John Edwards 2008: What’s not to like

According to the most recent Winthrop/ETV poll, 40 percent of white Democrats in South Carolina who say they are likely to cast a ballot in January’s primary are supporting U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

A distant second is former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina with 17 percent support. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama from Illinois is in third with 11 percent among white Democrats.

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Others attribute Clinton’s S.C. lead among white votes to Edwards’ loss of those voters - a claim Edwards’ campaign denies.

“I find it hard to believe that voters in South Carolina give more of their dollars to John Edwards than any other Democrat, see him campaigning here more than any other Democrat, hear him talk about his life here and the need to reverse decades of poor trade deals that have hurt their state, and then decide to support the senator from New York,” said Teresa Wells, Edward’s spokeswoman. “That is just not happening.”

McClatchy Newspapers 11/19/07
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/politics/story/255090.html

The same week that a Census Bureau study indicated more young African-American men were in college than prison, presidential candidate John Edwards painted a much bleaker picture, declaring at a forum that “pretty soon” the entire young black male population would be dead or in jail.

Asked what he would do to “eliminate inner-city kids partaking in violence,” Edwards — a former Democratic senator from North Carolina — said that the president needs to send the message that “We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison. Or dead. One of the two.”

Edwards made his comments at the MTV/MySpace forum Thursday (Video HERE).

Justice Department figures indicate that 193,000 black men age 18 to 24 were in prison in 2003.

Approximately 532,000 black men that same age were enrolled in college, according to the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey (LINK).

Quipped an African-American aide to a rival campaign, “It’s a good thing I look good in stripes.”

ABC Political Punch 9/29/07
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2007/09/edwards-paints-.html

Forbes

April 11, 2007
MAMARONECK, N.Y. (AP) - Democrat John Edwards criticized radio host Don Imus Wednesday for making racially and sexually charged comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, declaring “it was not OK to say this, period.”

But the former North Carolina senator stopped short of saying he would refuse to appear as a guest on the show in the future, saying more time was needed to see how the controversy would be resolved.

His comments came as a rival candidate, front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, launched an online petition drive to support the Rutgers players.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/04/11/ap3602935.html

But what does Edwards have to lose? Is he afraid that the “racist” grenade will be lobbed at him by people who’ve never given a happy hootie about civil rights as anything other than something to crush in the consolidation of their base? I’m guessing not, because the conversation then segues into Hurricane Katrina and Edwards appears to be openly courting the Lestor Maddox brigade in some new reverse Southern Strategy. Queried by Russert about the racial divide and Hurricane Katrina, and whether this has hurt the Administration in the eyes of African Americans, Edwards says:

And then, finally, and this is a critical component, responsibility matters. You know we, the American people, our country, we expect people that we’re helping to help themselves. And where we — we have to address things like teenage pregnancy. One — —one of the things I find when I sit at these tables with families who live in poverty is the mother of four or five children has kids who are having kids. We have to do something about that.

There’s really nothing quite like a panel full of white male millionaires scolding poor African American women about their reproductive irresponsibility, particularly in a conversation about the victims of Hurricane Katrina and in a week where South Dakota has passed a bill guaranteeing every rapist the right to have his fetus carried to term because women just really need to learn to keep their legs together.

Who knew the bigot vote was even in play?

That Edwards would not bring up the single biggest event of the week with regard to Katrina — the tapes which show George Bush deliberately misled people about what he knew before, during and after the hurricane hit — was quite the gift to the Administration.

Jane Hamsher, Huffington Post, 3/5/06
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/russert-watch-smokin-t_b_16809.html

In the pre-debate gathering of supporters on the Morgan State campus, Kucitizens Bernie Fischlewitz-Roberts and Jay Ukryn noticed some unusual things going on with their counterparts backing John Edwards. The crowd, largely African-American, didn’t appear to know who Edwards was, and, when asked, referred to what the Kucinich supporters described as a “script” containing facts about Edwards and his positions. One young man said his aunt gave him $20 to be there.

Ukryn said: “I overheard someone asking one of the Edwards supporters, “Why do you want this guy to win?” and they said, ‘I don’t know,’ and they asked him, “What do you know about Edwards?” and they said, “I don’t know anything about Edwards.”

The Kucinich volunteers speculated that the Edwards camp was trying to create a more diverse group of supporters, and noted that the Kucinich group was the real deal.

MSNBC 9/9/03
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3070889/