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Edwards' issue won't resonate

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published June 25, 2006

Last week, on the same day the U.S. Senate defeated two Democratic resolutions calling for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, John Edwards was down the street at the National Press Club trying to whip up support for another war. While Democrats and Republicans were engaged in a partisan firefight over Iraq policy on Capitol Hill, the former North Carolina senator and likely presidential candidate was calling for a war on poverty, although you won't catch him using the word "war."

The issue of poverty hasn't been on Democrats' agenda since LBJ promised a Great Society. Edwards is promising a "Working Society" that links government assistance to personal responsibility. As John Kerry's vice-presidential running-mate in 2004, Edwards dwelt on the growing divide between rich and poor - his "two Americas" theme. Now he is staking his presidential hopes on making poverty a major issue in the 2008 political debate.

That would be a huge challenge even in peacetime. It's not an issue that resonates with most voters these days. Edwards can talk his head off about poverty, but if U.S. forces are still bogged down in Iraq, which they well could be, the war quagmire is likely to be at the white-hot center of a presidential campaign debate that could be payback time for Democrats who supported President Bush's bugle call to war.

Antiwar Democrats have a score to settle with Hillary Clinton, who opposes setting a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and refuses to say her vote for the war was wrong. And according to a recent New York Times report, they are none too happy with the way John Kerry has fumbled the issue, both in the 2004 presidential campaign and more recently in the Senate. His resolution setting July 1, 2007, as the deadline for redeploying American troops was shot down by a vote 86 to 13 last week.

Humorist Andy Borowitz took dead aim at Kerry's ever-changing position on the war: "In a speech to the U. S. Senate today, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., made his strongest policy statement to date about the war in Iraq, saying that he had set a firm timetable for making up his mind about the conflict."

On Iraq, Edwards appears to have positioned himself safely, at least with antiwar Democrats and bloggers who are expected to be a force in the presidential primaries. He said he favors the immediate withdrawal of 40,000 troops, with the remaining 100,000 or so coming home in the next 12 to 18 months. He long ago disavowed his vote for the war, saying it was a mistake he regrets.

It's clear that Edwards would rather talk about poverty, his signature issue, than the war, and who could blame him. He believes we could end poverty in the United States over the next three decades at a cost of $15-billion to $20-billion a year. We've already poured more than $300-billion into the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no end in sight. The North Carolina populist believes we could cut poverty by a third in a decade, pulling 12-million Americans out an economic ditch for about half what we've already spent on the war.

Edwards emphasizes to audiences that he is not talking about another massive welfare program. "This not about pumping money into a broken government program," he e-mailed his supporters recently. "It's about finding ways to help everyone who works hard and makes responsible choices get ahead. It's about creating a new kind of social contract that I call the 'Working Society.' "

His antipoverty agenda calls for raising the minimum wage to $7.50 an hour, which he claims would lift a million people out of poverty, and creating a million temporary government-subsidized jobs over five years. He would use tax credits to help first-time house buyers and to pay for college for low-income workers and their families. No one would get a free ride. Everyone who benefitted would be expected to hold a job and make responsible choices in their lives, Edwards says. To help pay for his antipoverty program, he would try to roll back Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

"The debate on poverty is so stuck in the old policies of the past, the old days," Edwards told the Press Club audience, according to news accounts. "We've got one side driven by guilt and then we have another side who just doesn't believe that government can do anything effectively. The truth is, both sides should recognize what our whole economic future depends on providing upward mobility for everybody."

Edwards' idealism is admirable, even if the idea of ending poverty strikes some of us as farfetched. The issue belongs on our national agenda, but it is not likely to override the war and the threat of terrorism as the central concerns of most Americans. The issue is security, stupid.

[Last modified June 27, 2006, 10:04:52]