As former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina takes his 2008 presidential campaign on an anti-poverty tour, ending it by retracing the steps Sen. Robert F. Kennedy made on a similar tour in 1968, Thomas N. Bethell remembers. Bethell covered Kennedy for The Mountain Eagle, the Whitesburg, Ky., weekly newspaper, and later was research director for the United Mine Workers and managing editor of The Washington Monthly. He wrote about the Kennedy and Edwards tours for today's edition of the Daily Yonder, the new rural-news site with a political bent. Here are some excerpts:“Are we really expected to believe that a candidate with a net worth on the high side of $60 million, a brand-new 28,000-square-foot house, and an apparent addiction to $400 haircuts wakes up every day obsessed with the goal of ending poverty in America? . . . Maybe the charitable thing to do is wait and see. After all, it was only after Robert Kennedy was martyred, a few months after his Appalachian tour, that we all decided he was genuine in his determination to battle poverty. . . . He might have been a wonderful president, the first since Franklin Roosevelt to offer real and lasting hope for hard-pressed people, rural and urban alike. Or not. In the winter-spring of 1968 it was much too soon to tell, and the summer never came.” (Photo by Paul Gordon)
“It’s a measure of how desperate some of us were that we suppressed private doubts and wrote glowing accounts of his tour. Over the ensuing decades that tour has acquired the aura of something more spiritual than political, and it’s not surprising to see John Edwards striding along the pilgrim’s path, hoping that some fragment of the enshrined Kennedy mystique will adhere to his campaign. But skepticism and cynicism, although arguably unavoidable, aren’t very useful. There would seem to be intriguing parallels between 1968 and 2007, especially in the apparent fact that the candidates’ great wealth and good fortune failed to blind them to the needs of those less lucky or gifted. And the fact that both were more wedded to well-meaning rhetoric than to far-ranging policy proposals shouldn’t be held against them, not at this point at any rate. No one, least of all Roosevelt, knew what he would do for the downtrodden until he was actually in the White House. No one, early in 1968, knew what Robert Kennedy would do: It was too soon to know, and then it was too late. No one, in mid-2007, knows what John Edwards would do or whether, if elected, he would actually have the leverage to enact the initiatives, far-reaching or otherwise, that he might deem essential to redirect and revitalize the mostly afflicted and largely outsourced economy of Appalachia. So, rather than being a time to render some sort of judgment, it seems to be a time to watch and listen … maybe even to hope.” For Bethell's entire article, click here.
Today, a voter in New Orleans asked Edwards on ABC's "Good Morning America" how he could justify a $400 haircut. “I don't,” he replied with a smile. He said that in a busy campaign, such things are arranged by others, and “I should have been paying closer attention and it shouldn’t have happened.” When host Diane Sawyer broadened the inquiry, implicitly questioning the sincerity of Edwards' anti-poverty campaign, he replied, “A completely fair question … If you look at the arc of my life, I came from having very little to having a lot. … I want that chance to be there for everybody.” He said he was involved in urban ministries in North Carolina, helped organize union workers, pushed for raising the minimum wage (which he said could be the single most important solution to eliminating poverty), and started a program for poor kids in eastern North Carolina that gives them their first year of college free if they work. To watch, click here.
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