Obama Welcomes Edwards Supporters with Open Arms

With the announcement of his pending withdrawl from the race for the Democratic nomination for President this year, there will be millions of Americans struggling to decide where to pledge thier ongoing support.  Neither Hillary Clinton, nor Barack Obama  can represent precisely the firebrand populism of the Edwards campaign, but on issue after issue, there is strong reason for Edwards supporters to join the rising movement for change that has been inspired by the Obama candidacy.

Barack Obama had this to say about Edwards withdrawl from the race:

"John Edwards has spent a lifetime fighting to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the struggling, even when it wasn't popular to do or covered in the news. At a time when our politics is too focused on who's up and who's down, he made a nation focus again on who matters - the New Orleans child without a home, the West Virginia miner without a job, the families who live in that other America that is not seen or heard or talked about by our leaders in Washington."

Obama added, "John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this - that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose. So while his campaign may end today, the cause of their lives endures for all of us who still believe that we can achieve that dream of one America."

From all of us Obama supporters to all of you Edwards supporters:  we are here to welcome you with open arms.
Back in 2005, when Raising Kaine began fighting for our own particular brand of Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy Progressivism, we found inspiration in the words and strategies of the blogging leader who would later found the Progressive States network and then sign on to the Edwards Campaign, David Sirota.   In particular, in his American Prospect Cover Story from January 2005, "The Democrat's Da Vinci Code", Sirota identified a pathway to success for Democrats that has been successfully employed by great Dems from John Tester to Sherrod Brown, and which was largely embraced by the Edwards Campaign itself.

On issue after issue, as described by Sirota, Obama's positions and leadership drive the way towards the kind of populism that Edwards himself embraced, and which will form the lasting and broad coalition for a new era of Progressive politics in America.

1.  Fight the Class War

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, crying "class warfare" is the last refuge of wealthy elitists. Yet, inexplicably, this red herring emasculates Democrats in Washington. Every time pro-middle-class legislation is offered, Republicans berate it as class warfare. Worse, they get help from corporate factions within the Democratic Party itself.

But as countless examples show, progressives are making inroads into culturally conservative areas by talking about economic class. This is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans.

Obama's inspiring style doesn't easily lend itself to Hewey Long muckrakery, but his message and experience absolutely speak to the need to protect and defend "the little guy":

From the Washington Post, January 4:

Obama didn't stop there. He played a major role in passing many other bills, including the state's first earned-income tax credit to help the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in 25 years (a law a Post story said made Illinois "one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure"). Obama's commitment to ethics continued in the U.S. Senate, where he co-authored the new lobbying reform law that, among its hard-to-sell provisions, requires lawmakers to disclose the names of lobbyists who "bundle" contributions for them.

Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a "unique" ability "to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people." In other words, Obama's campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.

While Obama's oratory may not spark the same prarie fire as Edwards', his record shows that he is dedicated to the same progressive principles and is capable of getting results.  Obama's policy of "Tax Fairness", is precisely in line with the interests of the middle-class.  Moreover, you'll recall that it was Obama and Edwards who refused to take PAC money, while Hillary Clinton refused to take a stand against it.

Specifically:  

Taxes: Obama would raise income taxes on wealthiest and their capital gains and dividends taxes. He would also raise corporate taxes and provide $80 billion in tax breaks mainly for poor workers and elderly, including tripling Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credit for larger families.

2. Champion Small Business Over Big Business

The small-business lobby in Washington is a de facto wing of the Republican Party. But Democrats are finding that, at the grass-roots level, small-business people are far less uniformly conservative, especially as the GOP increasingly helps huge corporations eat up local economies. While entrepreneurs don't like high taxes and regulations, they also don't like government encouraging multinationals to monopolize the market and destroy Main Street.

It's no secret that John Edwards was the champion of "Main Street over Wall Street".    He decried the excesses of corporate greed and sought to set fire to the pillars of oligarchy.  He was also the champion of small businesses, and will likely continue to be in whatever he pursues after this contest.  

Barack Obama has very clearly delineated plans to address the issues facing small businesses,

As one blogger put it when his conservative republican parents suggested that they could vote for Obama:

3) The Republicans have long relied on a fundamental commonality of interest between big business and small business, between the Club for Growth and the Fortune Four Hundred on one hand and the members of thousands of local Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs on the other. This notion of a common interest is harder and harder to sustain. In the 1960s the health of America's big businesses meant they were hiring workers somewhere in the U.S., but today multinational corporations can boom while Main Streets are busting. Furthermore, the gap between the wealth of a successful small town entrepreneur or executive and that of a big business mogul has become immense. The fundamental argument that campaigning against the estate tax or corporate income taxes will improve the lives of "average" white-collar managers is less and less persuasive.

Obama's message in favor of small businesses is one that can be heard from the hovels of the deeply impoverished to the increasingly uncertain country club set, and in order to make profound change, we will need a group that diverse to make it.

Finally, Obama is a great champion of Media Ownership Diversity, an issue that includes the small-business v. big-business dichotomy and transcends it to include issues that go to the very foundations of our democracy.

3. Protect Tom Joad

Protect Tom Joad
Northern Wisconsin and the plains of North Dakota are not naturally friendly territories for progressives. Both areas are culturally conservative, yet their voters keep sending progressive Democrats like Representative David Obey and Senator Byron Dorgan, respectively, back to Congress.

No issue is closer to these two leaders' hearts -- or more important to their electoral prospects -- than the family farm. In Wisconsin, corporate dairy processors have tried to depress prices for farmers' dairy products. In North Dakota, agribusiness has squeezed the average farmer with lower prices for commodities. But unlike other lawmakers who simply pocket agribusiness cash and look the other way, Obey and Dorgan have been voices of dissent. They have pushed legislation to freeze agribusiness mergers, a proposal originally developed by populist Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. As Dorgan once wrote, "When Cargill, the nation's number one grain exporter, can buy the grain operations of Continental, which is number two, the cops aren't exactly walking tall on the antitrust beat."

Dorgan and Obey also opposed the Republican-backed "Freedom to Farm Act," which President Clinton signed into law.

The family farm is an endangered species in American life and just as John Edwards emerged as a powerful voice speaking to the needs of rural voters, the results from Iowa and Nevada point to Obama's power in rural communities.

Obama is a true leader on family farming, and has been for decades.  His family managed to live off of the proceeds of a modest oil lease, but before that, they were simple family farmers.

Obama stands against the excesses of the farm subsidy programs that have driven prices below the sustanence level for most small producers:

Obama's farm plan, which would cost the United States an estimated $300 million a year in new spending, would also include the elimination of income taxes for seniors making less than $50,000, conservation and land protection measures, and investments in bioenergy expansions.

"What we've learned, above all else, is that we're at a critical and urgent moment for rural America," Obama said, referring to the dozens of meetings his campaign held with rural Iowans during the summer to help draft the plan. "Our economy is in transition, our environment faces growing peril."

Farm subsidies have drawn national attention, particularly after a federal report this year showed that $1.1 billion was paid by the federal government to 172,801 dead people between 1999 and 2005. In addition, some large corporations have been paid millions, which Obama says has hurt family farms.

The plan proposed Tuesday would limit such payments to a maximum of $250,000 a year. Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, estimated that such limits would save the federal government $100 million.

"Too many family farmers are being squeezed as big agribusiness takes up larger shares of federal subsidies, takes up more market share, manipulates prices and contracts, makes it harder for family farmers to control how they run their own farms," Obama said.

There was a time when small, family farms were the backbone of our agricultural policy, but when Bill Clinton signed the "Freedom to go out of business farming" bill, into law, he set the stage for massive agribusiness to overwhelm the market.  

The excesses here also go well beyond merely squeezing small families out.  As we have well documented, agribusinesses like Smithfield Farms in Virginia are vicious exploiters of undocumented labor.  The fact that Farm subsidies drive grain prices through the floor, also contribute to world poverty and the flood of undocumented aliens.  When people can't survive on the food they grow it engenders the cycles of poverty that lead to worldwide disease, and force farmers to seek lives in America.  Obama opposes these mega subsidies, seeking instead to support small farmers and keep them and their rural economies thriving.

4. Turn the Hunters and the Exurbs Green

For years, conventional wisdom has said that culturally conservative hunters and exurbanites will always vote Republican. But the GOP's willingness to side with private landowners and developers is now putting the party at odds with these constituencies. And that could create a whole new class of Democratic-voting conservationists.

Obam hears this one loud and clear.  For Obama, creation stewardship is a moral imperative, and it's one that is being undermined by vested corporate interests:

Climate change is not just a scientific or an environmental issue, says Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. It is an issue of morals and of faith.

Men and women of faith have always waded into issues that impact society in profound ways: prison reform, temperance, abolition, women's rights, Obama reminded the group crowded into the public library on a rainy Sunday in Iowa's capital.

Climate change should also become one of those moral imperatives.

Obama was speaking the day after former Vice President Al Gore received a Nobel Prize for his efforts to promote awareness of the dangers of climate change.

"When God created the Earth he entrusted us to take responsibility to take care of that Earth," Obama says, and we are not living up to our responsibility to ensure our children's future.

From Obama's Rural Plan:

Protect the Rights of Sportsmen: Barack Obama deeply respects America's sportsmen and is committed to protecting their rights. Tens of millions of Americans hunt and fish. Obama believes that we can protect the rights of hunters and other lawful gun owners while still working to reduce gun violence and make sure that guns do not fall into the hands of criminals or the mentally ill. Barack Obama is fully committed to protecting the forests, fish, and game our sportsmen enjoy. Obama will provide full funding for a broad range of conservation programs. He also supports a proposal by more than 25 national hunting and fishing organizations to help fish and wildlife survive the impacts of climate change.

Obama champions the policies that will fulfill Sirota's powerful equation:  Red + Blue = Green.  His voice it the voice that will win the crossover  for redstate Americans sick to death of watching their precious natural resources destroyed by the excesses of big-business.

6. Become a Teddy Roosevelt Clone

"Tough on crime" has always been a reliable Republican mantra. Now, though, progressives are claiming that law-and-order mantle for themselves. Led by state attorneys general, Democrats are realizing the political benefits of fighting white-collar crime, big-business rip-offs, and corporate misbehavior.

John Edwards led on the issue of corporate responsibility, but Obama is ready to continue the fight.  

For example:

# Obama joined union efforts to get Wal-Mart & other large employers to improve working conditions, wages & health coverage.
# Obama supports amending bankruptcy laws to keep companies from avoiding their pension obligations.
# Obama supported new rules to force companies to properly fund their pension plans so workers aren't left without adequate retirement security.
# He has also voted to shore up the funding of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

His record and policies stand up to anyone on this issue, and he will carry this fight  to Washington where he has already proven able to make change.

6.  Clean Up Government

In the early 1990s, Newt Gingrich attacked Democrats as corrupt, wasteful, and incompetent, eventually leading the Republicans to reclaim Congress. Now, though, progressives are using the tactic for themselves.

Obama's hallmark achievement in the US Senate was the most sweeping ethics reform in modern history.  It doesn't go far enough, but he promises to take the ethics fight farther from the White House:

   "I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists - and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not get a job in my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president."

   - Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA, November 10, 2007

7. Use the Values Prism

In 2004, pundits seem to agree that the national election was decided by "moral values." And though many believe the term is a euphemism for religious, anti-abortion, and anti-gay sentiments, it is likely a more general phrase describing whether a candidate is perceived to be "one of us."

It is this sense of cultural solidarity that often trumps other issues. For example, many battleground-state voters may have agreed with John Kerry's economic policies. But the caricature of Kerry as a multimillionaire playboy windsurfing on Nantucket Sound was a more visceral image of elitism. By contrast, successful red-region progressives are using economic populism to define their cultural solidarity with voters. True, many of these Democrats are pro-gun, and some are anti-abortion. But to credit their success exclusively to social conservatism is to ignore how populism culturally connects these leaders to their constituents.

In terms of reconnecting the reputation of the Democratic party with authentic American values, there is no greater champion in the party than Barack Obama.  His eloquence and call to the greater nature of the American spirit is effective not only in speaking to the necessity of dramatic change, but in making the powerful case that the Democratic and progressive way is the American way.  

The impact of this particular aspect of Obama's message of change cannot be overstated.  In this age of disillusionment with the excesses and failures of the conservative agenda, Americans are looking for powerful ideas and the power to turn them into lasting transformation for the future of our country.  It is Barack Obama's voice that connects America to it's authentic progressive base and inspires Americans from all walks of life to a better and brighter future filled with possibility and that can overcome the massive adversity set before us by the powers of conservative ideology.

In Sum

David Sirota sums up his opus thus:

In these seven ways, successful red-region Democrats have tacked back to a class-based populism that puts them firmly on the side of the little guy. And because voters implicitly know that big guys with lots of cash dominate the political system, that populism projects a deeper sense of values and a McCain-like authenticity.

In the aftermath of the recent election, the stale cadre of campaign consultants who helped run the party into the ground now say the solution is for Democrats to simply invoke God more often and radically change their positions on social issues. But the point is not to impulsively lunge rightward in some cheap, unprincipled gesture to red America that would reek of political strategizing.

The point is to follow red-region Democrats who have diminished the electoral impact of traditional social issues by redefining the values debate on economic and class terms. Granted, the progressive populists profiled above do not uniformly hew to the standard liberal line on social issues: some are pro-life, some pro-choice; some pro-gun ownership, some pro-gun control; some pro-gay marriage, some anti-gay marriage; some vociferous about religion, some subdued. But they have shown that there is another path that moves past wedge issues if the party is willing to fundamentally challenge the excesses of corporate America and big money.

For all of you Edwards supporters who are looking for a new way forward, and a new candidate who will support the things that you found inspiring in John Edwards, we hope that you will consider taking this moment, along with the millions of Barack Obama supporters who are championing change in this nation.

You are the key to the future.  And if you are asking yourselves whether we can emerge from this dark era of Bush Republicanism into a new era of cooperation, transformation and success, millions of supporters and devoted Americans, Progressives, Democrats, Men Women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, moderates, and newly inspired republicans are here to tell you:

"YES! WE CAN!"

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