t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Monday 18 June 2007
John Edwards may not end up as president, or even as the Democratic nominee, but he is having far more influence on the substance of this campaign than any other candidate. His strong opposition to the Iraq war (reversing his Senate vote in support of the war), has pushed the other leading Democratic contenders to also highlight their opposition to the war.
His proposal for universal health care, which allows businesses and individuals to buy into a government-run, Medicare-type system, was largely lifted by Senator Obama, and will certainly have a large impact on the plan that will eventually be put forward by Senator Clinton.
Last week, Edwards put forward a proposal on prescription drugs that is likely to set another benchmark for the other top candidates. Edwards proposed setting up a prize fund that would be used to buy up the patents for some important breakthrough drugs. The patents would then be placed in the public domain. This will allow the drugs to be sold as generics. With new drugs being sold in a competitive market, they will cost just a few dollars per prescription.
If drugs could be sold without government patent monopolies, they would be easily affordable for people in the United States and other wealthy countries. Supplying essential drugs for the poor in the developing world would also be a much less daunting task.
In addition, a competitive market would eliminate the cesspool of corruption that surrounds the prescription drug industry. Drug companies would no longer have an incentive to wine and dine doctors and provide various forms of kickbacks in order to get them to prescribe their drugs for patients. They would also not have the incentive to produce misleading advertisements and marketing campaigns to push their drugs to patients and doctors. Also, they would not have the same incentive to conceal research findings that show their drugs are ineffective, or even harmful.
Of course, a prize fund is not the only alternative to the current patent system and Edwards is not the first presidential candidate to speak on the issue. Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced the Free Market Drug Act back in 2004. (Kucinich also beat Edwards to the punch on the Iraq war and health care.)
This proposal would have the government directly finance the development of prescription drugs. It would roughly double the $30 billion that the government spends on biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health, while setting up a new structure explicitly for this purpose. As with the prize fund, all the patents would be placed in the public domain. This system would also require that all research findings be made public. With more openness in research, science could advance far more quickly, eliminating unnecessary duplication and hastening the development of new drugs. Even if Edwards's proposal may not be the first or the best from the candidates, he still deserves credit for bringing this issue into the mainstream of the national political debate. The patent system of financing prescription drug research desperately needs to be reformed.
This system is a relic of the feudal guild system. It survives due to inertia and the political power of the prescription drug industry. It is unlikely that any economist would try to defend the efficiency of a system that allows drugs to be sold for hundreds or even thousands of times their cost of production. Economic theory predicts that such a system will lead to massive corruption. The newspapers provide daily evidence that economic theory is correct, with endless stories of payoffs to doctors and falsified research.
On its merits, the case for the current patent system has about as much merit as marketing cigarettes to kids. But the drug industry is even more powerful than the tobacco industry. It took courage for Edwards to take on the drug industry on an issue that is its bread and butter. It will be interesting to see if the other top candidates will show the same courage.
Edwards Makes a Populist Pitch to the Left
By Adam Nagourney
The New York Times
Monday 18 June 2007
Tipton, Iowa - Four years ago - facing what seemed to be a certain defeat in the Iowa Democratic caucuses - John Edwards recast his presidential campaign with weeks to go before the vote, unveiling an emotionally powerful speech about poverty that he delivered relentlessly across the state. Mr. Edwards came within a few thousand votes of victory. To this day, he tells associates he would have won with another week.
This year, Mr. Edwards has picked up where he left off in 2004. He visited 14 places in Iowa in the course of three days this weekend, an itinerary reflecting just how much he has settled on this state as the place where his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination will rise or fall.
Mr. Edwards's latest trip here offered evidence of just how much he studied the lessons of his Iowa defeat last time, though he would prefer to view it as a near victory. It also suggests the extent to which the rhythms of Iowa Democratic politics have shaped Mr. Edwards's decidedly different candidacy this time around.
This time, he is a candidate of the left in a state marked by a strong antiwar and liberal streak, filling a vacancy created as Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have campaigned from the center. Mr. Edwards has shown a new eagerness to draw contrasts with his opponents on issues like the war in Iraq and health care, in no small part motivated by his struggle not to get lost in a field of big names. And he has gone from the boyish, easygoing one-time senator from North Carolina to a candidate displaying an urgently engaging manner as likely to seize as to charm an audience, an approach that appears to be particularly effective in the close-quarter meetings that fill his days here.
Beyond that, Mr. Edwards is seeking to quell one line of criticism of him from 2004: that he was inexperienced and intellectually light. At every opportunity, he fairly leaps to offer a detailed response to a question, intended as much to provide a contrast to other candidates as to address any concerns about his own depth.
"Here's what I think," Mr. Edwards proclaimed repeatedly as he answered a welter of questions throughout the day, an introductory phrase that signaled a lengthy discussion on his opposition to the war in Iraq, his call for national health care or his view of terrorism.
In an interview, Mr. Edwards said any changes observed by those who watched him last time were the product of maturity and experience, rather than any political retooling. He noted that he had spent the last two years filling potential gaps in his resume, founding a poverty center in North Carolina and traveling abroad.
"More seasoned," Mr. Edwards said by way of self-assessment, leaning forward and squinting his eyes in the interview, between a late-afternoon jog and an early-evening fund-raiser. "I've done a lot of work since the last campaign. And I will say in all honesty that there clearly is some additional depth on these issues. Particularly world issues."
Though Iowa voters who knew Mr. Edwards in 2004 are finding a different candidate on their doorsteps this time, they are struck more by what they described as his move to the left.
"It seems to be that the last time he was running, he was trying to be the candidate of the D.L.C., trying to be moderate, more centrist," said Gordon Fischer, who was the state Democratic chairman in 2004 and has not endorsed a candidate this time. He was referring to the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.
"This time around, he's sort of cut loose from that," Mr. Fischer continued. "And he is outflanking Senator Obama and Senator Clinton on the left."
For now, Mr. Edwards's efforts seem to be paying off. Democrats across the state say he appears to have built strong support here. Mr. Edwards's hope is that beating Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in Iowa would slingshot him into the front of the field as the race moves across the nation, allowing him to overcome the financial and name-recognition advantage his two main rivals enjoy.
Mr. Edwards has experienced a rough few months, starting with the personal turmoil of the news that his wife, Elizabeth, had received a diagnosis of incurable cancer. It continued with critical disclosures that Democrats here said threatened to undercut his populist appeal - from his employment by a hedge fund to the $400 haircut he received that was the subject of mirthful coverage by Iowa newspapers for a month.
Mr. Edwards, his party's vice presidential candidate in 2004, has found his candidacy overshadowed by those of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, though he insists that causes him no distress. "I think it's completely understandable," he said. "You've got a woman running who is a very serious candidate. You have an African-American candidate running who is new and dynamic."
He is girding for a fund-raising report later this month that many Democrats predict will show him trailing Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, a result that would very well be deflating.
A number of Democrats argued that Mr. Edwards's shifts could provide ammunition for Democrats trying to stoke an image of Mr. Edwards, a trial lawyer by trade, as opportunistic and politically calculating.
"The problem with him is that he talks very much like a car salesman - you see what I mean?" said Rhonda Fisher, a sociology professor at Drake University, standing in the back of a auditorium after Mr. Edwards expressed sympathy to her upon learning that her son was returning for another tour of duty in Iraq.
Ms. Fisher, who said she supported Mr. Edwards last time, said the car-salesman perception of Mr. Edwards was "not fair," but that it was prevalent enough to give voters like her pause about supporting him again out of concern that he could take the Democrats to defeat in 2008.
Mrs. Edwards accompanied Mr. Edwards for two of the days he was in Iowa, presenting a toughly affectionate foil to her husband before rapt audiences, who laughed when she joked about his $400 haircut.
She sat to the side during the interview in a Des Moines hotel, jumping in at one point when Mr. Edwards was discussing his aggressive response to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton on the issue of the war at a debate in New Hampshire last week.
"Early in that debate, Mrs. Clinton said something about basically we're all the same about that," Mrs. Edwards said. "That wasn't actually accurate. They weren't all the same. If everything all looks likes it's packaged like butter, and some of it's oleo - voters need to know what they are buying."
Mr. Edwards, in discussing his approach to the race, noted that in 2004, a major criterion for Democratic voters was whether their nominee would be a strong general election candidate. So convincing voters of one's electability is not enough in this environment, Mr. Edwards said.
Mr. Edwards said that accounted for why he sounded like a different kind of candidate than he did in 2004. He has gone from a co-sponsor of the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq, to one of its biggest critics. "I think Congress has a responsibility to force George Bush to end this war," he told voters in Tampa, Fla.
Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant who was a senior adviser to Mr. Clinton in 1992 and is now close to Mrs. Clinton, said: "In 2002, he sounded like General Patton. Now he sounds like Mahatma Gandhi."
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