Opinion

Looking ahead to 2008

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Most of you probably haven't given much thought to the 2008 presidential election but for us political junkies, it's never far from the front of our minds. In fact, I decided last year to support and work for Chuck Hagel if he decides to throw his hat in the ring and nothing has happened to make me change my mind about that.

However, if he decides not to run, my other candidate of choice would be John Edwards, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in the last election. He is the epitome of the American Dream. He came from meager surroundings as a child, worked his way through college and Law School and made a lot of money as an attorney defending the "little guy" against corporate abuse. He has a great smile, a pleasing personality and seems to speak from his heart. His strongest suit, if he is to appeal to moderates and even some conservatives, is that he is not a wild-eyed liberal from the east coast or west coast. He's a southern boy who never forgets where he came from.

According to the polls, he is currently a distant second behind Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Senator from New York and former President Bill Clinton's wife. I'm not so sure about that though. I think most people assume she's running and because of that assumption, they're drawn to her "celebrity" name right now. If she does run, she'll eventually have to stand on her own and that might not be the easiest thing to do. One thing is certain. The Republicans simply drool when they think about her being the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate. I think there would be few undecided voters in that campaign. Hillary would be the most polarizing Presidential candidate we've had in a long time, maybe ever. Everybody knows who she is and everybody knows how they feel about her. Regardless of her recent efforts to be more "mainstream" in her thinking, I don't believe many Republicans feel she is mainstream at all.

Edwards, however, is purely mainstream. Since his defeat, he has been devoting almost all of his attention to poverty in this country. He finds it a national shame that 37 million people are living in poverty in the wealthiest country in the world. So, rather than going back to the practice of law, in February he announced a campaign to "eradicate poverty in America." With a $40,000 annual salary paid by private funds, he became the first director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina's law school. This is essentially a think tank designed to bring anti-poverty scholars, activists, journalists and politicians together in an attempt to come up with innovative ways to confront economic and racial inequities.

So, Edwards has returned to the heart of what it has traditionally meant to be a Democrat. The Democratic Party has lost it's sense of history, forgotten what it stood for and, more importantly, who it stood for, and consequently has been walking aimlessly in the wilderness for the past decade or so. Edwards wants to lead the party back to its roots and I think he has the manner, the personality, the drive and the intellect to do just that. The Democratic Party has seen much of its base hijacked by the appeal of Republican values over Democratic ideals, even when Republican Party leaders don't live up to those values themselves. The Democratic Party was built around the central premise of being for the little guy, of helping those who can't help themselves while the Republican Party has never been able to distance themselves from the fat cat corporate heads the party sleeps with on a daily basis. John Edwards has the ability to lure some of that base back home. If he's able to do that, he will be a formidable player in the Presidential sweepstakes of 2008.

Since we're talking about politics in this week's column, I want to mention a suggestion made to me by one of my students after he attended the Judicial Nominating Commission's Open Forum last week. He thinks anyone wanting to run for office should go through the same screening process judicial candidates go through. Every person wishing his or her name to be placed on the ballot should have to submit to a background check, a credit check and a screening process similar to the ones the judicial candidates encountered and similar to what most of us encounter whenever we apply for a job.

And that's exactly what someone who is trying to get elected is doing. They're applying for a job. Not a bad idea I think. Why shouldn't political candidates be held to the same standards the rest of us are? And just because we've never done it before doesn't mean we can't. We could just decide to change the process people use to get their names on the ballot.

Maybe a lot of the malfeasance we currently see in our elected officials could be avoided if we implemented this suggestion.

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