[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Edwards Goes After the 'Corporate Democrats'

[Jenifer Cartwright]

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  Edwards Goes After the 'Corporate Democrats'
  - Is This a Turning Point for His Campaign?
  

  By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
  Posted on August 26, 2007,
  http://www.alternet.org/story/60748/
  

  On August 23, John Edwards showed his populist mettle,
  firing a broadside against corporate America and, more
  significantly, corporate Democrats, the likes of which
  hasn't been heard from a viable candidate with national
  appeal in decades.
  

  Edwards is en fuego right now, and if he keeps up the
  heat, his candidacy will either be widely embraced by
  the emerging progressive movement or utterly
  annihilated by an entrenched establishment that fears
  few things more than a telegenic populist with enough
  money to mount a credible campaign.
  

  "It's time to end the game," Edwards told a crowd in
  Hanover, New Hampshire. "It's time to tell the big
  corporations and the lobbyists who have been running
  things for too long that their time is over." He
  exalted Washington law-makers to "look the lobbyists in
  the eye and just say no."
  

      Real change starts with being honest -- the system
      in Washington is rigged and our government is
      broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to
      protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very
      wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At
      the end of the day, it's rigged by all those who
      benefit from the established order of things. For
      them, more of the same means more money and more
      power. They'll do anything they can to keep things
      just the way they are -- not for the country, but
      for themselves.
  

      [The system is] controlled by big corporations, the
      lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line
      and the politicians who curry their favor and carry
      their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that
      too often fawns over the establishment, but fails
      to seriously cover the challenges we face or the
      solutions being proposed. This is the game of
      American politics and in this game, the interests
      of regular Americans don't stand a chance.
  

  It's a structural argument, and Edwards didn't pull
  punches in calling out his fellow Democrats, saying:
  "We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans
  with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the
  Washington insiders of one party for the Washington
  insiders of the other." The rhetoric was a clear signal
  that Edwards is going to beat the drums of reform as a
  contrast to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the
  primaries.
  

  About a third of the speech focused on the trade deals
  that Bill Clinton championed, and his argument that
  those "wedded to the past" can't provide the answers
  was a barely-veiled rebuke of the Clintonian arm of the
  party, and the media's chosen "front-runner" for the
  nomination.
  

  If Democrats are engaged in an existential struggle
  between the party's establishment and its grassroots,
  Edwards is obviously betting that the grassroots'
  passion and energy will trump the Machine Democrats
  message apparatus -- this was a speech that was not
  written by the usual coterie of Beltway consultants.
  

  The most striking aspect of Edwards' speech was his
  implicit argument that class still exists. For years,
  both parties have obscured the divisions that are so
  prominent in modern American society, painting a
  picture of a country in which we're all part of an
  entrepreneurial class with more or less similar
  interests -- a key ingredient in the false "center" to
  which politicians and Beltway pundits kow-tow. "Let me
  tell you one thing I have learned from my experience,"
  Edwards said last week. "You cannot deal with them on
  their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at
  their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will
  not give up their power -- you have to take it from
  them."
  

  It was an explicit rebuke of Obama's "new politics" --
  Obama recently told the Washington Post that "the
  insurance and drug companies can have a seat at the
  table in our health-care debate; they just can't buy
  all the chairs." Obama's approach to "cleaning up
  Washington" is not bad, but ultimately tinkers around
  the edges of a corrupted legislative system.
  

  Edwards is not so conciliatory on the subject. "For
  more than 20 years, Democrats have talked about
  universal health care," he said. "And for more than 20
  years, we've gotten nowhere, because lobbyists for the
  big insurance companies, drug companies and HMOs spent
  millions to block real reform."
  

  Contrast that naked confrontation of corporate power
  with the tepid appeals to working Americans that were a
  trademark of John Kerry's 2004 campaign. In announcing
  his candidacy, Kerry offered a bit of demagoguery about
  CEOs -- he segued from bashing Cheney and Halliburton
  --and boldly promised to end tax breaks "that help
  companies move American jobs overseas." Also in his
  plan for corporate accountability: "No more contracts
  for companies, no matter how well-connected they are,
  until they decide to do what's right."
  

  Hillary Clinton's economic proposals track with the
  thinking popular among the ostensible "progressives" at
  the DLC and the Third Way -- policies that give
  Americans the "opportunity" to save for retirement, a
  decidedly centrist approach to spiraling college costs
  and other familiar policies from the 1990s. She's not a
  fair trader nor a free trader, she says -- she's for
  "smart trade," "pro-American" trade.
  

  Edward's speech about the economy isn't the only time
  that he's strayed from the bounds of "respectable"
  discourse in Washington. In May, he said that the "war
  on terror" was a political "bumper sticker" that the
  administration used to "justify everything [Bush] does:
  the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, spying
  on Americans, torture."
  

  Edwards isn't the only candidate in the race making
  such bold statements, of course. Rep. Dennis Kucinich
  (D-OH) has long spoken of economic issues in the kinds
  of terms Edwards used last week. But John Edwards was
  the vice presidential nominee on a presidential ticket
  that won 59 million votes and he's raised $23 million
  in the current cycle (20 times what Kucinich has
  raised), and that means that corporate media is forced
  to cover him. So far, they've mocked him, written
  stories about his haircuts, pushed shadowy innuendo
  about his personal business dealings and suggested his
  focus on poverty is disingenuous or hypocritical, but
  they simply can't write him off as a member of the
  fringe. Unlike Kucinich, they can't ignore him.
  

  John Edwards is becoming a very different kind of
  candidate, and his growing message of empowerment and
  attack on the corporate class may prove to be the most
  interesting story of campaign 2008.
  

  -------------
  Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
  

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