The Great Moral Cause of Our Time

In the latest issue of The Nation, "Cornbread and Roses" discusses former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards recently announced campaign to eradicate poverty in America and his position as the first director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC, Chapel Hill’s law school. The Center is primarily a think tank designed to bring antipoverty scholars, activists, journalists and politicians together to find innovative ways to solve the economic and racial inequities in our country.

Edwards is traveling across the country challenging people to view poverty as "the great moral cause of our time." He’ll be joined by local AFL-CIO, ACORN and NAACP chapters in campaigns to raise the minimum wage in several states – including Michigan – and his message is being carried to college campuses too, where he is drawing surprisingly large crowds with his plea:

"These folks need a champion--and not just me. They need you. You can make ending poverty in America the cause of your generation. It's the right thing to do. This is not about charity--it's about justice!"

Edwards has some lessons for Democrats after the loss in 2004:

Lesson One: Stop thinking small..."We've got to give the American people something big and important to be unified by. Republicans use big things to divide America. I think we can use big things to unite America."

Chief among those "big things," clearly, is an all-out effort to conquer poverty. "Both sides bear responsibility for what's happened," he says. "During the Great Depression with Franklin Roosevelt, during the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson's great War on Poverty and Bobby Kennedy going through Appalachia--we were the party that led the fight against poverty in this country. We've got to show some backbone and stand up for the folks who are struggling. We've done it in the past, but it's been a while."

Which brings us to Lesson Two: Democrats can't afford to keep ceding the "values vote." Here again, Edwards sees his antipoverty crusade as a step in the right direction. "In a country of our wealth, to have 37 million people living in poverty? It's a huge moral issue," he says. "There's a hunger in this country for a sense of national community, that we're not in this thing by ourselves. There's been a long period of selfish thinking. I think there's a great opportunity for us to be about a big, moral cause that's bigger than people's own self-interest."

Lesson Three is also about changing the turf: Democrats, who've now lost every state in the nation's largest region in two straight elections, have to take their message south. "Look," Edwards says, "the fact is, if you lose the whole South, you've got almost no margin of error in the rest of the country. But it's more than that. We have to make it clear we've got a vision for the whole country, not just blue states."

Edwards claims his latest campaign "ought to be nonpartisan," and critics are labeling him a populist, but I think his message will resonant well with most Americans because the issue of poverty touches us personally. We can identify with John Edwards' words:

"Look, to be honest, it's all very personal for me. I've seen everything, been everything, from poor to lower middle class, then regular middle class and then just skyrocketing, you know, when I was a lawyer. What happened to me is that I started thinking as I got older about this. I saw some of the people I'd grown up with going the other way, getting in trouble, having a really terrible time getting by. These were my friends when I was growing up and here I was, doing great. It was no great policy revelation, just a sense that something was wrong, that, Why am I the one who's gotten the good luck and they didn't?"