especially since they are so meticulously documented.
All Caro does is point out what an incredibly complex world we live in, where a Southern Senator, who won his election by cheating an honest man, who was backed by the most reactionary men in Texas, who was a physical coward did such monumentally wonderful things. Johnson presidency will always be colored by Vietnam, but he ensured the first Civil Rights bill in almost 80 made it through the Senate in '55, he broke the Southern filibuster in '64...he started the war on poverty...He did so many awesome things.
I am not the right-winger who posted after me. His screen name from Protein Wisdom is "JD" and he is relatively (by his report) high up in an insurance company.
As for me, the Edwards campaign is the only national campaign I have ever donated to and I support his "Two Americas" campaign completely. I hope he wins the nomination and I hope he pushes through that program. You and I are on the same side.
As for JD's "points" they are typical insurance industry defense. The day I see the Randall Tobias (former head of Eli Lilly and user of prostitutes) struggling to pay his medical bills (assuming he's sold the multi-million dollar mansion his poor margins enabled him to buy) is the day I will feel sorry for him and his Robber Baron friends.
Timb??
Having re-read everything, I do see what you mean. I have been mixing up different posts from different people. My problem with Caro's books is the kind of seething hatred that I percieve seeping through directed at Johnson from time-to time. It seems as though Caro has some sort of personal act to grind with a man who can not defend himself. Given my high regard for LBJ and the goals and what remains of the legacy of the Great Society programs, I tend to feel it necessary to defend him. And it's not as though Vietnam was all him. Eisenhower sent the first troops there. JFK escalated to around 20,000. The Great God RFK supported sending more troops there and then stabbed Johnson in the back every chance he got. For his own part, Johnson was as much a victim of Vietnam as the rest of the nation. His advisors were so sure something could be "won" there and he believed them because of their elegent ivy-league educations. Then one-by-one, they jumped ship like rats leaving Johnson twisting in the wind with a war that had aquired a momentum of its own. It destroyed the man's health both physically, and I think to some extent, psychologically as well. Each death killed him a little more, even after Mr. Nixon took charge of the war and chose to take it into Cambodia.
But, that aside, my apologies for mixing you up with some "right-wing talking points" sycophant. It seems we are essentially on the same side after all.
Todd, I agree with you about the public Johnson, and I do think the war took a toll on his health. In the end, he was aware that men in his family lived short lives due to heart problems and he had first heart attack in 1956.
We live in sadly different times now, where the vast majority of the people who run the country couldn't care less about the other folks. Our country is teetering at the seams and those people don't see it on the 65" Plasma TV's and air-conditioned Saabs. Infrastructure is collapsing, roads are crumbling, airline flights are AN AVERAGE of 65 minutes late this summer. Yet, the private sector is the answer to everything, according to these people.
Well, in Johnson's days it took the Feds to provide electricity to the rural poor and home loans and SBA loans, it took the fed to de-segregate the country, and it took the feds to help the poor.
We now have a government that doesn't care whit one about the poor (let's roll a B tape here of Katrina folks), a supreme court that tells us that segregated schools ARE consistent with Brown v Board of Education, and the last Democratic President (excoriated by the Protein Wisdom folks as "liberal") canceled benefits to the poor as a political expediency.
We need an LBJ or an Roosevelt (frankly, either one) to re-establish the social contract in this country. In my opinion, that person is Edwards, but we need someone.
And, yes, JD, if you're still perusing, I'm talking increased Federal action to make the country better. There are some things only government should and can do. I hope we remember that and the reactionary Gilded Agers attempt to re-take the country and return us to 1921.
Tim, we are in agreement.
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