John Edwards for President?

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

New Zogby Poll: Hillary Trails Republicans, Edwards Leads

According to a Reuters story on the newest poll:

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton trails five top Republican presidential contenders in general election match-ups, a drop in support from this summer, according to a poll released on Monday.

Clinton's top Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, still lead Republicans in hypothetical match-ups ahead of the November 4, 2008, presidential election, the survey by Zogby Interactive showed.

Clinton, a New York senator who has been at the top of the Democratic pack in national polls in the 2008 race, trails Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mike Huckabee by three to five percentage points in the direct matches.

In July, Clinton narrowly led McCain, an Arizona senator, and held a five-point lead over former New York Mayor Giuliani, a six-point lead over former Tennessee Sen. Thompson and a 10-point lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Romney.

John Edwards "Born" Ad Running In South Carolina

Here's another great biographical ad from the Edwards Campaign. John Edwards talks about his experience growing up in a working-class family in rural Carolina mill towns. "When the mills closed, I saw first hand how devastating bad government and corporate greed can be," says Edwards. "I'm running for president to do what I've always done -- fight for people like the ones I grew up with against the powerful forces that have corrupted Washington."

Edwards was the first Democratic candidate to air television ads in South Carolina. This is his third new spot in the state.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Edwards Talks About His Legal Career And Fighting For Justice

According to this AP story from New Hampshire as Edwards touts his honest and his experience as a lawyer fighting for justice:

"While you shop (for candidates), I hope you will think about two key things: Who can you trust to tell you the truth about what's wrong in Washington, and who can you trust to fight like hell to make it right?" Edwards said during a town hall-style meeting Monday. "Those are the two things we need in the next president of the United States."

Edwards then turned to his background as a trial lawyer and work on behalf of plaintiffs.

"What I did was I gave them hope. And then I walked into that courtroom and I gave the company hell because they deserved it," he said. "That's the kind of fight we need. We need a president of the United States who will give you hope, who will stand up and fight for you to reclaim democracy. ... But we also need somebody who is ready for that fight, somebody who has been engaged in that fight. I've been in this fight my entire life. It didn't start last year. It didn't start in 2004."

Edwards said he is the candidate with a record of upsetting the system and standing firm.

"I won. I just didn't fight, I won and I won ... not just because I was right, but because I never gave up and I will never give up."

He also joked about the wealth his courtroom-based work gave him.

"Today, as many of you have heard, I don't live in a small house," he said to laughter.

John Edwards' Plan To Build One America

If you are increasingly interested in what John Edwards stands for, and his plan for One America, check out Edwards' extensive policy overview including an 80-page policy paper that is available as a PDF. Edwards has been unique amongst all the presidential candidates in proposing policies and coming up with papers on a whole breadth of issues.

If the above link doesn't take you to the right page, you can read the PDF online by clicking here.

Edwards Offers Heating Plan For Familes In Need

John Edwards has released an energy efficiency and affordability plan for families that are suffering from increasing heating costs this winter according to this New York Times story:

Former Senator John Edwards outlined a proposal yesterday in New Hampshire to lower the cost of heating oil, increase regulation of oil companies and promote energy efficiency.

...To ease the financial burden for low-income families, Mr. Edwards, a Democrat from North Carolina, said Congress should tap into its heating and oil reserves and increase subsidies to the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which he said President Bush had unfairly scaled back. In February, Mr. Bush proposed an 18 percent cut in the program, which provides $2.2 billion this year to help people pay heating bills.

...He proposed increasing financial assistance for a program to winterize homes, putting it on a $500 million annual budget, and supporting emergency loans for families to pay heating bills.

Saturday, November 24, 2007

The Horse's Mouth: More On The New York Times' Anti-Edwards Bias

According to this entry in the political blog, The Horse's Mouth by Greg Sargent, some more commentary on the recent New York Times public editor's comments on how the Times is covering this political race (and therefore influencing the outcome as readers of the New York Times -- who are not political junkies are really paying attention -- think it is a two-way race for the Democratic nomination when it is far from that:

To be fair, it's not hard to understand why Hillary and Obama -- both mega-wattage political stars whose candidacies are potentially history-making -- tend to suck up so much of the attention. Still, those numbers Hoyt shares suggest a sharp disparity in the coverage, particularly given that Edwards is in a virtual dead-heat with the two front-runners in Iowa.

To his credit, Richard Stevenson, the editor in charge of the paper's coverage of the 

Right, right -- but quantity does matter. And the quantity of coverage given by the paper to Edwards has given readers the distinct impression that this is a two-person race, when it isn't. Luckily, there's still time to take a step towards getting this right, but that time is fast running out.

Edwards: Happy Thanksgiving!

A great Thanksgiving ad from the Edwards Campaign:

Thursday, November 22, 2007

New York Times: Hillary & The Bushes Take Page Out Of Republican Playbook

According to this Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times it appears that both George W. and Laura Bush are endorsing Hillary Clinton who has recently gone about 360 degrees again. First accusing Edwards of throwing mud (because criticism of Hillary Clinton isn't allowed, y'know) and then getting personal and mocking Obama (but that's different, y'know, in Hillary country, also known as George W. country, you're either with us or against us):

She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”

...Obama’s one-liner [she wasn't Secretary of Treasury as far as anyone can remember] evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. Getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism.

“She hasn’t accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law,” wrote Joan Di Cola, a Boston lawyer, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, adding: “She isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who spent years as mayor of San Francisco before becoming a senator, or Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her political abilities. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton. She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because of that, senator of New York because of that, and (heaven help us) she could become president because of that.”

And then the Bushes had this to say, taking a page of the Karl Rove playbook: start to talk of the candidate you most want getting the nomination as inevitable. Bush,

gave a plug to Hillary on ABC News last night, calling her a “formidable candidate,” even under pressure, who “understands the klieg lights.”

...Laura Bush also gave Hillary a sisterly — and dynastic — plug when she told the anchor that living in the White House and meeting people everywhere would be “very helpful” to a first lady trading up.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

"Mudslinging" Defined By Hillary Herself

Since Hillary found that the accusations of the boys piling on, accusations of her being Swiftboated from her husband, former President Bill Clinton, didn't get any traction and instead caused people to question the legitimacy of these statements and accusations, in the last debate the Hillary Clinton Campaign conjured several lines that they thought might stick (and they sure did in the first media headlines that appeared) including the accusation against Edwards of "mudslinging"...with some help from Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd.

According to this statement yesterday, John Edwards for President communications director Chris Kofinis released the following statement on the definition of mudslinging:

"mudslinging |mŭd'slĭng'ing| (also mud-slinging) noun informalthe use of insults and accusations, esp. unjust ones, with the aim of damaging the reputation of an opponent.

As in: Hillary Clinton said about Barack Obama, 'Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face.'

"Now we know what Senator Clinton meant when she talked about 'throwing mud' in the last debate. Like so many other things, when it comes to mud, Hillary Clinton says one thing and throws another."

Not sure if Obama is getting stranger by the day and his comments somewhat odd at times or whether Hillary in these kinds of responses is really starting to show her true colors as she has stumbled repeatedly between the drivers' licenses answer, the planted audience question, the odd attack on Edwards...the list goes on. 

Here is more on Hillary Clinton vs Obama on the continuing issue of experience as seen thru her stints as First Lady and him as a 10-year old living abroad. According to this New York Times story.

Fog may have diverted Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plane from her campaign stop here on Tuesday, but that did not prevent her from continuing her attacks on Senator Barack Obama’s experience.

It was an odd moment. Mrs. Clinton, her voice piped in over a sound system, apologized for missing the event, expressed concern about the safety of food and toys from overseas and, pivoting off the overseas topic, tweaked Mr. Obama for saying on Monday that living overseas as a child had increased his experience in foreign relations.

Mrs. Clinton, who this week in Iowa has been making an issue of Mr. Obama’s experience, said the next president would face two wars and fraying alliances. She said she had traveled broadly and had “met with countless world leaders” and knew many of them personally.

“Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges that the next president will face,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I think we need a president with more experience than that.”

That was apparently a response to Mr. Obama’s citing his years in Indonesia as a child as contributing to his knowledge “of how ordinary people in these other countries live.”

“I sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” he said. “So I have frequent interaction with world leaders who come to visit here, and I take trips on various fact-finding missions, whether it’s to Iraq or Russia or Africa. But you know, probably, the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia.”

New York Times: Less Coverage Of John Edwards In All Media

According to the Public Editor of the New York Times a surprising admission and then a disappointing excuse from the editor in charge of political coverage:

For as long as I have been in the newspaper business, there has been tension between editors who have finite resources and an obligation to reflect reality and readers who argue that a lack of coverage shuts out the ideas and diminishes the prospects of lesser-known candidates. Richard W. Stevenson, the editor in charge of The Times’s coverage of this campaign, said: “Not all candidates are created equal. Some of them have a much greater likelihood of becoming the next president of the United States.”

I think the call is easier on the candidates at the very back of the pack, including some whose only campaign activity is to appear in the debates. But an unusually large number of serious candidates bunched somewhere behind the front-runners are not getting major attention in The Times.

“It is frustrating to us as well,” Stevenson said. “We are acutely aware of it, and are watching very carefully to be sure we aren’t making a mistake in how we are apportioning our resources.”

I’ll cite just one case where I don’t think The Times is paying enough attention.

In Iowa, which launched a little-known Jimmy Carter to his party’s nomination in 1976, John Edwards is close behind Clinton in the most recent Des Moines Register poll, yet The Times has given him comparatively scant coverage. Clinton and Obama have been profiled twice each on the front page since Labor Day, but Edwards not at all this year. Throughout the paper, The Times has published 47 articles about Clinton since Labor Day, only 18 about Edwards.

Stevenson said, “I don’t track our coverage by quantity; in a qualitative sense, we’ve covered him pretty thoroughly, and there is more to come.”

Yeah, after John Edwards was almost completely ignored by the New York Times and other media, where talk of Obama vs Clinton was an easier story, now American voters are being promised future coverage when the Iowa caucuses are less than 45 days away. So much for fair and accurate coverage in a democracy where we let voters decide!

Hell, yes, it is a mistake as the Public Editor himself puts it in the context of previous elections where a win in Iowa can catapult a candidate to the nomination and the presidency. That is still a very strong possibility as this new Washington Post article notes today.

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