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John Edwards Trades Up

I'd Freely Trade the Optimistic Populist for an Honest One

by Sandeep Kaushik

All of a sudden, everybody--and by everybody I mean the national press--loves John Edwards. He was a lightweight last month, but now they love his Horatio Alger story: son of a mill worker gets rich beating white-shoe law firms, and then, in a touching friend-of-the-little-guy narrative, Mr. Edwards Goes to Washington.

They love his optimism. They swoon over his toothy grin. They even like his economic populism. The press enthuses that Edwards' rap about two Americas, one for the privileged, one for the schmucks, goes over like the Gettysburg Address to Democratic voters. You see, they say, Edwards, courtroom-trained, understands the value of grinning disarmingly when sticking the rhetorical shiv into Bush's corporatist elitism.

I like Edwards' stump speech, too. I'm just not sure he's sincere when he says it.

In May 2003, Edwards spoke at a machinists' rally in Everett. Afterwards, I asked him for his position on NAFTA. Would he repudiate his free-trading hero Clinton, and in trade-dependant Washington State? Or would he blast NAFTA, as his working-class populist rhetoric that day implied?

To his credit, Edwards immediately understood the dilemma. His first instinct was to duck. He wasn't in the Senate when NAFTA passed, he said. I waited. Then he said he supported NAFTA, but thought it would benefit from some modifications.

Fine. Except in recent weeks, as part of his populist shtick, Edwards has been running around blasting NAFTA and slamming John Kerry as a bloodless elitist for supporting it. So Edwards is an anti-NAFTA populist after all. Except then I read in the New York Times that no, he is pro-NAFTA. Except in places where people don't like it. "NAFTA is important," but Edwards also has a "personal response" to the agreement, having seen his dad's mill close. So his big difference with Kerry on NAFTA turns out to be that when it comes to workers, he feels their pain more.

That's good. I like it when politicians feel people's pain. And I like it when they're sunny optimists, too. So why don't I trust John Edwards?

sandeep@thestranger.com