Why Edwards' Anti-Poverty Campaign Won’t Help Him

(cross posted at Daily Kos)

I read this item about John Edwards and took it at face value:

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Tuesday that he worked for a hedge fund to learn more about financial markets and their relationship to poverty in the United States.

Edwards won't disclose how much he got paid as a consultant to Fortress Investment Group, but said he did keep the money.

"It was primarily to learn, but making money was a good thing, too," the 2004 vice presidential nominee said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Edwards campaign had a righteous follow-up statement:

"Would it be better if I had done well and now I didn't care about people who are struggling?"

He also mentioned FDR and Bobby Kennedy as people of privilege who also cared about poverty whereas he "came from nothing and now I have everything."

These are all excellent points and there isn't anything about the hedge fund story that bothers me. I liked Edwards before and I like him now -- not enough to make him #1 in my book, but that's another story.

I think Edwards has a larger problem.

Fact is, what’s going to lead to Edwards’ probable failure to get the nomination (and if he gets it, his possible failure to be elected) is not the hypocrisy, but the very emphasis on poverty to begin with.

The sad fact is that (outside of religious institutions like churches, synagogues and presumably mosques) there is no cultural bias in this country toward helping the poor.

Fact is, deep down, most Americans probably believe that if you’re poor, it’s because you screwed up somehow.

And speaking of religion, didn’t Jesus say that “the poor will always be with you?” That doesn’t mean that you don’t help them; but it also doesn’t mean that we can permanently solve the problem, either.

Also: there is no political will to solve poverty. Even if Edwards is elected he’ll have a tough time getting any anti-poverty legislation passed. I hate to be brutal about it, but how many poor people actually, you know, vote?

Here's the thing: I'm old enough to remember Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president in 1968 and I was tremendously inspired by it. Kennedy was right: it was a crime that people live in this country and don’t have enough to eat or a decent place to live.

But that was then, this is now. Edwards is going to find that running on an anti-poverty platform, in 2008, may be noble but it isn’t going to get him a lot of votes.

P.S. Go back and read more about Kennedy's campaign. I recommend Evan Thomas' Robert Kennedy: His Life. Kennedy's underlying assumptions about poverty and how to fix it were surprisingly conservative in many ways. I think you'll agree that it was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of all people, who took up Kennedy's fallen standard.