EYE ON EDWARDS | A CAROLINAS NATIVE CAMPAIGNS FOR PRESIDENT

[surfermaw]

Source: McClatchy Newspapers

EYE ON EDWARDS | A CAROLINAS NATIVE CAMPAIGNS FOR PRESIDENT
Focus on poverty grew over time
LISA ZAGAROLI
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON --John Edwards likes to say that ridding the nation of poverty is the cause of his life.

But it was only in the past few years that it became a dominant public theme for the Democratic presidential candidate.

Edwards is expected to press his ideas on eradicating poverty in a campaign visit Thursday to South Carolina, which will hold its first-in-the-South key presidential primaries in January.

During his six years in elected office, Edwards only occasionally used his U.S. Senate platform to discuss the most economically desperate members of society.

Instead, he tended to concentrate on the middle class who needed a boost -- people with health insurance who didn't have access to specialty care, farmers who needed market assistance, folks who had jobs but needed government incentives to save more money.

"He is not known as an anti-poverty warrior -- let's put it that way," says Scott Spitzer, an assistant professor of political science who studies poverty politics at California State University in Fullerton. Still, he says, Edwards' current passion is a logical extension of his earlier theme of trying to "even the score" for the little guy.




Read more: http://www.charlotte.com/politics/story/309073.html

[JDPriestly]

1. Strengthening the middle class and eliminating poverty are two

aspects of the same thing. The American dream is to be able to pay your own way, to enjoy leading an independent life in which you are able to make as many choices as possible for yourself. Strengthening the middle class and eliminating poverty put achieving the American dream withing reach of more Americans. That is what our country is about. Go, Edwards.