WHAT THE ISSUES SAY ABOUT YOU TO CYNICS. I dearly hope that Paul's item yesterdayis wrong about why John Edwards is talking about poverty, but I fear it may not matter too much one way or the other, as I've found that others also share Paul's desire to suss out the "calculation" behind it -- a clear sign that people are questioning the sincerity of his commitment.
At the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees presidential forum last month, for example, I spent some time talking to the workers -- it wasn't all the paper-pushers you'd imagine -- after the candidates spoke, trying to probe why it was that Edwards has not yet secured much support from union workers in polls, despite his strong backing from certain union leaders and serious and ongoing involvement in issues affecting low-income and unionized workers over the past few years. Part of it is clearly a function of demographic and cultural affinities, in that today's union movement is increasingly organizing female and minority workers -- the precise people who polls show cleaving to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and who apparently aren't separating their identities as union workers from all the other facets of their being. (Think of it as an impulse roughly the inverse of the one that gave rise to the Reagan Democrats. In the early 1980s, union members were drawn by cultural affinities to the conservative Reagan, even as union leaders opposed him. Today, the minority women who clean unionized hotels or sew garments may be similarly drawn by the promise of a credible female or minority candidate, even as union leaders back the more explicitly pro-union Edwards.)
