Whew. John Edwards just spoke to the Change To Win convention in Chicago and blew the delegates away. I’ve got a few snippets here from his speech.
First, to repeat some of the background: Three of the Democratic candidates are speaking here at the one-day convention. Barack Obama spoke this morning and he did fine–I’d give him a B-plus, which was also the consensus opinion of all ten people who sat at my lunch table. Hillary Clinton speaks in about an hour or so (UPDATED: she is only doing a telephone speech because she’s stuck on tarmac somewhere).
The apparent front-runners for the Democratic nomination for president are appearing here–partly to try to win the endorsement of CTW (which I don’t think will happen for anyone–you need a consensus and it’s not yet there, if it will ever be) and, mainly, to appeal to the unions within CTW that have not made an endorsement. To recap, of the CTW unions, only the Carpenters has made an endorsement: John Edwards. Yesterday, the executive board of SEIU met and is still not making an endorsement, though all three of the contenders–Obama, Clinton and Edwards– sent a team of high-level campaign operatives to meet with the union’s executive board.
Edwards started out by telling the audience that Elizabeth Edwards had walked a UAW picket line today in Grand Rapids, MI in support of the striking General Motors workers and that he will be doing the same in the next day or so. And in that spirit he said:
I want to be the greatest union president in the hisotry of the United States of America…the reason we have a middle class in America is because of organized labor.
When it came to health care, he emphasized, as he has done in the past, that the only barrier to enacting universal health care in America is the power of the drug and insurance companies. And, then, he took on his own party when he talked about part of the problem:
Are we really going to trade a bunch of corporate Republicans for a bunch of corporate Democrats?
In the 1990s, he pointed out, when we had a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president:
We didn’t get universal health care, we got NAFTA.
[More after the jump]
On the war in Iraq:
Congress has to end this war. This Congress has a mandate from the American people. The Congress has the power to do this. They just need a little backbone…they should not submit a single bill to fund the war unless it has a timetable for withdrawal.
But, where he really won over the crowd and drew deafening standing ovations was when he spoke about the right to have a union and to have rights at work:
If you can join the Republican Party just by signing a card, anyone should be able to join a union by signing a card…
This, of course, referred to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow a union to represent workers if a majority of them sign cards, rather tham have to go through the time-consuming and employer-biased process overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
And he pledged that when he is elected president:
Nobody will walk through a picket line and take your job away.
Towards the end, Edwards spoke and you could almost hear a pin drop. He harkened back to a speech that Dr. Martin Luther King forty years ago at Riverside Church in New York, a speech in which King spoke eloquently about his opposition to the Vietnam War. Edwards recalled that King had a famous slogan: there comes a time when silence becomes betrayal and, that that was the reason he was running for president.
He, then, spoke about being able, like Martin Luther King, to see the Promised Land, where no one lives in poverty…:
Where every man and woman you represent is treated with dignity and respect.
The crowd went wild.
