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My Top 3 |
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by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
John Edwards, you better have a strong stomach and a steel rod in your spine. You’re going to need it because it’s going to get ugly, and you’re going to be the target of the ugliness. You hung tough, didn’t fade in the polls as some expected and hoped, and now you are poised to make a big showing in Iowa. Now that that’s the case, they’re going to come after you with all barrels blazing.
The ‘they’ is not just the gaggle of ultra-conservative slam artists, the Fox network crowd, talk shock jocks, the Wall Street Journal neo-con columnists, and The New York Times neo-neo-liberal bunch. The ‘they’ is also Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party shot callers. They will slander, slur, and outright frontally assail you. As long as you were a bare afterthought, warm up act to Clinton and Obama, nobody cared.
These two mediagenic darlings have hogged the glare of the media and the public, and with Clinton, it’s loathing and vitriol and with Obama, it’s curiosity and fake adoration. But John, you quietly, patiently did your homework. You courted the Democratic Party chairs and leaders in Iowa, hammered away on the need for universal health care, a revamped farm policy, labor protections, against corporate pillaging, and most importantly, the disgrace of endemic poverty in a nation of plenty.
Your populist message didn’t mark you as a threat — it’s the fact that you can win and would be in a position to deliver on it makes you a threat. The seeds of the attack were there from the start. You had barely stepped out of the barber salon months ago when the guffaws started. You were the butt of laughs and late night TV talk show gags for committing the unpardonable sin of blowing $400 on a haircut. Normally that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow since you are a wealthy guy who made millions as a corporate lawyer. But John, you did one more thing that none of your rich pals would think of doing. In fact, you did one thing that your Democratic presidential rivals were slow to do. You made poverty no longer a dirty word out of a presidential candidate’s mouth.
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Technorati Tags: John Edwards, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, $400 on a haircut, Democratic presidential rivals
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