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This post, written by Isaiah Poole, originally appeared on the Take Back America 2007 Conference website
For an audience that was eager to hear a presidential candidate say that they would not compromise progressive principles for political expediency, former Sen. John Edwards knew what to say.
When it comes to ending the war in Iraq or issues such as universal health care, "No more pontificating, no more vacillating, no more triangulating, no more broken promises, no more pats on the head, no more 'we'll get around to it next time,' no more taking half a loaf, no more 'tomorrow,'" Edwards said.
People who are diagnosed with breast cancer or other serious health conditions, like his wife Elizabeth, don't have time to wait for universal health care. "We need to do these things now," he said.
Edwards spoke immediately after Illinois Sen. Barack Obama electrified the crowd with a stirring speech that stressed broad principles and policies but steered away from specifics. Edwards was often less reticent about specifics. He offered some details of his energy plan, which he said would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. He called the nation's affordable housing policy a disaster and called for one million additional housing vouchers that would allow families to move out of pockets of poverty. He proposed a "college for everyone" plan in which students would have the cost of their tuition and books covered in exchange for 10 hours of work per week.
As the first presidential candidate in either party to release a detailed health care proposal, Edwards said he has one "threshold test" for a health care proposal: "whether it is truly universal." If it is not, he said, "someone is going to have to explain to me what child has to go without health care."
Edwards went beyond his opposition to the war in Iraq--his position is now the same as Obama's, although when he was in the Senate he voted for the use of force authorization that allowed it--to talking about the damage the Bush administration's foreign policy done to America's stature in the world. He asked the audience to consider that the Bush administration declared that the Bush administration declared that genocide was taking place in the Darfur region of the Sudan, but then the rest of the world saw the administration step back and watch the genocide continue. If you were living in another country, Edwards asked, "what would you think of us?"
When he ended his speech with a progressive call to arms, it was evident that Edwards' message still resonates on the left, even though recent polls show that he appears to be losing ground to frontrunner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. One Take Back America participant, having heard both Obama and Edwards, said, "I don't know which one to support. They're both good."
Tagged as: election08, iraq war, obama, clinton, edwards
Isaiah J. Poole comes to TomPaine.com, which operates as a project of the Institute for America's Future, from Congressional Quarterly, where he covered congressional leadership and tracked major bills through Congress.
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