I Cogitate

Presidential Profile: Edwards delivers stark message
Robynn Tysver
Omaha World-Herald
October 21, 2007

COUNCIL BLUFFS — John Edwards likes to tell the story of a disabled coal miner he met in the hollows of Kentucky who had difficulty speaking his entire life because of a cleft palate.

John Edwards, who placed second in the Iowa caucuses in 2004, is vowing to eradicate poverty, end the war in Iraq and reduce tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.He met the man on a summer tour of poverty-stricken areas in the United States.

The miner told the Democratic presidential hopeful that for 50 years he could hardly speak, until a nonprofit medical group provided him with a dental prosthetic. The miner appreciated the helping hand. Edwards says he was flabbergasted such help took five decades.

"He was very kind and noble about it. He said he was grateful. I wasn't noble. I was outraged," Edwards said in Council Bluffs as he touted his universal health care plan.

Anger is the operative word when it comes to Edwards' second presidential campaign. The former North Carolina senator is this year's rise-up-and-revolt candidate, the candidate who delivers a stark message: It's us versus them.

His stump speech is laden with rhetoric about a nation divided.

On one side of the divide, Edwards says, stand the wealthy and the multinational corporations who hire lobbyists to get special favors in Washington, D.C. On the other side are the hardworking stiffs who labor all day and still have trouble paying for health insurance — or fixing a cleft palate.

In frayed blue jeans and stark white shirts, Edwards can whip up a crowd with a sweet-and-spicy populist pitch. He bursts on stage with a megawatt smile and a soft twang, both of which slowly evaporate as his eyes narrow to a squint and he begins listing the ills of "crony capitalism" under Bush.

His eloquence reflects his years as a trial lawyer in Raleigh, N.C., where his oratory helped him amass a fortune as a personal injury attorney. He specialized in representing people who were victims of medical malpractice or corporate negligence...

....He is back this year with a more left-of-center message and a harder edge that accompany the deep lines forming around his eyes and cutting into his boyish features. His wife, Elizabeth, says the couple are listening less to political consultants and more to themselves.

The result is that as other Democratic candidates hug the political center, Edwards is blasting away from the left with vows to eradicate poverty, end the war in Iraq and reduce tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

He says he wants to return the party to its roots: helping the poor, the disabled and the people with no voice.

"The soul of the Democratic Party — when we're at our best, we stand up for people who can't stand up for themselves," he says.

Does Obama's Message Match the Moment?
Reconciliation May Be Hard Sell to Angry Party
Alec MacGillis
Washington Post
October 17, 2007

WASHINGTON, Iowa -- A hush fell over the crowd as Sen. Barack Obama crossed the field, his white shirt glowing in the sun, waves of cornstalks rustling behind him. Once inside the open barn on the county fairgrounds here, he offered a message as uplifting as the backdrop, promising a new era of consensus instead of partisan divide.

"We're going to win an election, but more importantly, we're going to change the country," the Illinois Democrat said. Nothing will get done in Washington "unless we not only change political parties in the White House, but also change our politics."

The audience of Iowa Democrats seemed receptive. But when it came time for questions, it was clear that at least some members of the crowd had not escaped the partisan mind-set that Obama said he wanted to overcome. What did he think about President Bush's veto of a children's health insurance bill? What, another person asked, did he make of the Bush administration's alleged denigration of science? What would he do to prevent Republicans from taking advantage of election flaws like the one in Florida in 2000, in which the questioner said "it's not over till your brother counts the votes"?

As Obama positions himself for the stretch run for the Democratic presidential nomination, his call for a "new kind of politics" faces a broad test in his own party, and not just of whether it makes any criticism of his chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), seem hypocritical. As the pointed questions he received here suggest, it may be that his summons to "turn the page" past the country's red-blue polarization is not what many Democrats want to hear after seven years of mounting anger at Bush and the Republican-dominated government.

Obama faults a broken system in Washington for failures that many Democratic voters attribute simply to having the other side in power. By contrast, Clinton more directly exploits Democrats' feelings of resentment. She argues that the troubles of the past seven years -- the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the widening income gap -- are the result not of broken politics in Washington but of poor Republican governance, and she says that she would offer competent leadership to fix what has gone awry since her husband left the White House.

David Axelrod, Obama's chief campaign strategist, argues that there is no mismatch between the senator's bipartisan appeal and Democratic anger at Bush, saying in an interview that Obama's call for reconciliation is itself implicitly an "anti-Bush message." "One of the reasons Democrats have been so angered by Bush is that he's been so fundamentally divisive and intractable and unable to hear other points of view," he said.

Hillary's Mystery Money Men
Russ Baker and Adam Federman
The Nation
[from the November 5, 2007 issue]

In the Clintons' pursuit of power, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton's campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who'd slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least as substantial--and still under wraps.

Political junkies will recall Quasha as the controversial figure who bailed out George W. Bush's failing oil company in 1986, folding Bush into his company, Harken Energy, thus setting him on the path to a lucrative and high-profile position as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and the presidency. The persistently unprofitable Harken--many of whose board members, connected to powerful foreign interests and the intelligence community, nevertheless profited enormously--faced intense scrutiny in the early 1990s and again during Bush's first term.

Now Quasha is back--on the other side of the aisle. Operating below the radar, he entered Hillary Clinton's circle even before she declared her candidacy by quietly arranging for the hire of Clinton confidant and longtime Democratic Party money man Terry McAuliffe at one of his companies. During the interregnum between McAuliffe's chairmanship of the Democratic Party and the time he officially joined Clinton's campaign, Quasha's firm set McAuliffe up with a salary and opened a Washington office for him.

Just a few years earlier, McAuliffe had publicly criticized Bush for his financial dealings with Harken, disparaging the company's Enron-like accounting. Yet in 2005 McAuliffe accepted this cushy perch with Quasha's newly acquired investment firm, Carret Asset Management, and even brought along former Clinton White House business liaison Peter O'Keefe, who had been his senior aide at the Democratic National Committee. McAuliffe remained with the company until he became national chair of Hillary's presidential bid, and O'Keefe never left. McAuliffe's connection to Quasha has, until now, never been noted.

Another strong link between Quasha and Clinton is Quasha's business partner, Hassan Nemazee, a top Hillary fundraiser who was trotted out to defend her during the Hsu episode--in which the clothing manufacturer was unmasked as a swindler who seemingly funneled illegal contributions through "donors" of modest means.

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