Liberal College Kid

Steven E. Landsburg, a columnist for the New York Times, thinks that the two Republican front runners, McCain and Romney, are too liberal. At least in one case.

In the last few days, there has been a lot of talk from McCain and Romney about how to deal with jobs disappearing due to globalization and outsourcing. Because they were campaigning in Michigan, the issue was particularly relevant, a state where the automobile industry was once an enormous employment provider. Now, however, the migration of factories overseas has resulted in an unemployment rate in Michigan that is the highest in the country. McCain and Romney, despite having different outlooks on the future of the automobile industry in that state, are both proposing government programs that would be available to downsized employees that would retrain them for new work opportunities.

In an attempt to show how ridiculous these programs would be, Landsburg applies cold economic reasoning to the plight of these unemployed workers. First, he gives us the standard free trade zealot response, namely, that Americans as a group benefit so much from cheap, foreign labor that it more than makes up for the loss of a few, insignificant American jobs. Now, as ugly as this fact is, there is some truth to it. The goods that we consume so vigorously do, in many cases, owe their low prices to outsourcing and foreign labor. Obviously, this is a touchy subject. There are many valid arguments on both sides of this issue, and the answer is not completely clear.

But what is clear, to even the Republican presidential candidates, is that the situation that middle class workers are put into when their factories or offices are moved to another, more profitable country, is dangerous to their livelihood, and that there should be some measure of safety from complete financial collapse for them. This view is pretty standard on the left, but with the rising number of instances in which this occurs, even pro-business, free trade conservatives have been forced to face this fact. However, Landsburg disagrees: he believes that we owe nothing to workers who are downsized and find themselves without an income to support them and their families. These, according to him, are the necessary casualties of economic progress:

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?

Um, no. Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born.

Here Landsburg insinuates what has become an increasingly common idea within the discipline of ecomonics, both inside and out of the academy: that economists know everything. They have, through their in depth studies, found a higher awareness and a more lucid insight into the workings of the world. In the game of global economics, the losers deserve nothing from those who have profited greatly from their loss, except a casual, “sorry, man, that’s the way the world works. You should be grateful for what you’ve gotten this far.” In this case, we are not even talking about the foreign “losers” in this game. He is not referring to citizens of the third world, who work in slave-like conditions and are compensated with poverty level wages. They do not even factor into his analysis in this piece. The losers he is referring to are our fellow Americans. Even they, according to Landsburg’s worldview, matter little. It’s dog-eat-dog, baby.

If Landsburg would just come out and admit that in his mind, some must suffer for the benefit of others, and that he really doesn’t care about what happens to the losers of economic progress, it would be, however reprehensible, a technically valid viewpoint. Instead, he tries to justify this phenomenon with, at best, skewed logic:

One way to think about that is to ask what your moral instincts tell you in analogous situations. Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door? Public policy should not be designed to advance moral instincts that we all reject every day of our lives.

Landsburg would like to think that these situations are analogous to the ones downsized workers face, but they simply are not. If you stop buying shampoo from your neighborhood pharmacy, how much of an impact is that really going to have on the success and profits of the store as a whole? Maybe they lose four dollars of business, maybe once a month. Even if every single person that used to buy shampoo at this establishment suddenly decides that they will switch to the internet for their hair product needs, its a safe assumption that this pharmacy will not go bankrupt. In the same way, most landlords own multiple properties, so if you decide to move to a cheaper apartment or house, they will most likely still have other places to collect rent from. And, if they do only own one property, I think its fair to assume that this is not their only source of income. Plus, in most areas (this is definitely true for my college town), landlords have no problems renting out properties once they are uninhabited. Landsburg’s final “analogy” is to the restaurant business. The same problems prevent it from being an accurate representation of what happens to laid off workers. Even if you do eat at McDonalds, instead of a diner nearby, not everyone is going to choose the fast food, and you yourself will probably not eat at McDonalds every time you dine out. There really are no meaningful comparisons in Landsburg’s analysis.

When a worker is downsized, their job moved to a foreign land or replaced by cheaper labor, they are completely cut off from all income, all at one time. Even if the situations that Landsburg posits do, eventually, lead to the pharmacy closing, the landlord losing all their tenants, or the restaurant failing, it would happen gradually, allowing the owner in question the time and some amount of income to invest in educating themselves and attempting to find a new career opportunity. This is not the case with people who just lose their jobs. It is fundamentally different when you own your own business and the prospect of losing all your income at the very worst can be seen coming through various signals (less and less shampoo sold over time, might want to think about getting out of the pharmacy business). Of course, in Landsburg’s calculating, free market economics-trained mind, there is no disctinction between these vastly different situations.

When someone is downsized, they immediately face a very serious crisis. They may have worked at the same factory for thirty years, in which time they have become highly specialized at a distinct skill that is not always transferable to another career. They may have spent years working up to the wages they now enjoy, and because of this, many of them have mortgages, car payments, and insurances premiums out for themselves and their families that are in line with the income they are now getting. If they lose this job and have no other skills with which to find a similar paying career, they have to start at the bottom. They can kiss their home, car and health insurance out the window. Despite whatever Landsburg may think, it IS society’s moral obligation to make sure that those who have spent years of their life working hard for an employer who has now made a profit-based decision to leave them jobless can still provide food, shelter and health care for themselves and their children. Or, if not all that, we should at least give them some education and training in order to make their transition from one job to another easier (you would think that someone who disdains government hand-outs would support a program that helps people get off unemployment). This is not just an indictment of businesses that decide to outsource: it is their right to do so, and as Landsburg keenly points out, it may be for the better of this country in some circumstances. But this does not mean that we have to forsake our own citizens in the process.

Something is often lacking in the recent wave of economists’ attempts to apply their discipline to all aspects of society (Landsburg himself released a book called More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics). They seem to feel less than content applying their methods to finances and want to branch out into other realms, from dating to parenthood. Why should we listen to them? What gives them the authority to comment on everything under the sun? Certainly not their degree in microeconomics. The real world has endless layers and subtleties that do not always fit into formulas and economists’ “rational” thinking. Sometimes, people would rather behave humanely (that is, like humans) rather than as machines engaged rational, cold decision making.

***

Update: A little while after I published this post, I went to Slate.com. What do I find? This piece, which is an excerpt from Tim Harford’s book, The Logic of Life. The specific section they have published here is titled “The Economics of Marriage.” Read it for yourself and let me know what you think of this new-found love for applying economics to everything.

There is also a BBC documentary called The Trap (by Adam Curtis) that deals, in part, with game theory (originally championed by John Nash, of A Beautiful Mind), its origins and application to economics, and since then, to many aspects of social life.

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“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and the obedience of the [U.S.] media.”

“The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or the modern corporation.”

-Noam Chomsky

Following the results of New Hampshire’s primary votes, it seems that John Edward’s presidential hopes are not looking good. It is infuriating, to me personally, that the whims of two states representing a tiny fraction of the American public can have such a substantial effect on the fate of the presidential race, and thereby the republic as a whole. But these frustrations, as much as I would like to now expand on them, are currently irrelevant, and should be reserved for a later date. What I do want to discuss, however, is what the Edwards campaign contributed to the general direction of the Democratic struggle for the presidency, and, vastly more important, the consciousness of the nation.

First of all: an indictment of the mainstream media. Throughout the last two years, as the candidates on both sides of the aisle have traveled around the country, the major news outlets in the United States (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name only a few) have depicted the Democratic race as a two-sided battle; namely, the battle between the Clinton and Obama campaigns. We would be foolish to think that this has not had a significant, if not vital, effect on the bid for the White House. The mainstream media is an incredibly powerful force. It has the ability to, and general does, shape our view of reality and world around us. The tell us who is a “viable” candidate and who is not (this, of course, is in reference to only one small aspect of the reality that the media shapes for us; the power they have extends far beyond campaigns and “politics,” in the strictest sense of the word). While anyone who considers themselves educated and enlightened acknowledges this fact, we must think further. Why is it that Edwards has been consistently counted out, considered a nearly hopeless candidate? Before you answer this question, try to disassociate yourself from everything you have been molded to think in the last year or two, everything that has told you that Obama and Clinton are strong candidates, and others like Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Kucinich, and even Paul are weak.

The easy answer is that all of the latter campaigns have been very short on money, some more desperate than others. Despite the fact that we live in a “democracy” (a word that, in my opinion, has lost much of its meaning over the last quarter-century), those that do not have adequate financial backing are doomed. This, perhaps, is one of the great tragedies that our nation has had to suffer, and, no doubt, will continue to suffer. But I hope, for the sake of our fate as a nation, that this is not your only justification for supporting a candidate: whether they have the financial assets necessary. Let’s ponder for a moment what having a large sum of money to support a campaign actually means. It means that those with the money will have the most television advertisements and radio commercials; they will have the most signs crowding the landscapes of our neighborhoods; they will have the greatest number of paid staff members to conduct activities like door-to-door recruiting and focus group organizing.

Those of us that claim to be on the Left should have an ideological discomfort with these facts. We tout our commitment to equality and fairness, and yet barely notice when the entire system of nominating a Democratic presidential candidate is blatantly unbalanced and favored towards those who have the most money. This is not to say that a candidate cannot rise from obscurity and become a serious prospect for the nomination. But, there are certain circumstances that must unfold in particular ways in order for this to occur. They must convince those in this society that have the most money to donate that they are justified in supporting them. This is what the Barack Obama campaign has done. The donors that are really necessary to the success of a campaign saw that his chances of winning the nomination were reasonable, and therefore pushed money his way. It’s an easily identifiable cycle.

But there is another, more important reason that certain campaigns are focused on by the media, and others are ignored or portrayed as hopeless. For candidates like Kucinich and the libertarian - turned - Republican Ron Paul, its because their platforms and ideas are, rightly, considered radical. Suddenly the number one issue in the Democratic campaign (and even in the Republican one, to a lesser extent) is “change.” But can we honestly say that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are proposing policy shifts (if you can find any at all on Obama’s side (I know that they are there, but he rarely references them)) that are even comparable to the platforms of Kucinich? The worst part about the entire game is that huge numbers of voters have a feeling in their gut that people like Kucinich and Paul may be the only candidates playing straight, making a priority of honesty, not simply speaking from focus group and poll results. Paul, especially, is the only one of the Republican candidates who really understands terrorism in the Middle East and its causes, yet when he attempts to explain them during debates, the other men jump on him, ridicule him, condescend to him, and make him seem delusional. Even those of people in this country that are the most outspoken about terrorism, specifically that it is simply a manifestation of the terrorists “hatred of our freedom,” must know at some level this is fantasy, and that the a major cause of hatred against the United States is not jealousy or a disdain for democracy, it is a reaction to the imperialistic foreign policies that have been in place since the end of World War II. These candidates are counted out from the beginning, none the less, most importantly because the media says they are. The fact is, that in our culture of twenty four hour non-stop media, no matter how much you canvas a state talking about your ideas, the majority of voters are seeing you through the camera lens. The more politically active and focused members of the country will go out to hear candidates speak in person, the ones that have rational reasons for their vote and can clearly demonstrate why they are supporting one candidate over the other. But in reality, elections are swayed in one direction or another largely because of how voters “feel” about a candidate, not for any identifiable policy factors, and these feelings are a direct result of how the the candidates are portrayed in the media. Its not an obvious process, in fact, in many cases, it is the most sophisticated propaganda system ever implemented. We think that we are making these decisions for ourselves, and to some extent we are, but these choices are made based on ideas and images formed in our minds via the media.

Why, then, would the media choose to raise certain candidates to the status of “viable” while leaving the majority nearly out of the conversation? The answer seems elementary, but it is worth noting.

All the major news outlets in this country are owned by a handful of corporations: the television channels, the newspapers, the magazines, and many important websites. The reporters and journalists employed by these powerful conglomerates are often forced to report what they are told, to shape the issues and the reality of American life into the vision that their bosses have. The alternative is often the loss of their job (see the documentary The Corporation, one version is here.) Like any powerful force in the world, the owners of these conglomerates have certain interests that they must protect in order to achieve their own personal goals, which are generally the increasing of their personal fortunes or the appeasement of their stockholders.

From the beginning John Edwards, like the so called “second and third tier candidates”, was described by the media as a long shot, despite the fact that he was perhaps the second most recognizable candidate on the Democratic side (after Clinton, and before the rise of Obama’s celebrity status). As we have already discussed, if the media deems your candidacy hopeless, it usually is, both because many people will hear and see less of you and because opportunistic but well informed voters will latch onto a candidate that they believe is most likely to be elected (I include myself in this category: many times I’ve passed on supporting my first choice candidate simply because “they’ll never get elected.”)

John Edwards has been one of the most disturbing candidates to the owners of mainstream media and their friends. While all democratic candidates use rhetoric suggesting a dislike for corporate greed and corruption, those who own these interest know that this is probably just an empty platform with which to get elected. Whatever they may say, the major and now the only probable candidates, like Clinton and Obama, still take donations from lobbyists and wealthy corporation owners, hence insuring that they will be indebted to them and their influence once in office. Edwards, on the other hand, refused to take this sort of donation. Despite the enormous temptation to do so, he would not be bought off, and his campaign has suffered for it, both in their financial capabilities and their media portrayal. While reading posts and comments on the internet, I am surprised how many talk about how sincere they think Edwards is (to be sure, not all people think that of him). There are certain aspects of his campaigning that bother me, certain tactics used, like the many sound bites he produces, but these are, unfortunately, a necessary part of campaigning, and beneath them, myself and many many others can see the sincerity from which they stem.

The central idea of Edwards’ campaign has been resisting corporate influence and putting a limit on their powers in the government. This is exactly the opposite of what corporations that own media are interested in. This desire is most obvious in the case of the FCC and the recent loosening of monopoly-preventing regulations under the Bush administration. But it also extends to their friends whose fortunes and power would be threatened were Edwards to win the presidency. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, surely one of the largest and most influential corporations in the world. Edwards’ stance on limiting their ability to exploit cheap labor (which in many cases more closely resembles slavery), control the vast majority of the market, destroy the environment and produce harmful products is dangerous to their interests. Consequently, when NBC and MSNBC along with their related outlets have discussed John Edwards, it has been in language that distorts his image and reduces his chances of nomination, as I pointed out in one instance in an earlier post. And they are obviously not the only corporate giants afraid of Edwards. Most pointedly he has attacked insurance and pharmaceutical companies (who, on another note, Mitt Romney said were not the problem), two of the most powerful lobbyist groups in Washington.

Corporations are not only afraid of the attacks they receive from Edwards, but also of who his most important supporters are. Edwards has been consistently backed by the major unions (the few that still exist) in a large majority of the country. It doesn’t take a degree in Labor-Industrial Relations to see the problems this could create for large businesses like Wal-mart that do not allow their employees to organize and pay them near poverty level wages in addition to providing little or no benefits. Raising the pay of these people and giving them health care and other benefits would cut deeply into the pockets of the Waltons, the family that owns the mega-giant corporation and whose members are among the wealthiest in the country. In fact, Wal-mart is the perfect example of all that corporate America has to lose under an Edwards presidency.

Edwards has not yet dropped out of the race. His determination to keep going is remarkable, although its prudence can and will be debated. Even if he does eventually decide to stop running, the impact that he has had on the tone of the campaign will be felt all the way to the popular election and hopefully into the policies of the next administration. Not since the early part of the twentieth century has there been a presidential election that has confronted the growing power of large conglomerate interests and the resulting social stratification it produces. The American public, largely thanks to Edwards, is more aware now, I hope, of all that is being stolen from them in order to line the pockets of the upper echelons of society. Hopefully those that bemoan the welfare state that gives assistance to single mothers (although it is not much) will start to realize that while these programs are cut, corporate welfare in the form of subsidiaries, tax breaks and policies that allow functional monopolies are growing. Both Obama and Clinton have already had to address this issue more than they would have if it would not have been inserted into the discussion so forcefully as is has been by Edwards, and hopefully they will continue to pay it the attention it deserves. Nearly all of the major problems in the United States today can be traced back to the skewed influence of the corporate world into public affairs, and this trend is becoming ever more important and visible. Whether or not Edwards goes on to win the nomination, a scenario that is unlikely now, this election season has been fundamentally altered by his presence, and all of us that believe in real, not just the appearance of, equality and fairness, have him to thank.

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On Friday the Washington Post published its biweekly column by Michael Gerson, this time titled “Democrats in Denial.” Before we discuss the basis of the article and the claims made within it, a little about Michael Gerson himself.

Gerson is a former senior policy adviser to the Heritage Foundation, an important and influential conservative think tank. He left that position in 1999 at the bidding of Karl Rove who thought that Gerson would be a nice addition to the presidential campaign for George W. Bush. After Bush was elected, Gerson became one of his speech writers and eventually became the head of the White House speech writing group. If anyone were to doubt the effect that his work has had on the rhetoric and political language of the current time, they would only need reminded that, according to Gerson himself, he was the originator of the “smoking gun - mushroom cloud” image, the term “axis of evil” and that he was one of the most prolific speech writers for Bush (it should be mentioned that other White House speech writers have accused Gerson of exaggerating his contributions, although the point is that even if he did not come up with all of the memorable lines of this administration, he desires to have people believe that he did - which may be even more revealing). In 2006 Gerson left the White House, wrote for a time at Newsweek, and ultimately was given a column at the Washington Post.

Now that we are familiar with Gerson’s past and his obvious interests in defending the actions of the administration, policies that he himself helped persuade the American public to accept, let’s look at some of the claims made in his latest piece.

The mood of this article strongly suggests that it is a reaction to the events in Iowa last night; specifically, that such an overwhelming amount of independents and even Republicans came out to participate in the Democratic caucuses. Gerson seems angry about this, and would like to convince us that most of the platforms of the Democratic candidates are no better - in fact, much worse - than those of the Bush administration. First he takes on the Iraq war. Again, let’s keep in mind the “smoking gun - mushroom cloud” metaphor that convinced the world that the war was justified in the first place, a metaphor that proved to be meaningless.

Gerson says:

“In Iraq, coalition casualties are down significantly, along with Iraqi civilian casualties, roadside bombings and suicide attacks. Large sections of Baghdad have been pacified, and the military rolls toward Mosul. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is in reeling retreat. And, most impressive, we have seen the first example of a large-scale Sunni Arab uprising against Islamic extremism. By one estimate, 30,000 former insurgents and tribal leaders are now fighting the enemy in Iraq, adding their surge to our own.

This progress is reversible, especially while Moqtada al-Sadr’s militias maintain the capability to mount their own mini-Tet Offensive. But Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy has succeeded with disorienting speed. Its combination of vision and competence will fill chapters in military textbooks.”

If the statistics Gerson is referring to are assumed to be accurate (this administration has been less than competent in compiling accurate numbers, especially in respect to the war where they have bet so much of their credibility. A key phrase here is “by one estimate” - almost certainly the highest estimate), then they do reflect that the surge may be working. And this is, at the risk of stepping out of the holy party line, a very good thing. We can debate the merits of the war as a whole, whether or not it should have happened in the first place, but if the surge is working, and therefore fewer Americans and innocent Iraqi’s are losing their lives, it should be congratulated. In this case, partisanship is not only irrelevant, it’s irresponsible. However, Gerson’s characterization of the surge as having worked with “disorienting speed” is an obvious exaggeration meant to insinuate that Petraeus completely blew everyone’s expectations out of the water. I also highly doubt that it will appear in future military textbooks. He wants us to believe that this has been one of the most impressive military undertakings in history, a claim that is almost laughable.

Next, Gerson says:

“In spite of these gains, Democratic presidential candidates still insist on reckless timetables for withdrawal — the surest way to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory.”

One wonders how closely Gerson has actually listened to the Democratic Candidates. Now that the race has effectively been reduced to Obama and Clinton, with moderate hopes left for Edwards, only one of the candidates has pledged to pull out all combat forces by 2013 (Edwards). Surely, both Obama and Clinton would like the war to be over, and they would definitely take whatever measures necessary to achieve these goals. But no matter how politically advantageous it is for any of them to claim they will end the war immediately (which they really have not anyway), they all know that a complete, and in Gerson’s words, reckless immediate withdrawal would indeed probably be a bad idea, and none of them would actually do it.

So far, the column is nothing too spectacular, embodying what most people on the right and definitely everyone inside the White House already thinks. But then he turns his attention to education and the Orwellian No Child Left Behind.

“Democratic rhetoric on education is also an assault on reality. Attacking No Child Left Behind is a reliable campaign applause line — Hillary Clinton promises to “end” the law, because it is “just not working.” Actually, the imposition of educational standards and testing has improved math and reading scores and begun narrowing the gap between disadvantaged and affluent students.”

While Gerson is very correct that attacking the law is a great platform for a campaign, he reveals in this statement more than he means to. Why is it, I would like to ask him, that so many people feel so passionately against No Child Left Behind? Gerson condescends to the nearly the entire American public in his assertion that he knows more about what is or is not working in their own school districts than they do. People are angry about NCLB because they see what it is really doing. It is taking the focus off of real education, the kind that molds students into free thinkers and better members of society and instead concentrating solely on arbitrary test results. If a school fails to meet up to these pointless standards, then they do not get sufficient funding. There is a GLARING logical problem here. Shouldn’t those schools that are not meeting the cut actually receive more funding so that they have a chance of improving their programs? Instead, in the twisted mind of Bush administration members like Gerson, schools that are already disadvantaged and poor (a subject that requires an entire look of its own) are punished and their students are, well, there’s no other term for it other than “left behind,” hence the Orwellian, call it exactly what it is not, sense of the program. In addition, it would be nice if Gerson would provide us with some of the data that he interprets as showing that the gap between rich and poor (sorry, “disadvantaged and affluent”) students is closing. Surely, these incredible findings should be on the front page of every major newspaper, since they directly contradict what any respectable social scientist has found lately.

“There is an angry backlash against NCLB among some Democratic interest groups. Suburban districts resent being labeled as failures just because some minority and disabled children aren’t making progress. But that is the whole purpose of the law — to prevent districts from hiding the poor performance of minorities behind the success of other students. Such districts should feel less resentment and more shame.”

I kid you not, I gasped when I read these sentences. This, above anything else Gerson posits in this piece, is shocking. He doesn’t even make an attempt to conceal his racism. Disabled children?! School districts should be ASHAMED that their disabled students are not meeting up to George Bush’s standards?! No, Mr. Gerson, YOU are the one who should feel shame.

Whether it is intentional or not (and I would bet that at some level, it is), the real result of education policies like No Child Left Behind is to form students into the kind of intellectually numb, power yielding adults that fit so well into the corporate world, where idiotic targets and goals are now the norm as well. And those schools who do not mold enough of their students into this picture will simply have to fend for themselves. It has resulted in many schools being forced to abandon many of their usual and time tested curricula and only teach “to the test” in order to ensure that they don’t fall short. A shocking number of students entering college are entirely unprepared for the sort of real challenges that await them, because they will be required to actually think once in a while.

Gerson accuses the Democratic presidential candidates of being out of touch with reality. But obviously it is he who has become so indoctrinated with the Bush-world view, having spent many years shoving it down the American public’s throat, that he can no longer see reality. The policies that he helped articulate for the president are, in his mind, beyond scrutiny, even as their blatant failures are becoming obvious throughout the country and the world. Now that there is good evidence that the Democratic party is stronger than it has been in a very long time, Gerson and others like him will scramble to find reasons why they are not to be trusted and are incompetent liars. But the public is sick of the nonsense that is constantly spewed by the administration, and many of them can feel at a visceral level and see at a intellectual one that there is in fact substance to what the Democrats are saying. They are finding a vision that has been completely absent in the current administration. And when one of them is elected as president, Gerson is going to have to finally pull himself out of his own denial and myopia and see that it was partly his own fault, with his glaring lies and misconceptions, that the Democrats are back in power.

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Presidential prospect John Edwards is on a mission this presidential season. He wants to end poverty in America. In my mind, Edwards is making poverty an issue the way Al Gore has become the champion of combating global climate change. Edwards’ website states:

End Poverty by 2036: John Edwards believes that ending poverty should be a goal our nation actively pursues. A national goal will rally support for the cause and help us measure our progress. In 1999, Tony Blair announced a 20-year goal to end child poverty in Great Britain and he has already reduced child poverty by 17 percent [Washington Post, 4/3/2006]. Edwards calls for a national effort to:
Cut poverty by one third within a decade, lifting 12 million Americans out of poverty by 2016.
End poverty within 30 years, lifting 37 million Americans out of poverty by 2036.

Currently the former Senator from North Carolina is in third place for the Democratic race trailing Obama and Clinton. The cool news though, is that should Edwards win the nomination, he would still beat any of the Republican challengers! The Edwards campaign has not done a good job of being able to really break out of the third place trap they’ve been in seemingly since people started announcing their intention to run.

Should Edwards not win the nomination, or the Vice Presidential nomination (I’m hoping for Bill Richardson as VP) he may be able to transcend the political spectrum to make poverty a values issue rather than a political one. Much like global warming, it’s hard to imagine that Republicans could really say that they are pro-poverty, which could make Edwards’ plans realistic regardless of who is in the white house. Then again, this is the party who has leaders who don’t believe in evolution… Wake up Walmart suporter = AWESOME!

Maybe one of these fights with Ann Coulter will push Edwards out in front of Obama or Hillary. Regardless, Edwards has made poverty the central issue of his campaign, and I fully believe it will become a central issue in America for the future regardless of who the next President is. You can read more about Edwards and his plan to end poverty in America at http://johnedwards.com/issues/poverty/

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