Edwards: Fighting Global Poverty Key to US Strength

"The reason I've given this post such a grandiose title is that global poverty is the biggest problem in the world."

- Neil

Neil the Ethical Werewolf (at Ezra Klein's website) has written a post about John Edwards' major policy addresss delivered by him in New Hampshire this week.

Excerpt from Neil's blogpost:

I hope what we're seeing here is the beginning of a distinctive Democratic approach to the problems posed by radical Islam, with its own grand story about how we're going to win. Being able to promise that you'll lead America to victory is very important in rallying people around your foreign policy, and one of the reasons why perceived Republican advantages on foreign policy lasted as long as they did, even in the face of wanton dishonesty and catastrophic blunders, was that Republicans kept making the promise of victory in Iraq. Democrats had to face up to the truth that Iraq was collapsing into disaster, and they were too conscientious to make any similarly grand and impossible promises. But plans like the one Edwards expresses here credibly promise victory in the larger struggle of which the Iraq War was supposed to be a part. It's how we triumphed over Communism, and it's how we're going to triumph over Islamic extremism too.

We must stop labeling the fight against global poverty as 'charity.' In this new age, the fight against global poverty is also a fight for our own way of life. None of us are completely self-sufficient, and to imagine ourselves as such is a sorry delusion. What happens to the child in Jakarta is going to have a ripple effect that stands to all too easily reach your child on the streets of your American town.

If we did not care for the way our nation approached the Iraq War, it's time to realize that, until we begin to think in a whole new way about exactly what fighting global poverty means to our own well-being, we are continuing to expose our children and the chiren of foreign nations to assured and pointless war and to the pointless and unnecessary destruction of others' lives and property in the future.

There truly is a change that can occur once we stop consciously agreeing with the frames set for us by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Cokie Roberts, Bill O'Reilly, George Will, and others who bang their ideology drums and move their dry lips to rote recitations heard a million times before. They haven't a clue as to how to change the course to Hell that America is currently on. These stale cookies have absolutely no ability to learn a new language. Someone ought to pull their political driver's licenses. They've gone blind.

With John Edwards to offer some new frames, let's teach these stale cookies something new. We can be leaders by creating and holding a vision of realistic and attainable change - then working to see that the change comes. I don't mean sitting around waiting for a miracle. I mean working with passion to effect the change that must happen if we care about our nation and its place in the world.

Remember the film "Field of Dreams?" We - simple people that we are - may be the key to the natural law of attraction. Let's build it - and trust that many will come.