The Long and the short of it all. First the short answers:

A man with big dreams, big ideas but practical ways to get there. A man who is a Builder and a Visionary with a gift for eloquence. A man who is an unrepentant optimist, but no Pollyanna. He’s a healthy skeptic like I am. He’s a hard worker who believes in teamwork; a man of manners and civility who is wicked smart and can deliver a knockout punch. His visions of the future are contagious and I caught the bug. He made me get off my butt and out of my safe cushy life of work, Manolos and Martinis. Here’s a brother who asks big things of me and not a Big Daddy who pats me on the head and tells me to go shopping.

And the long answers:

He has called for us “to build things up not tear things down”; not blowing things up or letting things rot. He’s asked us to question “what kind of leadership America should provide in the world?” He’s asked us “what kind of America do we want, not just today, but twenty years from now and how do we think we can get there from here?” He asks us to be like the Founders and “dream large”.

America was built on “optimism not cynicism”; “possibilities not problems”; “hope not despair”. After 6 years of hell, bad grammar, smugness and incompetence, I look forward to getting up in the morning and listening to John Edwards. He gets it. America is a place of hope. And let’s get practical, entrepreneurs and small businesses do well with an optimistic leader. Big Business, on the other hand, has had far too much public assistance. Time to rein in the corporate rascals and give an even playing field to small business including small farms and ranches.

Restoring the American dream: Bill Moyers points out that the American dream has been mugged. John Edwards lived the dream and has seen it disappear for most Americans. He wants to return the ability to dream and to prosper to average Americans. He dreamed of being a lawyer. His mother was a postal employee and his father worked hard in the textile mill, but was often passed over for promotions by college graduates. John Edwards was the first in his family to go to college and graduated with a degree in textile technology. But he couldn’t leave his dream behind and so enrolled in law school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where he met his wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of a decorated Navy pilot who flew reconnaissance missions over North Korea. In his law practice he defended primarily regular folks against big corporations and their teams of lawyers. His wife worked for the state’s attorney general and then went into bankruptcy law.

He will be the people’s President. He has chosen to remain in the heartland and not in the insular world of Washington. He went to a state university and a poor state at the time; not a Harvard or Yale or Skull and Bones candidate. He understands where most of us come from and the struggles that most of us have as we sit around the kitchen table figuring out our budgets. He comes from rural America and has seen large factory farms replace small family owned ones. He’s seen good jobs go overseas and seen average Americans having to compete with low wageworkers in third world countries. He is the only Presidential candidate who makes ending poverty not part of a laundry list, but the centerpiece of his vision for America and the world.

Dedicated his life to the rule of law, not the rule of men. He bases everything on law and the principles of justice. He has dedicated his life to defending the rights of the people as laid out in the Constitution. It is time we return to the idea of a president as a person who believes in our Constitution and does not want to dismantle it. We experimented with a CEO president and that is not what we want. A business is not a democracy. A CEO is a ruler and it’s his way or the highway. The founders would be appalled at this self-interest. They believed that leaders should be “disinterested” and Washington didn’t even take a salary. The founders were revolted by Aaron Burr’s use of office to make a profit for him and his friends. In a truly bi-partisan move, Hamilton, who couldn’t stand Jefferson, backed him over Burr for President. State politicians might be parochial, selfish and money grubbing, he felt, but the President of all the people should not be. The founders would be appalled at ruthless “bottom line” scam artist mentalities running our government.

So now what? How do we restore the freedom to prosper in peace?
He fixes things. He likes to build things. He built cases thoroughly, methodically. He won time and time again. But realized that he could only win for one person at a time. But he wanted to help more people. When his 16-year-old son was killed in a freak auto accident, he came out of his grief to seek public office partly inspired by his son’s desire to serve the public. (He still wears his son’s Outward Bound pin.) So he went for the Senate and won despite the odds. He soon realized that his talents did not lie in the slow deliberate clubby Senate. The Senate originally had been set up as the aristocratic branch of government as a check on the “herd”, on the working class’s house. Vestiges of the set-up remain as the Senate has come to represent the corporations like Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil and Monsanto. Edwards wants to push back against this new form of feudalism; this new form of bondage that has us in slavery to all kinds of monopolies that control our energy, our health and our food supply.

He has “Real Solutions” to many of our problems and has the personality type that demands much of himself and only slightly less from those around him. In other words, he makes us better. His vision starts with College for Everyone, housing vouchers for poor workers, decreasing the size of government bureaucracies like HUD; investment in alternative energy and mass transit. Stopping the privatization of our military, our prisons and our elections.

His solutions for Iraq are bold and he has taken the courageous and perhaps dangerous step of insisting that “First, we need to remove the image of an imperialist America from the landscape of Iraq. American contractors who have taken unfair advantage of the turmoil in Iraq need to leave Iraq. If that means Halliburton subsidiary KBR, then KBR should go. Such departures, and the return of the work to Iraqi businesses, would be a real statement about our hopes for the new nation.”

We are in a world of trouble. We are at the beginning of what James Howard Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency” aka the end of oil. We have not exported more than we import since 1980 and have for all intents and purposes become a third world nation. We have been conned by the cons into a disastrous experimentation with trickle down economics that saw the rich take their money and stick it off shore rather than trickling down even a little. We need somebody with a quick mind and relentless energy to get us through what could be the great unraveling of our economic and political system.

The messenger and the message; the leading man with the right script.
John Edwards has been given the gift of eloquence. I define eloquence as the ability to take complex ideas and wonky policies then communicate them simply and easily to his listeners. His years as a trial lawyers honed his skills of talking to a jury of his peers and not a bunch of boring pretentious politicians. Yet he never condescends to his audience with the fake country hokum we’ve had to endure for 6 years. His rhetoric is always designed to lift us up and demand the best of us. He appeals to our higher brain functions, not to our lizard brain. I came to admire him by reading his speeches, not by seeing him in person. In June of 2003 I read a speech of his where he remarked that we were “rewarding wealth over work” and that sentence struck me like a thunderbolt. When labor creates wealth, why had we abandoned our pride in work? When had we become ashamed of being called workers? Why was the investment class superior to the 98% of us who work for a living whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, managers, janitors or carpenters?

Then I started watching him on C-Span at the town meetings in Iowa. I was struck by how fast his mind worked and how he actually enjoyed the one on one discussion with the audience.
His wife Elizabeth also is great in town hall situations and loves conversation, which is part of community. The debates clinched it for me. Here was a man who never lost his sense of fairness but could deliver a sharp jab to the chin with lightening speed. No one was better at debate than he and no one seemed to be having more fun. That’s where it pays to be an extrovert. You gotta love being out there.

And finally, after 6 years of politics dominated by people with total lack of empathy; people who have made the case that Potomac Fever may just cause lack of the ability to get in other people’s shoes or even want to unless, of course, the shoes are from Fendis; I’m ready for some feelings again. After 6 years of rampant narcissism, “stuff happens” condescension, Marie Antoinette mothers and blubbering old patriarchs, I want somebody who makes an effort to understand the world and the people in it. I want a person who cannot bear to make a mistake twice and so admits it, studies it and never repeats it. The ability to grow and change and make your work about something other than yourself is the sign of maturity. I want the grown up guy in the boyish package. Together we just might be able to keep this Republic from hitting the reef. But if we are all now cast members on “Lost”, this is the guy that I’ll vote for to haul our asses out of despair and get to working on our future before it’s too late.


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