This having been the week of John Edwards' tour from the Ninth Ward to Kentucky, the Prospect was thick with commentary on his antipoverty efforts. I'd been itching to respond to Mark Schmitt's post wishing that Edwards would deal more explicitly with race as well as poverty, but Ezra said it all. Edwards hasn't shied away from race -- he's repeatedly visited New Orleans, where he launched his campaign with lots of black children standing behind him -- but he's followed the wisdom of William Julius Wilson in keeping the issues separate enough that his antipoverty proposals can't be race-baited to death.
Garance Franke-Ruta's latest of many attempts to show that the Edwards campaign is in trouble, however, hasn't received an adequate response. It's titled "What Edwards Doesn't Get About Poverty", though she never says that there's anything Edwards doesn't get about poverty. Rather, she argues that minority and female voters have good reason to prefer the transformative potential of black and female candidates over a white male whose policy positions promote their interests. This is interesting, and I'll discuss it more later. But there are also a bunch of terribly ill-supported assertions in the article, and I'll point those out first.
