Good morning, afternoon, evening, or whatever suits you when you happen to be reading this update. According to the campaign site blog, Senator Edwards is going to appear on MSNBC's Hardball "tomorrow" at 5pm EST, with a repeat at 7. Unfortunately, that was posted at 1am EST on the 29th, which would mean this episode of Hardball would be airing on Saturday, which it doesn't do. I'm going to tack into the wind and suggest that you hook up with Hardball tonight at 5pm EST, that's Friday the 29th.
The Senator will also be appearing on The Situation Room on CNN sometime during its 4-6pm EST airing, though it doesn't really say when specifically. You can hit up the post here.
I'm looking around the site to see if there will be archives of the town hall meetings the Senator is doing over the next few days, but I'm not finding any. If you want to check them out, you'll either have show up, or tune in live when the site has their stuff setup. The next event is tonight in Portsmouth, NH, with the doors opening at noon. I believe you need to get tickets ahead of time through the page I just linked you to. The town hall meeting in Iowa started at 6pm with the doors opening at 4, so you can probably expect the NH event to get under way sometime around 2pm, but check Edwards main site for updates on this because I'm just guessing here.
For news, there is a new article in The News & Observer that went up early this morning. It centers around the Senators interests in eliminating poverty within the United States.
Edwards, who is the son of a mill worker and who became a millionaire trial lawyer, has linked himself to the issue of poverty. He has made three previous trips to New Orleans to help residents with rebuilding projects. During his 2004 campaign, Edwards emphasized his Two Americas theme, highlighting the inequalities in the nation.
In 2005, Edwards created the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has compared his stance to that of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, who ran for president in 1968. But addressing poverty, rather than the problems of the struggling middle class, can be tricky politically.
"It's clearly not the main mover of most voters," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York. "People are interested in the war in Iraq. The question is whether he can talk about the quality of life for Americans as part of the specialized focus on people who are poor."
Yeah, it's not a huge vote getter issue, but it's still pretty damn important when the richest and most powerful nation in the world has starving children living in the streets. You can turn to the ideologically popular issues that drive the base, and other universally popular issues such as education, but that only goes so far. Everyone wants to improve education and help old people cross the street, but it's the tough issues like poverty that can't be solved with tax cuts or taking away peoples rights to make choices. These are significant societal issues that will take new ways of thinking and new institutions to improve, and it's long past time we got to work on this.
There's another piece pointing out that Edwards voted for the Iraq war, but now regrets it. "It was a mistake and I take responsibility for that," Edwards said. It's nice when people can admit their mistakes, but I'm still not happy that it happened in the first place. Hopefully he's done something the recently disenfranchised GOP hasn't been capable of: learning from those mistakes.
