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Edwards, Obama vie: same towns, same voters
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 Ambassador Rice on Obama’s Afghanistan plan Dec. 2: Rachel Maddow is joined by Ambassador Susan Rice, U.S. representative to the United Nations, to talk about President Obama’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan. |
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“I’m not sure exactly what his policies are, or what he has done in the past, or what committees he’s been on, but I do believe at this point in time we do need a change,” she said. “I just feel when I listen to him and when I see the way he expresses himself, I believe he’s sincere, I believe he’s genuine and that goes an awful long way with me.”
Why a Republican backs Obama
“He seems to be an honest, sincere person who will bring back some sincerity to the presidency,” said Dennis Pearson, a self-described Republican who heard Obama at his stop in Manchester. “He instills in me a hope that there can be some change…. He may not have the experience, but I think he can inspire people.”
Pearson, who owns a heating and air conditioning business in Manchester, said, “I’ve been a Republican my whole life” and voted for Bush in 2004, but sometimes votes for Democrats.
About Edwards, Pearson said, “The problem I have with John Edwards is that all I’m hearing him say is ‘I’ve spent 35 years fighting corporations.’ It’s a campaign thing – they’re all fighting the bad guys.”
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Abraham Funchess, an Obama supporter in Waterloo, Iowa |
“There’s a new sense of urgency, as the candidate said today,” Funchess said after hearing Obama speak in Waterloo on Saturday. “This whole element of ‘the fierceness of now,’ the urgency of now. I don’t want to waste this opportunity to have an impact on who will be the new leader in the free world.”
Asked about former president Clinton’s critique of Obama as relatively inexperienced, Funchess said what many Obama supporters say: “If we have someone in there with that intelligence, he can attract the right policy advisors. We need a president who knows how to dialogue with both our friends and our adversaries.”
He added that he is also impressed with Edwards, “particularly his emphasis on the working class and the poor.’
If an undecided voter wants to look to the Edwards and Obama rhetoric as a way of choosing between the two men, there’s little to choose from.
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The lines from their stump speeches often are interchangeable:
- “People are tired of economic policies that seem to always favor the wealthy and the powerful, so that a CEO makes more in ten minutes than ordinary Americans make in a year and the CEOs are getting the tax breaks.”
- “Why does our tax code continue to create more tax breaks for the wealthiest people in America and for the multinational corporations, while working families are left behind constantly? Because the corporations and the wealthy have so much power and lobbying presence in Washington that they get what they want.”
- “I’m running to tell the lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.”
Those quotations came from the rivals’ weekend campaign stops in this order: Obama, Edwards, Obama.
But in contrast to Obama, Edwards’s vision of the economy is often bleak, a vision of people in the grip of sinister forces, the corporations and their lobbyists.
“I’m telling you: these people are controlling what happens!” Edwards told a crowd at the Opera House in Elkader Friday night. “They are controlling everything that happens.” He urged the crowd to “reclaim this democracy — it doesn’t belong to them.”
The outcome here in Iowa may well be decided by which tone voters prefer: the heated populism of Edwards, or the more mellow populism of Obama.
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