John Edwards for VP?

Eric Lee is not only making the case that Barak Obama should pick John Edwards as VP, he is organizing a grass roots campaign to send that message to the Obama campaign.

Here's what Eric writes

It's the morning after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. It now seems pretty clear to everyone that Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee for President. The question now is -- what can we do to ensure that he defeats John McCain in November. And not only defeats McCain, but defeats him decisively.

We need more than a Democratic victory in November -- we need a landslide. We need huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. We can only achieve that if we have the kind of unbeatable team at the top that unites the party and the nation.

It's obvious that Hillary Clinton is not going to be Obama's running mate. Obama has to choose from among many outstanding Democrats, including some who ran against him in the early primaries, to find a great Vice Presidential choice. But one man stands head and shoulders above all the others as the obvious choice: John Edwards.

John Edwards set the agenda for all the candidates in the early stages of the primary battles. He came up with the first and best comprehensive health care plan. He raised the issue of poverty as no leading politician has done for 40 years. His charisma, his abilities and his appeal to those voters Obama must win in November are beyond dispute.

An Obama-Edwards ticket in November is the Democratic party's best chance of winning a resounding victory. If you agree, please sign the form above. We'll make sure that Obama gets this message loud and clear from the many Democrats who we're sure agree with us.

If you agree, visit the Edwards for VP site and sign-on. BTW, Eric promises to have Obama-Edwards campaign materials available soon.

Most lists of potential VPs for Obama seem to be to excessively centrist and rather bland. Despite the importance of Ohio, no-one seems to mention Senator Sherrod Brown, a very forceful critic of the myths of fair trade (he's even written a book on the subject) or Governor Ted Strickland.

If Eric is right and Hillary out of the equation, it seems to me that Obama's advisors will present him with three options. First, a woman to win over Hillary's female supporters. Second, a balance-the-ticket moderate who will satisfy the media and the punditcrats. Third, as Eric argues pick a running mate who will give an economic populist punch to the ticket. This is the way to build an enduring, progressive Democratic majority.

The invisible candidate

My friend, Eric Lee, has an interesting column on the invisible candidate (John Edwards). You might also want to take a look at his post on which candidate should the unions back.

Progressive economists for Edwards

Economists pick Edwards because he will fight for sustained growth, full employment and an end to poverty

Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Today, the John Edwards for President campaign announced that more than 30 leading U.S. economists have endorsed John Edwards for president. "Economists for John Edwards" includes such notable scholars as James K. Galbraith from the University of Texas at Austin; Deirdre McCloskey from the University of Illinois at Chicago; Thomas Palley, founder of the Economics for Democratic & Open Societies Project; Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategies Institute; Harley Shaiken from the University of California, Berkeley; and Edward Wolff from New York University.

"I'm proud to endorse John Edwards and his campaign to build One America.," said James Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin. "Edwards understands that in order for America to prosper, our economy needs to reward work as well as wealth – and he's proposed detailed and comprehensive policies to address the growing income gap, the health care crisis, job loss and the other critical social issues facing our nation."

"I am honored to have earned the support of this distinguished group of economists," said Senator Edwards. "Today, families across the country are working harder than ever, but struggling to make ends meet. To help middle-class families get ahead, we need a president who will fight for universal health care, smarter trade policies and a new energy economy."

In their endorsement of Edwards, the "Economists for Edwards" signed on to the following statement:

"As professional economists, we support John Edwards for President of the United States in 2008 because we believe that John Edwards has best demonstrated the capacity and the policies to be the next president of the United States.

"We support John Edwards because we believe his campaign is the single best expression of progressive political values in American politics today.

"We support John Edwards because we believe that as president he will best wage the hard fight that lies ahead for the principles and programs we endorse.

"We support John Edwards because as economists, we seek effective public policy aimed at sustained growth, full employment, an end to poverty, and progress toward solving the major social and environmental problems associated with health care, education, trade, taxation and climate change.

"John Edwards' approach to these issues has been uniquely serious, honest, and far-reaching. We urge all Americans – and particularly the Democratic voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina - to join us in supporting John Edwards for president."

A complete list of the members of "Economists for Edwards" is included below.
Economists for Edwards

Note that institutional affiliations are for identification purposes only.

Gar Alperovitz
Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy
University of Maryland-College Park

Lourdes Beneria
Professor of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University

Michael A. Bernstein
Provost
Tulane University

Martha Campbell
Associate Professor, Economics
SUNY Potsdam

Manuel Castells
Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society
University of Southern California, and
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Science and Technology
MIT

Jane D'Arista
Former staff economist
U.S. House of Representatives

William Darity, Jr.
Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy Studies
Professor of African and Africa-American Studies and Economics
Duke University

Paul Davidson
Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis
The New School University

Gerald Epstein
Professor of Economics
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Susan F. Feiner
Director of Women's Studies
Professor of Economics
University of Southern Maine

James K. Galbraith
Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations
LBJ School of Public Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin, and
Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Richard Garrett
Associate Professor of Economics
Division of Accounting and Business Management
Marymount Manhattan College

Mary King
Professor of Economics
Portland State University

Jan Kregel
Visiting Distinguished Research Professor of Economics
The University of Missouri - Kansas City

Peter Hans Matthews
Department of Economics
Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753

Deirdre McCloskey
Professor of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago

Richard McIntyre
Honors Program Director and Professor of Economics
University of Rhode Island.

Thomas Michl
Professor of Economics
Colgate University

David Miller
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

John Miller
Professor of Economics
Wheaton College

Tracy Mott
Professor of Economics
University of Colorado at Boulder

Thomas Palley
Founder
Economics for Democratic & Open Societies Project

Dimitri Papadimitriou
President
Levy Economics Institute
Bard College

Chip Poirot
Associate Professor of Economics
Department of Social Sciences
Shawnee State University

Robert Pollin
Professor of Economics and Director,
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI)
University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Robert Prasch
Associate Professor of Economics
Middlebury College

Clyde Prestowitz
President
Economic Strategies Institute

Bruce Roberts
Professor of Economics
University of Southern Maine

J. Barkley Rosser
Professor of Economics
James Madison University

Harley Shaiken
Class of 1930 Professor
Graduate School of Education and Department of Geography
University of California, Berkeley

Nina Shapiro
Professor and Chair
Department of Economics and Finance,
Saint Peter's College

Edward Wolff
Professor of Economics
New York University

Martin Wolfson
Professor of Economics and Policy Studies
University of Notre Dame

L. Randall Wray
Research Director
Center for Full Employment and Price Stability
Department of Economics
University of Missouri-Kansas City, and
Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute

Iowa reports

A few interesting reports from or about Iowa

Marc Cooper on the Edwards surge.

has toughened his tone, making him sound more like a Latin American populist than a genteel Southern Democrat. His speeches have become emotional incitements to "rise up" against the "small band of profiteers" who have clamped down an "iron grip" on American life. He has qualified any notion of politically investing in the Clinton campaign as an agent of change as "insanity" and has said that, unlike Obama, he would "never, ever" sit down to negotiate with powerful special interests like the health care lobby. "They will never give up power voluntarily," Edwards told a cheering crowd Saturday. "The only way they will ever give up power is when it is taken away from them." After listening to just such an Edwards speech this weekend, one veteran campaign observer quipped: "No Democrat has run a campaign like this since Fred Harris." In 1976 the former Oklahoma senator unsuccessfully challenged Jimmy Carter for the nomination from the left by running on an unabashedly populist platform

Thomas Edsall on will Edwards win?

As the race comes to a close on January 3, it has become increasingly apparent that Edwards and Obama are competing for the same constituency of anti-Clinton Democrats. Most importantly, Edwards has escalated his aggressive anti-corporate attacks, which are producing small, but potentially crucial, defections from the Obama camp of men who favor a bellicose response to their weakening economic position and to their lack of traction in the job market.

John Nichols in The Nation on Edwards having the right message at the right time.

Shiraz Socialist, a UK leftist, argues that US (as well as British) socialists should back Edwards.

Edwards Courts Unions Heading into ‘08

By Marie Horrigan New York Times Published: January 4, 2007

Coming out of a 2004 campaign year in which he staged an upstart bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and ended up on the ticket as the party’s vice presidential running mate, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards could have bided his time before committing to another White House try in 2008.

But Edwards, who is independently wealthy from his past career as a successful trial lawyer, hardly left the national campaign trail. In the interim — and leading up to his official candidacy announcement in New Orleans Dec. 28 — Edwards has continued to tour the nation honing his message on a theme he calls the great issue of our time: combating poverty.

Edwards’ official occupation as he entered the presidential derby was head of a recently established center on poverty issues at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where he attended law school. He hopes that the issue will earn him significant support within the party’s traditional base of liberal activists, and more general support among voters in a nation where, statistics show, the gap between the wealthiest and least affluent Americans is growing.

His efforts may be bearing fruit, as his anti-poverty theme is drawing attention from segments of an important Democratic political constituency: organized labor.

Edwards threw his weight behind efforts to increase minimum wage levels in Ohio, Arizona and Michigan. In April, he marched a picket line with Teamsters Union President James Hoffa and service workers at the University of Miami.

Last year, Edwards spoke at the national conventions for three major unions: the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win Coalition and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. It was at the latter that Edwards proclaimed the labor movement “the greatest anti-poverty program in the United States.”

“I believe in a Democratic Party of big ideas . . . a Democratic Party that’s not afraid of saying the word ‘union,’” he told more than 7,000 attendees at the Teamsters’ June convention in Las Vegas, according to release from the union.

The UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity “helped spark a nationwide renewal of interest” in poverty and class issues, Edwards said in his resignation letter dated Dec. 28, the same day he announced his candidacy. A book co-written by Edwards, titled “Ending Poverty in America,” is scheduled to come out in April, about the time that the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will be picking up steam.

His singular approach to the issue appears to be giving Edwards entree to possible union endorsements, from which he was excluded in 2004. Although Edwards also emphasizing the need to reduce poverty that year, he was viewed by many labor leaders as too inexperienced after just a single term in the Senate; some also looked askance at his profile as the “Southern alternative” to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry — who won the nomination and picked Edwards as his running mate — and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, now chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Edwards’ blue-collar roots are well established. His background as the son of a millworker and first member of his family to go to college won him credentials among rank-and-file union members, his campaign argued.

While most candidates courting unions focus on specific sectoral concerns, Edwards has taken a new approach, making economic populism and the value of unions part of his general message to all audiences, Kusnet said.

And another difference, Kusnet said, was Edwards’ experience on the picket line. “Other than Jesse Jackson [the longtime African-American activist], I don’t think there anybody who’s run for president who’s made themselves that visible in day-to-day union work,” he said.

But one change is likely to help Edwards, according to Kusnet — the insertion of Nevada into the early round of Democratic presidential nominating events. Edwards has made his strongest ties among SEIU and UNITE HERE, two unions with strong organizations in Nevada, a state where the hospitality and service industries are driving economic forces.

“They’re not just strong in the sense of being long-established, stable institutions, they’re dynamic organizing unions there. And that tends to be the kind of situation where people are more likely to vote as union members,” Kusnet said.

Official sanction from union leaders, however, will not be the most important issue to the campaign, Palmieri said. “Whether we get endorsements or not, we think that union household voters will be a big part of Edwards’ supporters,” she said.

Eric Lee on the Edwards campaign

Eric Lee, visionary international labor activist and creator of the invaluable LabourStart website, has entry on his blog about the John Edwards campaign for President. After recommending that unions emulate Edwards use of the internet as an organizing tool, Eric discusses the importance of the Edwards campaign for American unions and the democratic left..

..a running thread in everything I have written for some years now is the question of whether the trade union movement has a future or not. You might be asking yourself what this has to do with the Edwards campaign. The answer is: plenty.

Edwards did not come out of the trade union movement; he made his millions (and they were millions) as a lawyer. He may have had working-class roots, but they appear to be behind him now. And yet in recent years, especially since his defeat in the 2004 elections (when he first ran for the Democratic nomination, and then as John Kerry's vice presidential candidate), he has made a sharp turn toward the unions.

This has been in evidence for some time now, and a quick glance at his activities over the last year or so show that he's been in the thick of the fight against poverty, and helped get several states to enact higher minimum wages than the stingy Republican administration in Washington.

This is great stuff, and combined with his constant appearances at union events and expressions of support for union causes, he did two things this week that cement the bond between John Edwards and the trade union movement.

First, in his two-minute online video, placed on YouTube (where else?), standing in front of a ruined New Orleans house, he spoke about all the great work that's been done – this was at the very end – to organize workers into unions. It was a brief reference, but it was a clear mention of Edwards' strong belief in the positive role of trade unions.

And it gets better. Today, the campaign named its manager, the man who is leading the effort to get Edwards into the White House. That man is David Bonior, a name I've certainly come across as he's also the Chair of a group called American Rights at Work -- an organization that's been around since 2003 promoting its vision of the US as “a nation where the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers is guaranteed and promoted.”

If this stuff sounds mild to Europeans and others, it sounds positively radical to Americans. The percentage of American workers organized into unions has been plummeting for decades, and is below 10% in the private sector.

Studies have shown that a majority of workers in the US would join unions if they could, but they don't because of a well-grounded fear that they could lose their jobs if they do.

Every day, people get sacked by their employers for trying to join unions. There has long been a corporate reign of terror in the workplace and ever since I've been politically active (this goes back some time) unions have called for changes to the country's laws to make it easier to join unions.

So now we have a presidential campaign boosting a candidate who is the most pro-labour politician in America today, run by a labour studies professor (I'm not making this up) who until yesterday was running a workers' rights organization. This is the kind of politics we haven't seen in America for more than a generation.

It bears comparison to the nearly successful 1934 California gubernatorial campaign by Upton Sinclair, a socialist running as a Democrat, under the slogan “End Poverty in California”. It reminds one of the campaigns of the Socialist Party in its heyday, when Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas could get close to a million votes.

And on a personal level, I'm reminded of a Presidential campaign that was discussed, and then abandoned, by Michael Harrington back in 1978-9. Harrington proposed then to launch is campaign from the ruins of the South Bronx – something echoed by Edwards' decision today to launch his own campaign from still-devastated New Orleans.

None of this means that Edwards is a socialist – far from it. But I mention this to point out that there is a radical tradition in American politics, closely linked to the unions (Debs, of course, was a great railway union leader before becoming a politician). Edwards may well fit into this tradition.

The problem with that tradition is that it never came close to winning the Presidency. That may be about to change.

Today, polls in the state of Iowa, the first battleground state in the long series of Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, show Edwards in the lead – ahead of Hillary Clinton and all the others.

Edwards is running on an explicitly pro-union message, unashamed of his connections to the labour movement in his country. And he's doing so with the kind of website that every union and campaigning organization should aspire to have.

That's why his campaign interests me so much, and why I intend to do what I can to learn about it, report on it, and participate in it.