PrintJune 24, 2008
Edwards Touts Obama to ACORN Group
Former Democratic senator and perpetual presidential candidate John Edwards was the keynote speaker at the annual gathering of the radical group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).
Touting Obama to the crowd was hardly necessary. Barack Obama was closely allied with ACORN during his community organizing days in Chicago and even did some legal work for them in the early 1990's.
But Edwards - true to his populist, class warrior personae - played up Obama's plan to end poverty for "37 million (?) Americans:
Touting Obama to the crowd was hardly necessary. Barack Obama was closely allied with ACORN during his community organizing days in Chicago and even did some legal work for them in the early 1990's.
But Edwards - true to his populist, class warrior personae - played up Obama's plan to end poverty for "37 million (?) Americans:
Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards used a rousing speech on combating poverty Monday to promote Barack Obama as a president who will best address economic hardship, the United States' standing abroad and inequality in education.
With his trademark Southern accent, Edwards said Republican candidate John McCain will build a wall around progress to low-income people, but promised Obama "will tear it down" as president.
"It's time to have an economy that works for everybody," said Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina. "It is a moral outrage that kids go to bed hungry. We can end the shame of 37 million people living in poverty."
The "moral outrage" is that the poverty industry, of which ACORN is a leading light, continues to push statist solutions to problems that have proven over the years to be resistant to socialist remedies. In fact, what the US government considers "poverty" is so vastly overblown as to put most who live below the poverty line in the middle class if one were to include the wealth of federal benefits like food and housing assistance as well as other programs that benefit the poor.
But if we were to do that, where would groups like ACORN be? Out of business, that's where. So despite the fact that real poverty in this country is a problem for around 10% of families (18-22 million people) and that their economic situation is more often due to drug and alcohol abuse, illness, or some other issue other than pure economic failure, one begins to see the emptiness in Edward's rhetoric. (A family of 4 is considered poor by the government if their cash income is below around $21,000 a year.)
The manipulation of figures on poverty by the left in order to bring more and more people under government dependency is the real "moral outrage" here and Edwards knows it.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
