I had the opportunity to sit down with Elizabeth Edwards at a house party in Nashua yesterday. Elizabeth is, as always, a great interview, and a banal question will send her off into a daisy chain of associations ranging from social movements throughout the 20th Century to the failure of universal health care reform in America to the need to re-empower the citizenry to the campaign's theory of executive pressure. An excerpt:EK: Is that what's being referred to when you speak of fighting? The battlefield, after all, is the legislative process. You can't just assert the fight. So how do you pressure Congress if, as you say, it's already controlled by these special interests?EE: I don't think its that hard. You think about what happened in 1993 with health reform. There was a Joint Session of Congress and Bill Clinton came out and introduced health care and there were a series of Senate hearings and at the same time, the health industry, which had sat down with Mrs. Clinton in the legislative process to help draft the law, went around and undermined it, the exact law they'd supposedly helped craft, the exact law they'd sat at the table compromising, sending out the Harry and Louise ads that scared the bejeebers out of everybody.And what did we do in response? You know why you can't answer that? Because we did nothing. There was no response, no offense for this. Some of it is just saying I'm not going to let you get away with that. I'm going to go to the American people and tell them Harry and Louise are wrong and who they really work for, and I'm going to go the districts of members of Congress who are recalcitrant and speak directly to the people, tell them why it is that their congressmen, who's taken a lot of money from the insurance industry, is voting with the industry and not with them.Congressmen take the money because they think it'll help them get votes. If they think the votes will be taken away from them rather than given to them, they'll vote the right way. And my guess is that John won't have to visit that many districts to make that happen Now, there may be some congressmen who vote that way out of conviction, and if so, let them defend it to their constituents. But if it's really all about money, they'll be outed.Read the whole thing.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user NCBrian.)
