Why the corporate media want to silence John Edwards...He is "dangerous"

[draft_mario_cuomo]

by Paul Street

==Why is the media’s scorn for the populist/progressive hypocrisy of top tier candidates – a hypocrisy that is written into the structural nature of the United States’ heavily media-focused and corporate-plutocratic “dollar democracy” – so disproportionately focused on Edwards? It’s simple. He’s not a full-blown populist progressive; no such individual could run a credible campaign under the current corporate-dominated U.S. electoral regime. But after the openly Left and officially unelectable Kucinich (who threw his Iowa caucus delegates to Edwards in 2004 and will probably do so again in 2008), Edwards is the closest thing to such a candidate in the Democratic primaries. Having attained his “wealth as a trial lawyer suing hospitals and corporations” (Cohen 2007), Edwards is deeply concerned (however hypocritical he might sound) about poverty and inequality. After heading a liberal poverty research center in Chapel Hill for the last three years, he announced his campaign in an impoverished section New Orleans – the nation’s leading symbol of concentrated and racialiized poverty and government neglect – and speaks insistently and repeatedly about and against the growing chasm between rich and poor within the United States. He has the most progressive and detailed health care proposal – the only truly universal plan – among the top-tier Democratic candidates. He advocates rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for people who receive more than $200,000 a year to fund truly universal coverage (6).



Edwards is the only top tier Democrat to back up Dennis Kucinich’s claim that single-payer government health insurance is good policy. His universal health care plan is to the left of the cheaper and milder copy-cat version proposed by Barack Obama in that it is more adequately funded (thanks to the proposed tax-cut rollback), truly universal and would compel private insurance companies to compete with government plans and could evolve into single payer. ==

==“Edwards is alone in convincingly criticizing corporate-drafted trade treaties and talking about workers’ rights and the poor and higher taxes on the rich. He’s the candidate who set up a university research center on poverty. Of the front-runners in presidential polls, he’s pushing the hardest to withdraw from Iraq, and pushing the hardest on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to follow suit. Given a national media elite that worships ‘free trade’ and disparages Democrats for catering to ‘extremists’ like MoveOn.org on Iraq withdrawal, the media’s rather obsessive focus on Edwards’ alleged hypocrisy should not surprise us. Nor should it surprise us that we’ve been shown aerial pictures of Edwards’ mansion in North Carolina, but not of the mansions of the other well-off candidates. You see, those other pols aren’t hypocrites: They don’t lecture about poverty” (Cohen 2007).



It’s not for nothing that Edwards is losing to Hillary-Obama in both the big donor dollar race and in the race for name recognition and favorable attention in dominant media. He’s speaking the languages of labor, the New Deal and the (stillborn) War on Poverty to a noteworthy extent in a time when the labor movement and the notion of positive government action for egalitarian and anti-poverty ends have been officially proclaimed dead and over (drowned in the icy individualist waters of neoliberal calculation) and in a period when the issues of inequality and economic insecurity resonate with a considerable and growing section of the ever more class-fractured citizenry.==

Read the rest at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=13177