First In: John Edwards

John Edwards, who you last saw in 2004 playing the class-warfare game and claiming that John Kerry would make the lame walk again, has officially thrown his hat into the 2008 Presidential Ring.

And we’re all very excited.

Here is his five-point campaign platform:

In his message to supporters, Edwards listed five priorities to change America. Among them: “Guaranteeing health care for every single American,” “Strengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty,” “Leading the fight against global warming,” and “Getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil.”

The fifth point, apparently, is “Get the heck out of Iraq”.

As gripping as these bullet points may be to some, I’m far more interested in finding out exactly how Edwards proposes to do these things. One of the hallmarks of the Democratic Party os late is that they seem to be very long on slogans and buzz phrases and very short on anything that resembles detail.

So, while I’m all for “stengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty”, I’ll want to know what Edwards plans to do differently than we’ve done the past 40 years. Actually, I’ll want to know if Edwards plans to end poverty itself or simply to make is less shameful.

If it’s the latter, I’d say he has a pretty easy job. There seems to be little stigma these days to being poor, especially the sort of poor that doesn’t feel a great need to work hard to pull oneself out of poverty. That he held his press conference in New Orleans, where poverty has been created not by our economy but by the rampant corruption of local elected officials (all Democrats, by the way) and persistent victimhood, speaks much about the tenor his campaign is likely to take.

I don’t consider Edwards a serious candidate at this point. He was a lightweight in 2004 and there’s little to demonstrate that his arguments have matured any in the past two years.

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Category: The 2008 Horse Race