[Mb-civic] Looking Back (and Ahead) With Edwards - George F. Will - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Looking Back (and Ahead) With Edwards

By George F. Will
Sunday, March 5, 2006; B07

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- "Sometimes," says John Edwards, "people need a 
breather." He is not talking about himself, although surely he needed 
one after his brief rocket ride through the upper atmosphere of national 
politics. That ride ended -- or perhaps paused -- when the Kerry-Edwards 
ticket lost. The people who Edwards thinks really need a breather from 
presidential candidates are the voters.

But Edwards is roaming around, with 2008 in mind. His travels to more 
than 30 states have been organized around his interest in poverty. His 
Senate term ended nine weeks after the election, and he went to earth 
here. While his wife, Elizabeth, continues to recover from breast 
cancer, he is directing the new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity 
at the University of North Carolina.

Most Americans seem to regard as the only searing economic injustice the 
violation of their constitutional right -- surely it is in the Bill of 
Rights -- to cheap gasoline. But Edwards believes attacking poverty can 
be politically energizing if, by stressing "work, responsibility, 
family," the attack "is built around a value system the nation embraces."

In a speech shortly after Hurricane Katrina, he rightly stressed the 
correlation of family disintegration -- especially out-of-wedlock births 
-- with many social pathologies associated with poverty. He said, "It is 
wrong when all Americans see this happening and do nothing to stop it."

But no one knows how to stop it. Anyway, spending at least $6.6 trillion 
on poverty-related programs in the four decades since President Johnson 
declared the "war on poverty" is not "nothing." In fact, it has 
purchased a new paradigm of poverty.

Edwards has a 1930s paradigm of poverty: Poor people are like everyone 
else; they just lack goods and services (housing, transportation, 
training, etc.) that government knows how to deliver. Hence he calls for 
a higher minimum wage and job-creation programs. And because no Democrat 
with national ambitions will dare to offend teachers unions, he rejects 
school choice vouchers and says this: "Give working parents who are poor 
housing vouchers so they have a chance to move into neighborhoods with 
better schools."

But the 1930s paradigm of poverty was alive in 1968 when the National 
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, created in response to urban 
riots, thought this would be an imaginative cure: government creation of 
2 million jobs. This at a moment when the unemployment rate was 3.7 percent.

The 1930s paradigm has been refuted by four decades of experience. The 
new paradigm is of behavior-driven poverty that results from 
individuals' nonmaterial deficits. It results from a scarcity of certain 
habits and mores -- punctuality, hygiene, industriousness, deferral of 
gratification, etc. -- that are not developed in disorganized homes.

Edwards, who does not recognize the name James Q. Wilson, may have 
missed this paradigm shift. Many people in public life, and almost all 
those with presidential ambitions, are too busy for the study and 
reflection necessary for mastering any subject.

In 2000, just his second year in the Senate -- his second year in public 
life -- Edwards was on the short list of finalists to be Al Gore's 
running mate. Edwards's appetite was whetted, and he began the 
peripatetic scurrying around that preceded his run for the 2004 
presidential nomination. He lost, but he was the last man standing 
against John Kerry, and he can torment himself with plausible thoughts 
about how, with this or that tactical move, he could have won the Iowa 
caucuses -- he finished second, with 31.9 percent of delegate strength 
to Kerry's 37.6 percent -- and the nomination.

When Democrats wonder what red states Hillary Clinton could turn blue in 
2008, the wondering does not help Edwards, whose presence on the 2004 
ticket did not sway his own state: In 2000 Bush beat Gore-Lieberman in 
North Carolina 56-43. In 2004 Bush beat Kerry-Edwards here 56-44. And 
Democrats know that Gore might now be in his second term if he had 
carried his home state.

Edwards says that one lesson of 2004 is that presidential elections "are 
not issue-driven"; rather, they are character-driven and voters see 
issues as reflections of character. The issues "show people who you 
are." Perhaps.

But the idea that the candidate's persona is primary and that issues are 
secondary is a mistake made by some Democrats who yearn for another John 
Kennedy. He was a talented but quite traditional politician whom many 
Democrats wrongly remember as proving that charisma trumps substantive 
politics. Edwards, who has been called Kennedyesque, has a stake in that 
yearning.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301756.html
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