John Edwards Serves Notice at the First Democratic Party Candidate's Forum
News: Fiery populist rhetoric, promises of universal health care, and passion galore: Wait, these are Democrats?
February 22, 2007
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Carson City, Nevada, might seem an unlikely place for the starter-gun to be fired in a presidential race, but that's what happened yesterday. The small state capital, surrounded by the snow-dusted mountains of the eastern Sierra Nevada, the huge western sky specked with gentle white clouds, played host to the first Democratic Party candidates' forum. Eight of the declared runners were there: Senators Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, and Hillary Clinton, Representative Dennis Kucinich, Iowa's ex-governor Tom Vilsack, Governor Bill Richardson, and ex-Senators John Edwards and Mike Gravel. The only big name missing was Barack Obama.
With Nevada slated to host the second caucus of the '08 season, and with the West flexing its growing political muscle, the candidates can't afford to ignore its voters. Over the coming months they'll be flying in to participate in several debates and forums around the desert state. For this first event they lined up to speak in a cinder-bloc community center, dominated by two large basketball courts, on a non-descript downtown street lined with strip malls, gas stations, and pawn shops.
Most of the audience was local AFSCME members, dressed in green union sweatshirts emblazoned with the logo: "Nevada Battle Born Battle Tested AFSCME." The backdrop to the speaker platform was a huge green union decal. For sale in the lunchroom were union hats, socks, travel mugs, and watches. Nevada has relatively strong unions—14 percent of the workforce is unionized, and some of the biggest organizing successes nationally in recent years have occurred in Las Vegas—and labor is clearly going to play a big role in the run-up to the state's caucus.
The event was co-hosted by the state Democratic Party and AFSCME, moderated by George Stephanopoulos, and attended by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and virtually every senior Democrat in the region. "The West," Reid announced to the audience at the start of the two hour event, "is going through a realignment. Democrats have an opportunity to harness this and take it to the White House."
Now, if a year's a long time in politics, two years is a very, very long time. At this point, what's most interesting is not necessarily the nitty-gritty policy proposals of the candidates—after all, most of the candidates will wither on the vine in the coming months, and many of their policies will evolve considerably in response to changing political conditions—but the core themes being stressed by them all.
Judging by the forum speeches, these appear to be: pulling out of Iraq; creating some sort of universal health care system; raising the minimum wage; expanding the rights of trade unions; reworking some of the global trade agreements to incorporate stronger labor and environmental standards; and creating a new national energy policy, through what Richardson termed a "man on the moon effort" to move away from oil dependence and toward the creation of new energy technologies. Whoever wins the candidacy is going to have to convince state electorates of their seriousness in tackling these issues.
Without exception, all argued against Bush's Iraq "surge," and for a more proactive Middle-Eastern diplomacy, one that involved America talking with Iran and Syria as well as others in the region. As expected, Clinton refused to apologize for her 2002 war authorization vote, while Edwards said several times his vote was wrong and he wished he hadn't cast it.
Clinton promised she would have a universal health care system up and running "by the end of my second term." Edwards one-upped her, saying the situation was so dire he'd start moving toward universal coverage immediately. Richardson, one of the West's most successful governors, called for policy flexibility, so states could rapidly start moving toward universal coverage at the state level.
The forum didn't generate any great policy surprises—the nearest thing to a surprise was Kucinich dancing around the stage screaming "No strings" at the top of his lungs over and over again as he pledged to be a special interest-free president. But it did serve to introduce the candidates to a Western electorate that, for the first time, is going to play a crucial role in selecting the Presidential candidates who will eventually square off for the White House.
To my mind, there were two things of particular interest about the event. The first was the unabashed liberalism-cum-populism of the candidates. These weren't Democratic Leadership Committee-type speeches. They were fiery speeches, in their economic timbre redolent of New Deal era oratory, full of references to economic injustice, to America's squandered reputation in the world, to the historical urgency of the current moment. "We need to reestablish America as the great moral leader on the planet," Edwards declared. "The world needs to see us as a force for good again. The world needs to see us as the shining light we used to be." Richardson, who arguably has a broader array of experiences in the world of government and diplomacy than any candidate in the field, averred that the country "should not be known for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and eavesdropping and violating international conventions."
The second revelation was the Bobby Kennedy-esque presence of Edwards. Clinton's body language is supremely confident—but it comes off as somehow forced, almost overacted. John Edwards, by contrast, is a natural performer. In 2004, Edwards seemed charismatic, yet somehow not fully formed. This time around, there is nothing raw or inexperienced in his presentation: he establishes an instant rapport with his audience, his answers are passionate, and he exudes a command of his subject. When he fields questions from the press, his eye contact is almost hypnotic. When he talks about the issues he cares about most—poverty, Iraq, healthcare—he creates the same sincere-yet-not-pontificating aura that Bill Clinton mastered 15 years ago.
None of which is to say Edwards emerged from the forum as the front-runner in Nevada let alone nationwide. Clearly, Clinton and Obama have tremendous momentum behind their campaigns. Richardson, too, is a powerful, smart-as-hell candidate who will benefit from having early Western caucuses and primaries. But in Carson City, Edwards did put the rest of the candidates on notice: his voice this time around is stronger than in 2004, his policies better honed, and his anger at the state of the country today almost incandescent.
