Has Has Barack Obama been getting snippy at John Edwards because of the lack of an endorsement? That's the analysis of Politico's Roger Simon, whose grand unified theory of Edwards' failure is that the candidate "picked up, put aside the poor" -- and that Obama is sick of Edwards' supposedly righteous attitude. Simon claims the critique isn't about Edwards' expensive haircuts, but about him beginning his campaign with a focus on poverty, switching his target to the middle class in the run-up to Iowa, and then, while dropping out of the race, returning to poverty as his central theme.
I think Simon vastly overstates the effects of these shifts on Edwards' campaign. There's nothing inauthentic about focusing on the plights of both the poor and the middle class. After all, the middle class is struggling for many of the same reasons the poor are destitute: stagnant wages, catastrophic health care costs, struggling schools, and the like. Still, Simon is onto something. When I heard all of the Democratic candidates speak to the SEIU in September, I was struck by Edwards' framing of organized labor as an anti-poverty movement, while Hillary Clinton portrayed labor as the creator of the middle class. Historically, both narratives contain parts of the truth. But in the present day, unions are focusing much of their attention on service workers, many of whom, even with representation, have little hope of achieving the security of what many Americans would call a "middle class lifestyle." That's not the fault of unions, but rather, an outgrowth of the way our economy is structured, and the way conservative government has put corporate profits before workers' rights and human needs.
In that sense, I thought Edwards' had the more realistic view of labor's potential role in healing our economy. And yet, there's no question that as the campaign wore on, he spoke less about poverty, even as he continued to rail against inequality and corporate greed. Still, I wouldn't point to this as a decisive factor in Edwards' failure to win the nomination. Rather, Edwards simply didn't have a movement behind him, and couldn't effectively compete against the historic celebrity candidacies of Clinton and Obama. Here's my piece on the matter.
--Dana Goldstein
