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John Edwards - Money - Economics - Poverty - Presidential Elections of... http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2007/06/10/magazine/10... June 10, 2007 THE MONEY ISSUE The Poverty Platform By MATT BAI In April 1964, when Lyndon Johnson sought to rally public support for his new War on Poverty, he did it while sitting on a pile of two-by-fours on a front porch in Inez, Ky. — an appearance that helped establish the Appalachian South as a national symbol of economic deprivation. And so it was fitting that John Edwards, announcing his candidacy for president at the end of last year, chose as his setting not his hometown, Robbins, N.C., where he unveiled his first presidential campaign four years earlier, but the front yard of a mangled brick house in New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward. New Orleans is the new national shorthand for neglect, and it is, not coincidentally, the spiritual center of Edwards’s campaign. After Hurricane Katrina washed away, with brutal efficiency, some of America’s most impoverished neighborhoods, Edwards took more than 700 students to the submerged city to help rebuild homes and schools, and in the months since then, he has never stayed away for long. “I can always tell when he’s been to New Orleans,” says Bruce Raynor, a co-president of the hotel and garment workers’ union, who is close to the former senator. “His passions are stirred. It angers him.” On his most recent trip to New Orleans, on a Friday early last month, Edwards returned to the Upper Ninth Ward. Riding over in a van with Edwards and the actor Danny Glover, whom Edwards got to know when they toured the country together to help organize hotel workers last year, I remarked that until now I’d seen the hurricane’s damage only through the lens of a television camera. “It hasn’t changed,” Edwards said gloomily, gazing out the window. Rain clouds were gathering. “The Ninth Ward is exactly the same as it was.” I asked him why. “That’s a really good question,” he said with a sigh. “I wish I had an answer.” Our first stop was a Habitat for Humanity rebuilding project. We parked on a block of boarded-up houses, and Edwards, wearing a navy blue work shirt, faded jeans and a tool belt, alighted from the van and walked to the work site, which was instantly surrounded by a swarm of photographers. He shook some hands and smiled, but it was clearly a forced smile, not that Edwards smile that looks as if someone just plugged him into a wall outlet. He waved his hammer around and pounded a nail or two, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Then he answered a round of questions at a microphone stand that had somehow appeared in the street. 1 of 15 6/19/2007 11:56 AM John Edwards - Money - Economics - Poverty - Presidential Elections of... http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2007/06/10/magazine/10... Next we piled back into the van and headed over to Orelia Tyler’s little brick house, the one where Edwards first announced his campaign just after Christmas. This was to be a reunion of sorts. “Oh, yeah, I remember this place,” Edwards said as we turned onto Tyler’s street. Tyler’s house smelled of the chocolate cake she had baked for the occasion. Edwards sat down on the couch in the freshly rebuilt living room — stucco walls, hardwood floors, lamps with the plastic still on their shades — next to Tyler’s sister, who was staying at Tyler’s because her own home remained uninhabitable. She was weeping. A fraudulent contractor had taken $20,000 from her and disappeared, she said, without so much as touching her decimated house. It had happened to a lot of families. She said the Bush administration’s Road Home assistance program had offered her a little more than $10,000 for rebuilding her house. “Ten thousand?” Edwards asked, incredulous. “Yes.” “And how much would you need to rebuild it?” “Sixty-eight thousand.” “Terrible,” Edwards said, shaking his head slowly. “I’m hurting,” Tyler’s sister said. “I just would like to get home.” I had the distinct sense that Edwards, who had been flying from one fund-raiser to another all week, might be thinking the same thing. He rubbed his eyes. After a few minutes of awkward conversation, he rose to leave. “Nice to seeyoo, darlin’,” he drawled, patting Tyler’s knee. We all climbed back into the van, Glover carrying the warm chocolate cake that Tyler never got the chance to serve. Edwards took a slice. He arrived in New Orleans in the middle of the night, he said, and hadn’t been able to sleep. He had stayed up for hours. I asked him why. “I don’t know,” Edwards answered, sounding resigned. It makes sense that John Edwards would be emotionally drained from traveling around the country while his wife, Elizabeth, is back in North Carolina, undergoing treatment for cancer. He has always been a more enthusiastic campaigner when Elizabeth, the more gregarious personality and more skillful political thinker of the pair, is at his side. Now he talks to her and his two youngest children several times a day from a cellphone, stealing a few minutes in a van or backstage before delivering a speech. And yet, even taking that personal ordeal into account, there is something surprisingly arduous, even joyless at times, about Edwards’s second bid for the White House. Modern presidential 2 of 15 6/19/2007 11:56 AM John Edwards - Money - Economics - Poverty - Presidential Elections of... http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2007/06/10/magazine/10... campaigns tend to be aggressively upbeat and personality-driven; sure, every candidate has his favorite issues, but those issues generally exist mostly to color the candidate’s driving ambition with some shade of higher purpose. Edwards’s campaign feels oddly inverted. There’s no doubt he wants very badly to win, and yet there are times when the entire campaign seems little more than an excuse for him to talk about the issue with which he is now most closely identified: the case for the 37 million Americans living in poverty. The centerpiece of his campaign is a sprawling plan to eradicate poverty altogether by 2036. Echoing Robert Kennedy’s final campaign 40 years ago, Edwards, who has apologized for his Senate vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, argues that Americans can’t prevail in a civil war abroad but that we can — and should — wage another war on poverty at home. Everything else in the campaign, Edwards seems to think, all these carefully orchestrated photo ops and drop-bys and van rides with the media, is the kind of empty political theater from which he declared himself liberated after his last presidential run. He gives the impression that he simply endures it. In that last campaign, in 2004, Edwards, running as the unflappable optimist in the Democratic primaries, wrote an inspiring book about his days as a plaintiff’s lawyer; this time, his unusual entry into the now-standard field of campaign books is called “Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream,” a collection of bleak and technical essays by leading liberal academics. In 2004, when Edwards repeated endlessly that he was the son of a millworker, he sounded proud and hopeful; now, when he brings up his humble beginnings, it’s mainly to suggest that he knows what it’s like to be one layoff or one X-ray away from destitution. This kind of grim “twilight in America” approach hasn’t been very successful for Democrats in recent decades. And yet Edwards could be poised to profit from the current moment in Democratic politics. Over the last few years, the party’s labor leaders and its left-leaning intelligentsia — Ivy League academics, columnists, economists — have become increasingly agitated about the ever-widening disparity between a tiny slice of wealthy Americans and the growing ranks of the working poor. These progressives see in Edwards’s campaign a test case for what they hope will be a more anticorporate, antitrade message for the Democratic Party. The significance of what Edwards is saying, though, goes well beyond messaging and tactics. As the first candidate of the post-Bill Clinton, postindustrial era to lay out an ambitious antipoverty plan, he may force Democrats to contemplate difficult questions that they haven’t debated in decades — starting with what they’ve learned about poverty since Johnson and Kennedy’s time, and what, exactly, they’re willing to do about it. If you’ve recently flipped to Lou Dobbs on CNN or opened the pages of a liberal political journal like The American Prospect, you might have the impression that America in the Bush years has slipped into a kind of Dickensian darkness, a period of unbridled greed and economic deprivation on a scale not seen in this country since the Great Depression. Like so many things in politics, this has some basis in truth, but only some. To compare Bush’s America with Herbert Hoover’s — or Lyndon Johnson’s, for that matter — is to engage in not very helpful hyperbole. According to the economists 3 of 15 6/19/2007 11:56 AM John Edwards - Money - Economics - Poverty - Presidential Elections of... http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2007/06/10/magazine/10... Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the average income of an American taxpayer in 1929, using today’s dollars, was about $16,000 a year; the entire middle class, in other words, was poor by modern standards.