Edwards at Yearly Kos: "Change Is What America Needs"

Posted by Adam Howard at 7:42 PM on August 4, 2007.

John Edwards really made one thing clear to me during appearance at the Yearly Kos convention. He is ready to fight.

Now I hate negative campaigning but that’s not the kind of fighting he wants to do. He’s doing what he needs to do—draw real distinctions between himself and the other Democratic presidential candidates.

He entered his “break-out session” after the Yearly Kos debate..forum, whatever you want to call it, and pretty much right off the bat said this about his challenge to all the ‘08 candidates to disavow lobbyist contributions:

“We got some yes's and and one clear no. Senator Clinton made it clear she intends to continue taking Washington lobbyist money.”

Now, this is a serious issue, especially to progressives and Edwards knew he had caught onto something here and while the way he kept hammering away on this issue seemed a little bit desperate to me, it proved the point that Edwards is focused on the short game, winning over the base, the early primary states and then the nomination, while Hillary Clinton seems to be operating like she has the nomination pretty much in the bag and now must win over the general election crowd.

Edwards went on to steal a few pages from the Obama playbook by saying, “Do we want serious change is this country?” and adding, “We don’t need to trade one group of insiders for another group of insiders." Now how having served in the Senate for six years and then leaving three years later makes Edwards this total outsider I have no idea. But he really sold himself and in person he is undeniably energetic, quick on his feet and charming as hell.

Still, he was hit with questions from the Yearly Kos audience that he clearly wasn’t used to. A former colleague of mine from my Nation days, Liliana Segura, asked a terrific question regarding his hypocritical stance on the death penalty, which he didn’t exactly adequately respond to and when confronted on where he stood on impeachment ("What more does Bush have to do?" He was asked) he also was unsatisfying. At one point he defended himself by saying, “Look I’m not God, I’m just telling you what I believe.”

He was much stronger on issues like the minimum wage, immigration (“I don’t want to live in an America with a 1st class of citizens and a 2nd class of workers), the FISA bill and global warming (he also came out against liquid coal and nuclear power plants.)

I came away thinking Edwards was a top notch politician, with a shrewd campaign frighteningly dependent on a major victory in Iowa. I felt like he suffers from the same quality Hillary Clinton is attacked for—a kind of calculated coolness that many can find off-putting. He mentioned Elizabeth early on and that did a lot to win over the crowd and humanize him.

But I think if he indeed does become the nominee, and the warm reception he received at Yearly Kos implied a lot of progressives hope he does, he’ll have to answer for a lot of these pledges he’s been making now on the War and he’ll have to explain how he should be trusted with the presidency after he’s acknowledged that he was wrong on the most important decision of his political career—the authorization of the Iraq War.

I overheard some attendees talking about this before the presidential forum started and I heard one guy say, “I want a president who’s smarter than me and any child could have seen this war was going to be a disaster.” I’m inclined to agree with this and Edwards was one of those adults who was unable to see that or could see that but chose to support the war anyway for political reasons. Either way it will always create a sense of uneasiness about him with some folks from which I fear he might never recover. But I could be wrong. I often am.

After the days events, I rode back to my hotel and had probably the liveliest political conversation I'd had all weekend with a Chicago cab driver. I was heartened by the fact that he was generally pleased with all the candidates and yet was a bit put off by Hillary and cautiously optimistic about Obama in almost the identical way that I was. The more we talked the less I felt the need to preface my views as a little to the left or liberal and we were just talking and I began to think that the people back at that Yearly Kos are definitely not as far outside the mainstream as the press is sure to be reporting they are.

We want the same things as most Americans, we've simply have found a new style of expressing it. The cab driver I rode along with had no clue what a blog technically was and he seemed some of hostile to the concept until I explained what it was. Once he got it he just nodded in approval and said, "that makes sense." Yes, indeed it does.

Tagged as: blogs, election08, edwards, yearly kos

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.