John Edwards' Speech

I guess I can't ignore the Democratic National Convention (me being an American Studies major and all) so let me offer you some of my thoughts on John Edwards' speech last night. I was up around 4 am to catch it, and I wasn't disappointed. Edwards is an electrifying speaker who makes all this tired old campaign rhetoric sound fresh and new again. While I have seen Edwards speak better on other occasion this definitely was a good, solid speech.

Let's look at some specifics of the speech, shall we? The first thing that really grabbed me was the rejection of “the tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past.”  A lot has been said about the appeal of an optimistic election campaign that Kerry and Edwards represent, as opposed to the negativism of Bush and Cheney. Edwards went out of this way to make that very explicit in his speech. Kerry and Edwards represent, “the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible because this is America, where everything is possible”. Edwards defines one of the interpretations of the American Dream here. The American Dream is all about possibilities, but the difference with the Republican intepretation is that the Democrats want the government to step in and actively create an environment of equal opportunities.

Of course, no Republican is against equal opportunity but they don't see as much as a role for the government to provide such an environment. Rather, they point to the self-responsibilty and self-reliance of the American people. However, the Republicans are wrong. Enter one of the crucial passages of Edwards' speech:

“John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn't have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck. You don't need me to explain this to you do you?
You know exactly what I'm talking about. Can't save any money, can you? Takes every dime you make just to pay your bills. And you know what happens if something goes wrong, if you have a child that gets sick, a financial problem, a layoff in the family -- you go right off the cliff. And when that happens, what's the first thing that goes? Your dreams. It doesn't have to be that way.”

Kerry and Edwards have been accused of being 'liberals', but I'd like to think that their liberal face is what will win them the elections (or so I hope). There'a lot of poverty in the US and minimum wages are atrociously low for a civilized country. You'd think that passages like the above would appeal to loads of people trying to make ends meet. Unfortunateley, 'liberal' is a scary word in the US and just a step away from socialism.

I'm not going to quote Edwards entire plan of action here, but I appreciated many of his point about health care, raising the minimum wage,  discouraging outsourcing of jobs, and making education equally available to all Americans.

A final passage I'd like to point out is the one dealing with the race issue, something that I found to be very tangible and disconcerting when I was in the US:

“I've heard some discussions and debates around America about where and in front of what audiences we ought to talk about race and equality and civil rights. I have an answer to that questions: Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. This is not an African-American issue. This is not a Latino issue. This is not an Asian-American issue. This is an American issue. It is about who we are, what our values are and what kind of country we live in. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”
 
What becomes apparent in this passage is that Edwards is deliberately targeting minorities and swing voters, but he does so by speaking about it to a broad audience. In doing so he makes it an American problem, and I think it succeeds in being appealling to minorities without coming across as patronizing.

All in all a pretty impressive speech, looking forward to the Kerry speech tonight. (PS: Check the full transcript of the speech)