John Edwards in The Contenders

On Budget & Economy: Savings & Credit Commission to regulate abusive credit

In June 2007, Edwards proposed “setting up a new consumer commission to be called the family Savings and Credit Commission... to deal with all financial services--credit cards, mortgages, car loans, check-cashers, payday loans, investment account, and more. It will ban the most abusive terms and make sure consumers understand the others.“ To many, this will seem an overly roundabout way of regulation, and one that doesn’t get at the high interest rates. But Edwards also more directly pledged to ”pass strong national laws protecting us against the worst abuses in credit markets: predatory mortgages, abusive credit card terms, and payday loans with interest rates of 300% or higher.“

On Corporations: Oil windfall tax is most serious blow against wealthy

The reporter quotes former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “Rhetorically, if you’re calling Edwards an economic populist, it’s true he cares a lot about the poor,” says Reich (who is hardly radical, though he himself cared too much about the poor to stay for Clinton’s 2nd term). “He evinces a lot of concern for the middle class and middle-class anxieties. But he’s not in any way attacking the rich or corporations. He is not explaining one fundamental fact of modern economic life, which is that the very rich have all the money.”

On Foreign Policy: Cosponsored 2002 Iraq War Resolution

In fact, the people who disagree with these basic facts were the CIA, and their doubts were contained in a classified report available to Congress before the 2002 war vote. But Edwards said it was not necessary to read the report, since as a member of the Senate Intelligence committee he was getting information directly from intelligence officers. ”I had the information I needed,“ he later said. ”I just voted wrong.“

On Health Care: Critics call plan backdoor to a single payer system

His healthcare plan seems as a backdoor to a single payer system, [according to critics]. “Edwards will give you free healthcare,” warned the National Review. This is a bad thing, of course, because “everyone, in a society of allegedly free healthcare, would actually be paying the collective costs of healthcare. They used to call that socialized medicine.”

On Health Care: Don’t spend another decade arguing; get it done

My proposal, a bold plan, doesn’t go directly to single-payer--I think it can be accomplished politically. Now, it may be that that gravitates towards a single-payer plan.

I think we can get support from across the political spectrum and will accomplish a lot of what we want to do. Second, it does give people a choice. And I think Americans have become accustomed to having choice, and I think they want to be able to choose what their healthcare plan is.

On Jobs: Create a million “stepping stones” jobs at minimum wage

Dennis Kucinich, in contrast, wants to put people without jobs to work rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure--bridges, tunnels, roads--at a time when many politicians in both parties are desiring to sell them off; his program would put people of New Orleans to work rebuilding their own city and its water defenses.

On Principles & Values: Op-Ed: more populist or perhaps more redistributionist

Now, in what some critics call a convenient conversation to woo liberal Democrats, Edwards is tougher, staking out positions on healthcare, national security, and the environment, much further to the left than he advocated in 2004.

Convenient or not, the idea of Edwards’s “conversion” is buoyed not only by his own rhetoric but also by attacks from conservative critics. “He is a redistributionist, another word for socialist,” Cal Thomas wrote in USA Today. “His populist jargon is nothing but class warfare, the 2007 version.” Statements like these are enough to set progressive hearts beating.

On Principles & Values: Positioning as a populist who stands with struggling masses

Thirty years after the Reagan Revolution, when merely talking about the plight of the poor is a novelty, just such modest reforms as Edwards is proposing--raising the minimum wage, extending health insurance, supporting college tuition--may indeed sound almost radical. And Edwards himself may be the closest thing to a populist who has a chance of making it to Super Tuesday with double-digit support.

Edwards’s effort to position himself as the race’s true populist--the man who understands and empathizes with the struggling masses--has gotten a leg up from his own life story.

On Principles & Values: Founding member of the Senate New Democrat Coalition

In 2002, he was a featured speaker at the DLC’s ”National Conversation“ in New York. He cozied up to the DLC--and implied, through his use of the first person plural, that he was one of them: ”A decade ago, the DLC said we should expand opportunity and demand responsibility. Mr. President, if you’re not going to use that word ‘responsibility,’ we’d like to have it back.“

On Welfare & Poverty: Criticized for personal extravagances after poverty lectures

[One pundit writes], “Seldom has a presidential candidate undergone a trifecta like Edwards’s this year--the $400 haircut, a $55,000 honorarium from U.C. Davis for a speech on poverty, and the $500,000 hedge fund salary--without his campaign imploding.”

It’s true that the media seems to have a double standard when it comes to Edwards, largely because of his willingness to talk about the poor. [Another pundit] points out that “we’ve been shown aerial pictures of Edwards’s mansion, but not of the mansions of other well-off candidates. We’ve heard so much about Edwards’s connection to one Wall Street firm, but relatively little about other candidates’ connections. You see, those other pols aren’t hypocrites: they don’t lecture about poverty.”

On Welfare & Poverty: Morally wrong that full time workers are still in poverty

But again, the policy proposals were weak and predictable: ”raise the minimum wage“--to a level where, if everyone works 2 jobs, a family might just make enough money to qualify for a tax credit; and ”finish the job on welfare reform“ (for which he seems to see no downside), and ”bring good-paying jobs to the places where we need them the most.“