In the spirit of open debate, here is an article on Edwards that ran in LA Weekly in 2004.  Can Edwards supporters refute the claims?  

A Populist Make-over
Meet John Edwards, the corporate man

By Doug Ireland
Thursday, January 29, 2004 - 12:00 am

John Edwards has the best smile, the best hair and the most effective populist discourse of all the Democrats who want to be president. His endlessly repeated "Two Americas" stump speech -- flaying the haves for fleecing the have-nots -- has been carefully honed over months on the campaign trail. It won him second place in Iowa. But it takes more than one speech to give a contender real staying power -- as the cash-strapped Edwards discovered when, by an eyelash, he lost the third-place ticket out of New Hampshire to a treasury-rich general with a weightier résumé.

But what's under the hair and behind the smile? He was born Johnny Reid Edwards in a small mill town, but abandoned this moniker as too Snopes-y when he began the legal career that made him super-rich. He constantly says he's the "son of a mill worker," and to hear him tell it, he pulled himself up from poverty so crushing it evokes images of shoeless Li'l Abner. His "Two Americas" rally-pleaser gets much of its power from this poor-boy autobiography, but in making this tale his central campaign theme, Edwards gave his family history a cosmetic make-over, like the one he gave his name.

"The Edwardses were solidly middle class" when Johnny was growing up, according to a four-part profile of the North Carolina senator in his home state's most prestigious daily, the Raleigh News and Observer. It's true that for a few years as a young man Edwards' father worked on the floor of a Roger Milliken textile mill. But Edwards père (a lifelong Republican, like his reactionary boss) quickly climbed upward, becoming a monitor of worker productivity as a "time-study" man -- which any labor organizer in the South will tell you is a polite term for a stoolie who spies on the proletarian mill hands to get them to speed up production for the same low wages. Daddy Edwards' grassing got him promoted to supervisor, then to plant manager -- and he finally resigned to start his own business as a consultant to the textile industry. As a Boston Globe profile of Edwards put it last year, the senator never "notes that his father was part of management . . . `John was more middle class than most of us,'" says Bill Garner, a high school friend and college roommate.

Edwards' legislative record -- what little there is of it -- is hardly populist. In fact, Edwards is a classic, corporate-friendly, centrist New Democrat. In his five years as a freshman senator, Edwards on his own produced little legislation, much less than some other first-termers -- although he was assigned by Tom Daschle to represent the Democrats in negotiations over a patients' bill of rights, and so can boast he was a co-sponsor of the final, but aborted, bill.

However, there's one highly significant chapter in his Senate career omitted from Edwards' campaign Web site. Edwards, who comes from a state where banking is big business, played a critical role in brokering legislation to allow banks to sell mutual funds and insurance, and to engage in other speculative ventures. This law, worth hundreds of billions to the banks, blasted a gigantic hole in the Glass-Steagal banking law's firewall of protections designed to prevent the kinds of bank collapses that marked the Great Depression of the '30s -- meaning that it put the money of Joe Six-Pack depositors at risk. Such a gigantic boon to the banking lobby can hardly be classed as a populist victory.

If there was real depth to Edwards' rhetorical populism, one would expect to find it in "Real Solutions for America." That's the 60-page campaign booklet that Edwards refers to in his stump speech. But when one checks out these "real solutions" (available on his Web site), one finds a lot of nice-sounding hot air, some innocuous small-bore proposals -- and few specific details. On a number of important matters -- example: federal corporate welfare -- the "solutions" Edwards' speeches describe as "bold" involve . . . appointing a commission.

Sometimes, the pamphlet contradicts Edwards' reality. Example: "Some tax lawyers make millions through flimsy letters telling clients how to shelter their income. Edwards will stop these abuses," it claims. But in 1995, Edwards -- already a multimillionaire -- set up a professional corporation to shelter at least $10 million in legal earnings from having to pay Medicare taxes on them, saving himself some $290,000, according to the News and Observer, which quoted a top specialist from the American Institute of CPAs as labeling this trick "gaming the system." Populist hypocrisy?

The foreign and defense policy sections of the pamphlet are similarly airy and detail-free, with lots of boilerplate guff about "promoting democratic values." And while Edwards, when campaigning, bashes John Ashcroft for assaults on civil liberties, his pamphlet boasts that he'd "create thousands of neighborhood watch groups by 2007," which sounds suspiciously akin to Ashcroft's infamous TIPS program of setting citizen to spy on citizen. Edwards, of course, voted for both the blank check to Dubya for war in Iraq, and for the civil liberties-shredding Patriot Act. He's in no position to take on Dubya over his lies about Iraq's WMD -- for Edwards himself proclaimed, as late as October 10, 2002, "We know that Hussein has chemical and biological weapons"; and hailed the invasion of Iraq, which "still might prove a victory for people everywhere . . . who seek to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction."

The Web zine Slate called him "more hawkish than all the Democratic candidates except for Joe Lieberman." Example: As a senator, Edwards voted to deploy the "Star Wars" national missile defense as soon as possible -- but you won't find this controversial position in Johnny's feel-good pamphlet. His solution to the quagmire of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is not to hand it over to the United Nations -- of which Edwards has been a tart critic -- but to have Iraq policed by NATO, which is not exactly what most of the world would interpret as a step toward the international rule of law.

Edwards is certainly clever, but his knowledge base is awfully thin -- only Al Sharpton's is thinner. In the last New Hampshire debate, he didn't know what the Defense of Marriage Act really said -- despite the fact that the GOP is making gay marriage the hot-button social issue in '04. He's startlingly callow to go up against Dubya, no matter how good a debater he is. Example: In the June 2003 Washington Monthly, its iconoclastic editor, Charlie Peters, reported the following anecdote: "One evening while he was campaigning for the Senate in North Carolina, Edwards was faced with a choice of several events he might attend. An advance man suggested, `Maybe we ought to go to the reception for Leah Rabin.' `Who's she?' `Yitzhak Rabin's widow,' replied the aide. `Who was he?' asked Edwards."

Edwards on the stump likes to proclaim, "What you see is what you get." Not quite, Johnny.

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Is Chuck Hagel unbeatable in the general election?  A hansome, anti-war Republican and Vietnam veteran.  He seems to be the new McCain, appealing to swing voters and even some Democrats.  If he manages to win the nomination, by convincing the powerbrokers and pragmatists in the Republican machine that he can't lose in the general, are the Democrats in for a tough race in '08?  Who matches up best against Hagel?

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If Joe Biden was not misquoted in his NY Observer interview, his career in the Unites States Senate should come to an end.  Here is his comment on Barack Obama:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Therefore, up to this point, mainstream African Americans have been neither "articulate" nor "bright" nor "clean" nor "nice-looking."

Remember his derogatory comments about Indian Americans and convenience stores?

http://www.observer.com/20070205/2007020 5_Jason_Horowitz_pageone_newsstory1.html

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In the spirit of advancing a more constructive dialogue on Obama, here's David Sirota's review of the Senator's recent speech in New Hampshire.  Perhaps this provides a new point of departure for a SUBSTANTIVE discussion of our concerns and hopes for Obama?

Obama - Power Challenger or Power Appeaser?

By David Sirota

Over the weekend, Barack Obama (D), the Senator from Illinois, delivered his first major presidential campaign speech in New Hampshire. The remarks, which you can see on C-SPAN's webpage, were covered typically by the national media - more horse race and style rather than actually letting the public know what he actually said on substance. A look at that angle tells us a good deal about Obama's outlook and what he would actually do - or not do - as president.

Most of Obama's speech is a rambling ode to happy-sounding concepts like "democracy" and "unity" and "bipartisanship." It was only toward the end that the audience got a taste of substance on the defining economic issue of the next 50 years: globalization. Here's how Obama started off on that subject (at around 43 minutes into the video of his speech):

"People notice what's going on overseas and they say we are not afraid to compete. But as globalization advances and corporations bottom lines know no borders and our young people are competing against children not just in California or Florida or Illinois they are competing against folks in Calcutta or Beijing."

Sounds good so far - sounds like we're going to get some honest straight talk about how the rules of trade are rigged to protect patents, copyrights and intellectual property, but not to protect human rights, union rights, wage levels or the environment, and that such a tilted playing field unfairly forces Americans to compete with slave labor. But that's not what we get from Obama. He immediately goes on to say the following, and then moves on to another subject:

"At that point parents start saying why aren't we doing everything we can to prepare our young people making them adept at math and science so that they can get the jobs of the future and be the innovators of the future? Why wouldn't we invest in early childhood education to bring every child up to par? Why wouldn't we start paying our teachers more and help develop training for them to recruit the best and the brightest for the classroom? Why on earth would we start increasing the cost of student loans at the precise time we know that our young people are going to be needing a college education more than ever?"

Yes, it is the Great Education Myth - the idea that if we only just made everyone in America smarter, we would solve outsourcing, wage depression and health care/pension benefit cuts that are the result of forcing Americans to compete in an international race to the bottom. As I wrote recently in the San Francisco Chronicle, this is one of the most dishonest myths out there, as the government's own data shows that, in fact, all of the major economic indicators are plummeting for college grads. You can make everyone in America a PhD, and all you would have is more unemployed PhD's - it would do almost nothing to address the fact that the very structure of our economy - our tax system, our trade system and our corporate welfare system - is designed to help Big Money interests ship jobs offshore and lower wages/benefits here at home.

That gets us to exactly why the Great Education Myth is so often repeated by politicians: because it is the one myth that simultaneously looks like an economic panacea to the public and avoids offending the Big Money interests that bankroll political campaigns. Talk of reforming our trade policy to equalize capital protections (copyrights/patents) and human protections (labor/wage/enviro) threatens Corporate America's efforts to use foreign economic desperation to increase the bottom line. Talk of ending massive taxpayer subsidization of job outsourcing threatens the profit margins of the major political donors like General Electric that are benefiting from such gifts. Talk of cutting corporate welfare threatens the corporate welfare queens that write big checks to politicians. Talk of sending more taxpayer dollars to schools even if that prescription will do very little to address the country's structural economic challenges - well, that threatens nobody.

This isn't to say that we should underfund America's schools, or that our education system isn't a priority. Of course it is. But it is downright destructive to peddle the idea that paying teachers more or better funding the No Child Left Behind Act will be th majore key to solving the problems inherent in a globalization policy that incentivizes slave labor, sweatshops, union busting and environmental degradation. All this Tom Friedman-inspired Great Education Myth does is raise public expectations to unrealistic levels while and creating a justification for continuing to sell off our country's core economic policy to K Street lobbyists.

Obama, of course, has a mixed record on structural economic policy. He made a solid move by voting against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on the grounds that it did not include strong enough worker protections. But he wrote a Chicago Tribune op-ed making sure the right people knew "I wish I could vote in favor of CAFTA" and then, in classic fashion, created a strawman argument that an unnamed group of people who voted against CAFTA want to "stop globalization." Obama was also one of a handful of Democratic senators to vote for the Oman Free Trade Agreement - like CAFTA, an agreement with no labor, human rights or environmental protections. Then again, to his credit, he is now talking about pushing universal health care - not an easy issue to talk about with such powerful interests backing the status quo. But Obama has been careful not to actually offer any shred of detail on what exactly he means, and has criticized proposals for a single-payer system, much like the one that congressmen and senators are included in.

Many of Obama's followers get very quickly offended when anyone asks questions about their guy, and they sometimes even accuse people who ask such questions of working for another candidate (I am not working for another candidate). It is as if the entire world should stand aside silently as a lawmaker with all of two years experience on the national stage is coronated as the Democratic nominee for President.

But we, the public, have a right to know who this person is, how he sees the world, and what his attitudes are in dealing with the entrenched interests that are at the root of so many of our country's challenges. We have a right to know the answers to these questions both because elections are about more than celebrity worship and because the answers to these questions will tell us whether a candidate knows what it takes to win the election. We may recall, the last successful Democratic presidential challenger candidate, Bill Clinton in 1992, won not by appeasing power or preaching nebulous "bipartisanship" - but by voicing populist themes promising to go up against powerful interests that had corrupted Washington.

As I wrote in my profile of Obama in The Nation, when it comes to these structural issues, he is a man who seems caught between his background as a community organizer in touch with real people, and his current existence surrounded by Washington insiders and consultants who, by profession, push politicians to avoid challenging power. Peddling the Great Education Myth is the ultimate way to avoid challenging power. If this is just a fleeting tactic and Obama goes on to get serious about the real heart of our economic challenges, then he may be the great presidential candidate Democrats need. But if this aversion to confronting power previews the rest of his campaign, there will indeed be a major opening for a real populist candidate to win the nomination and the presidency.

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during the early stages of the Dean campaign?  It gave Dean, who had little money and little organization, a huge boost in voter outreach and name recognition, launching him in the polls.

Using the Lamont campaign's "Family, Friends & Neighbors" outreach tool to contact even casual friends and acquaintances in CT could very well make the difference in defeating Lieberman.  And even a brief note like "Hey Jack, just passing this along" breaks the ice.

http://www.familyfriendsandneighbors.net /

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