KEEP JOHN EDWARDS' HOPE ALIVE

As I continue to contemplate who my second choice for President will be (actually third - Joe Biden was second), I am encouraged by the recognition that John Edwards is getting for the campaign he ran.

Here is the entry posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on The Nation magazine blog:

He ended where he began. Against the backdrop of a battered New Orleans, John Edwards spoke eloquently of Americans' "moral responsibility to each other. We must do better if we're going to live up to the promise of this great country." And as he has throughout the course of the campaign, Edwards laid down a marker for the remaining two candidates. End poverty in America.

Edwards said that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama "have pledged to me-- and more important through me to America--that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign. And more important, they will make ending poverty central to their Presidency."

Edwards didn't make it out of January. He never had Obama or Clinton's $100 million campaign war chest required to wage a national campaign in this frontloaded system. What he did have was a powerful message of democratic populism: rewarding work, repairing ravaged pensions, confronting spiraling inequality, supporting organized labor, calling for public investment, and working for an end to poverty, Edwards was the only leading candidate to connect the war and the home front, arguing that an ambitious domestic agenda required cuts to our bloated miitary budget. And his campaign put the central issue of our time center stage: Who controls our country--corporations or the people?

What Edwards brought --and we can't lose with his exit--is that fighting moral spirit to take back our government from corporate power and interests. It's up to progressives to ensure that Obama and Clinton heed Edwards' words --and that we keep driving the issues of economic fairness, justice and dignity into the next primaries and election.