WASHINGTON — There’s losing. There’s losing honorably. And then there’s John Edwards.
-snip
Then there is John Edwards. He’s not going to be president either. He stays in the race because, with the Democrats’ proportional representation system, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might end up in a very close delegate race — perhaps allowing an also-ran with, say, 10 percent of the delegates to act as kingmaker at the convention.
It’s a prize of sorts, it might even be tradeable for a Cabinet position. But at considerable cost. His campaign has been a spectacle.
Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq War vote. But he has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret and renunciation.
– As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now denounces.
– As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.
– As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it “radically overhauled.”
– As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it “a good bill … and I am pleased to support it.” He now attacks it.
– As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of greed, etc.
Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an astonishing string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy, bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but inveighs against.
Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an “epic struggle” against the great economic malefactors that “have literally,” he assures us, “taken over the government.” He is angry, embodying the familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly holds to any revelation other than the zealot’s very latest.
Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has been the “cause of my life,” the very core of his being, ingrained in him on his father’s knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the anecdote he’s telling. You must understand: This is not politics for him. “This fight is deeply personal to me. I’ve been engaged in it my whole life.”
Except for his years as senator, the only public office he’s ever held. The audacity of the all-my-life trope is staggering. By his own endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint newly acquired. His claim that it is an expression of his inner soul is a farce.
A cynical farce that is particularly galling to left-liberals of real authenticity. “The one (presidential candidate) that is the most problematic is Edwards,” Sen. Russ Feingold told The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., “who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq War. … He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record.”
It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world. But for 4 percent of the Nevada caucuses?
January 25, 2008
And then there’s John Edwards
November 15, 2007
Unions balk at Edwards track record
In 1998, while running for the Senate, Edwards did not come out in favor of repealing right-to-work laws in North Carolina, and he has only opposed a national right-to-work law. While North Carolina is hardly considered to be a labor stronghold, the former senator’s record and his relationship with some unions in the state were used by some unions to judge him as unworthy of an endorsement.
The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), which endorsed Sen. Chris Dodd (Conn.), said Edwards’s unwillingness to advocate a repeal of the right-to-work measure was a sticking point for the membership when it was seriously considering supporting the former senator’s bid.
“How do you walk picket lines and be for right-to-work?” Jeffrey Zack, an IAFF official, said. “It’s surprising that it wasn’t disconcerting to more people.
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s results. It’s not what you say. It’s results.”
Edwards has also come under fire for his support for normalizing trade relations with China after he was elected to the Senate and for voting for fast-track authority for the president. Edwards has said since that he regrets both votes, and Wednesday he told the UAW in Iowa that he would reverse trade policies.
Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) were clearly impressed with Edwards when he addressed the group this summer, but members from North Carolina and his past positions on trade and right-to-work were ultimately what led them to endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) instead, officials said.
“He walked out of there completely convinced he had our endorsement,” IAM official Rick Sloan said. “What he failed to realize was the jury was still out.
“I think he makes an exceptional closing argument. If that was all the jury ever heard, he’d win every time. But it’s not.”
Sloan said Edwards appeared to be “the natural for us,” but the former senator made some missteps with the North Carolina IAM members who worked to elect him, and his support for normalizing trade with China and right-to-work in his home state cost him.
“These days he’s sounding like Johnny Tremain helping a modern-day Paul Revere going around saying, ‘The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming,’ ” Sloan said. “Well, they are — by his gold-plated invitation.”
Sloan added that in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, IAM members who worked for U.S. Air in Charlotte, N.C., were losing their jobs in the wake of lost revenues and corporate cutbacks.
“When our guys were getting laid off after 9/11, he came down and met with the company” instead of the workers, Sloan said.
“Our guys in North Carolina worked really hard to get him there and then didn’t see much of him,” Sloan said, adding that the right-to-work issue is “the highest priority for the labor movement.”
The Hill 11/15/07
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/unions-balk–at-edwards-track-record-2007-11-15.html
November 14, 2007
Kucinich calls out Edwards on China Trade
WASHINGTON, D.C. – “Made in China” has become a health and safety warning label for American consumers following the recalls of tens of millions of Chinese-made toys, but the “real warning label should say ‘Made in Washington, D.C. by corporate lobbyists’ because the life-threatening hazards of these products were either ignored or brushed off by members of the Congress seven yeas ago,” Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said today.
And, at least one then-member of the Senate, John Edwards, who has been railing lately in favor of higher safety standards for Chinese-made products, defended his 2000 vote supporting expanded China trade with the famously reported comment, “it does us no good to pretend that these remedies are perfect and that people will not be hurt.”
“Senator Edwards knew seven years ago that people would be hurt, so why did he vote for China trade?” Kucinich asked. “How credible is his newfound consumer protectionism and his campaign advocacy for trade reform to save American jobs?”
Kucinich, D-OH, noted that Edwards, who became a millionaire as a trial lawyer with considerable expertise in product liability matters, “knew better than any other member of the Senate what the risks were in sending U.S. manufacturing jobs to a country with almost no labor standards, no health and safety standards, and no environmental standards.”Beyond that, Kucinich pointed out, Edwards’vote in favor of the 2000 China trade agreement has resulted in the loss of more than 973,00 manufacturing jobs and more than 1.2 million jobs total, according to studies released by the AFL-CIO.
“If he knew then that this trade agreement would hurt people and put Americans out of work, he had a moral responsibility to vote against it,” said Kucinich, who has a perfect record in his votes against unfair trade agreements. “Like his now-regretted vote in favor of the resolution that led to the Iraq war, his votes on trade issues raise questions of judgment.” “When candidates stand in front of a union audience or in front of the cameras, they bemoan the three millions jobs that have been lost because of ‘free trade’ agreements,” Kucinich noted. “When they had a chance to vote as a member of Congress, they strongly supported those agreements. That means they voted against American workers, and, as recent events have shown, against American consumers.”
October 31, 2007
Edwards called on China trade vote
Imports from Peru last year amounted to $5 billion, only 0.03 percent of all U.S. imports. In comparison, China accounts for 16 percent of U.S. imports — nearly $288 billion worth of goods last year. China is running neck and neck with Canada as the top source of U.S. imports.While Edwards talked about what he sees as excessive CEO pay in his Des Moines speech, he did not mention China at all, alluding only to “ensuing the safety of imported food and drugs” without mentioning any specific country.
Later Thursday, in a meeting with 200 voters in Boone, Iowa, he said, “We’ve got these trade deals that cost Americans millions of jobs, and what do we get in return? Millions of dangerous Chinese toys.”
That line got a good reaction from the crowd.
Edwards didn’t tell them what he himself had said seven years ago when he voted for the China trade deal.
snip
While the China trade legislation included an “anti-surge” proviso designed to stem a flood of imports, Edwards was quite candid in 2000 in acknowledging that “it does us no good to pretend that these remedies are perfect and that people will not be hurt.”
He touched on a classic problem of international trade policy: the hurt is highly concentrated among some workers in higher-wage countries — while the benefits of trade (lower prices, greater variety of goods) are broadly diffused over many millions of consumers.
snip
As he explained his vote on Sept. 19, 2000, Edwards, then a senator from North Carolina, told the Senate, “Trade between U.S. companies and the Chinese will likely explode in the coming years, generating jobs and revenues in this country. It could easily be the keystone in the continuing prosperity of this nation.”
snip
The 2002 vote to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq has become a mea culpa moment for Democratic presidential contenders. Edwards has ostentatiously confessed what he now sees as his error in that vote.
But the 2000 China vote hasn’t become a cause for repentance and confession.
MSNBC 10/30/07
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21536832/
August 12, 2007
NAFTA spin mode
Even John Edwards, who has worked hard to win over the unions, stopped short of calling for the United States to pull out of Nafta.
“Scrap it or fix it?” the moderator, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, asked.
“It needs to be fixed,” Edwards said, then quickly changed the subject to take a swipe at Clinton, who was recently featured on the cover of Fortune with the headline “Business Loves Hillary (Who Knew?).”
“The one thing you can count on is you will never see a picture of me on the front of Fortune magazine saying, ‘I am the candidate that big corporate America is betting on,’ ” Edwards said. “That will never happen. That’s one thing you can take to the bank.”
International Herald Tribune 8/12/07
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/12/america/trade.1-113375.php
June 4, 2007
China: “No more important relationship”
“There is no more important relationship that America has than our relationship with China,” Edwards said in a 2006 speech before the Asia Society in New York after returning from a trip to China. Edwards appears to believe that the United States must accept that China is becoming a major world power, and that its relationship with the United States does not necessarily have to be tense. In Edwards’ analysis, Chinese leaders “want the world to be a stable, relatively tranquil place” so that they can focus on further expanding their economy.As a senator in 2000, Edwards voted for the U.S.-China Trade Relations Act, which normalized trade relations with China.
Council on Foreign Relations
http://www.cfr.org/publication/13521/candidates_on_us_policy_toward_china.html
May 6, 2007
Reversals on war, education and Yucca Mountain
Democrat John Edwards, his party’s 2004 vice presidential nominee, underwent a tough grilling Sunday on ABC’s This Week about his evolution from what host George Stephanopoulos called “hawkish new Democrat” to “ultra-liberal.” Click here to see a video clip.
Stephanopoulos said Edwards has changed his mind about a number of positions he supported when he was a senator from North Carolina — starting with the Iraq war but also including bankruptcy reform, free trade with China, the No Child Left Behind education law and storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
A few of their exchanges:
• Edwards has called his 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war a mistake. He was asked about a Boston Globe report that he urged privately in 2004 that he and nominee John Kerry stand by their votes and not admit to making a mistake. Edwards said that when the election was over and he had time to reflect, “I thought it was my personal responsibility to be honest.”
• Edwards said he did not remember saying his vote for No Child Left Behind was a mistake. He said the law “needs to stay in place” but it should be changed because “the testing regimen is too intrusive.”
• Stephanopoulos said Edwards criticized offshore tax shelters in the 2004 election but went to work the next year for an investment group with hedge funds incorporated in the Cayman Islands, which get tax breaks. “I learned about this after the fact. I didn’t know it at the time,” Edwards said. He said he remains opposed to offshore tax shelters and would try to eliminate them as president. He said his pay from the Fortress Investment Group will be on his next financial disclosure report.
• Edwards did not address the trade, bankruptcy or Yucca Mountain issues on the show. Nevada has moved to the beginning of the nomination process with caucuses scheduled Jan. 19. Majorities there oppose the nuclear waste repository.
USA Today On Politics 5/6/07
http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2007/05/edwards_grilled.html
February 27, 2004
KERRY TRUMPED JOHN EDWARDS ON THE TRADE ISSUE
KERRY TRUMPED JOHN EDWARDS ON THE TRADE ISSUE. The North Carolina senator has made criticism of free trade policies a central theme of his campaign to upset Kerry in “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses in states such as California, New York, Ohio, Georgia and Minnesota. And Edwards has plenty of ammunition for the fight, as Kerry’s record on trade issues is difficult to distinguish from that of George W. Bush. But, when the trade issue came up during Thursday’s Los Angeles Times/CNN debate, Kerry was ready for Edwards. And he hit the North Carolina senator where it hurt.
After Edwards suggested that the frontrunner was changing his pro-free trade tune with recent statements about the need to insert protections for workers and the environment into trade agreements, Kerry suggested to voters that Edwards is, himself, something of a newcomer to the fair-trade movement.
Asked if he was “shocked” by Edwards’ focus on the trade issue, Kerry said, “Well, I am surprised, because in his major speech on the economy in Georgetown this past June, John never even mentioned trade. And the fact is that, just the other day in New York, in The New York Times, he is quoted as saying to The New York Times that he thought NAFTA was important for our prosperity. Now he’s claiming that he was against it and these other agreements.”
Then, Kerry added, “I have said clearly for a number of years now, we have to have labor and environment standards in all of our trade agreements. That is exactly the same position as John Edwards.”
Ouch!
The Nation 2/27/04
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=1286
February 20, 2004
“He’s admitted he made a mistake on China”
ATLANTA — Senator John Edwards never misses a chance to tell people he is the “son of a mill worker,” recalling the days before many manufacturing jobs in the South were sent overseas.And to draw a sharp distinction between himself and Democratic front-runner John F. Kerry, Edwards often reminds audiences he opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, while Kerry voted to pass it — setting in motion new economic forces that labor leaders believe have cost Americans jobs.But as Kerry is quick to point out, Edwards never had to vote on NAFTA; he was still working as a lawyer then. And during his five years in the Senate, Edwards has been more flexible on trade than his rhetoric suggests: In 2000, he supported solidifying trade relations with China, swayed by technology, furniture, textile and tobacco firms in his home state of North Carolina who sought to sell their products to Chinese consumers. His North Carolina GOP colleague, Republican Senator Jesse Helms, opposed it.Two years later, Edwards initially backed giving President Bush broad “fast-track” powers to negotiate future trade agreements. Only when a provision protecting the textile industry was stripped out did Edwards oppose it.Yesterday, as a war of words over trade practices heated up on the campaign trail, Edwards described trade as a “moral issue” during a speech in New York.
Noting that US firms have sought intellectual property rights abroad, Edwards said: “We’re asking that human rights be taken just as seriously.”
The Kerry campaign fired back almost immediately. In an e-mail labeling Edwards “Mr. Johnny Come Lately on Trade,” the Kerry campaign pointed out that Edwards did not highlight trade in a major economic speech last year. A separate Kerry memo accused Edwards of changing his mind four times on fast-track, noting that Edwards “voted FOR the China trade deal, even while acknowledging that he thought jobs would be lost.”
snipKerry and Edwards have nearly identical positions on future trade deals: They would insist that enforceable human rights, labor, and environmental standards be written into the body of any agreement. However, their records do differ. Edwards has recently voted against trade deals with Chile, Singapore, the Caribbean, and Africa, while Kerry supported them all.
Speaking in New York City yesterday morning, Edwards set forth his guiding principles on trade, saying every future agreement would have to create US jobs, contain human rights and environmental protections, and contain mechanisms to punish nations flouting those rules.
But on the major trade accords of the recent past, Edwards’s record is hardly that of an antitrade firebrand, as the China and fast-track examples illustrate. In those two cases, local trade concerns — driven by the powerful North Carolina textile industry — shaped his ultimate positions.
Edwards never publicly commented on NAFTA when it was pending before Congress. In 1998, as Edwards ran for the Senate, he said he had “serious reservations” about NAFTA when asked by reporters, but rarely spoke out against it unprompted. With the North Carolina economy humming along back then, NAFTA and trade were not big political issues.
snip
Last summer, Gephardt, the Missouri Democratic congressman who recently dropped out of the race, criticized Edwards for supporting the China trade deal. At the time, a mass closing of 16 textile plants had enraged many in North Carolina.
But in 1999, just before the China trade deal, North Carolina businesses sold $245.2 million in products to China, the state’s 16th-largest foreign customer.
In addition, Edwards said at the time that exposure to trade would help democratize China.
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/edwards/articles/2004/02/20/trade_issue_close_to_home_for_edwards/
February 19, 2004
Kerry: ‘We voted for the China trade agreement’
Kerry, still the prohibitive favorite in the race after winning 15 of the first 17 contests, brushed off suggestions that Edwards was making inroads in the race by pointing out their differences on trade.
“We have the same policy on trade. Exactly the same policy,” said Kerry, who has been criticized by Edwards for supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement. “We both voted for the China trade agreement.”
John Edwards
Asked if Edwards, who was a trial lawyer when NAFTA was approved by the Senate in 1993, was being disingenuous in saying he opposed NAFTA, Kerry replied: “Well, he wasn’t in the Senate then. I don’t know where he registered his vote, but it wasn’t in the Senate.”The Massachusetts senator also rejected suggestions that Edwards’ working class roots gave him a better understanding of what it was like to lose a job.
“If where you come from was a qualification for president, we’d never have had Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy,” he said.
China Daily 2/19/04
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-02/19/content_307395.htm
