[John Edwards] puts focus on ending poverty

from The Statesman Journal

Ex-senator speaks to group of black female lawmakers

PETER WONG
Statesman Journal

PORTLAND -- John Edwards came to Oregon on Friday to test-drive themes, including a new national war on poverty, for a potential presidential bid in 2008.

"I want to live in a country that is well on its way to ending poverty" within the next two decades, Edwards told 400 attendees at the National Conference of Black Elected Legislative Women, or NOBEL.

"I don't see this as complicated. In a country of our kind of wealth, to have 37 million people living in poverty is wrong," he said.

Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina, was the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee.

He leads the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina law school in Chapel Hill. He ran for president in 2004, and he said he will decide soon whether he will run again.

Edwards said poverty got renewed attention last year after people saw the victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

"It is about focusing on those who have been left behind," state Sen. Avel Gordly, D-Portland, said after the speech. "We can do so much better. We have the talent and creativity. What we need is the will -- and the recognition that this is the moral challenge of our generation."

The 37 million people under the federal poverty line in 2004, the most recent year available from the Census Bureau, amount to one of every eight Americans. In Oregon, the number is 419,000, or 11.7 percent. The 2000 Census poverty rate was was 14 percent in Marion County and 12 percent in Polk County.

For whites, it was 8.6 percent nationally in 2004; Asians, 9.8 percent; Hispanics, 21.9 percent; and African Americans, 24.7 percent.

"The face of poverty in America is largely a face of color," Edwards said.

No president since Lyndon Johnson -- who launched the original War on Poverty in 1964 -- has talked seriously about reducing poverty through government action.

Edwards said that perhaps too much effort was absorbed by bureaucracy or made people too dependent on government. However, he said, by the end of the 1960s, the national poverty rate dropped by half, partly because of the economic boom and partly because of other government programs such as Medicare.

"It's clear that this country has a conscience," he told reporters afterward. "They care about fellow citizens who are struggling. What has been missing is any kind of leadership to help galvanize that kind of effort."

He suggested these steps during his talk: An increase in the federal minimum wage, which has been at $5.15 per hour for a decade; an expanded earned-income-tax credit for low-income wage earners; special savings incentives; regulation of payday loans; housing that breaks up concentrations of low-income families; 1 million "stepping-stone" jobs for youths; and guaranteed college tuition in exchange for work.

"I do not claim to have all the solutions to poverty," Edwards said. "But there is a hunger in America to be inspired. The American people understand, in a way that a lot of politicians in Washington (D.C.) do not, that national community matters."

Sen. Jackie Winters, R-Salem, said Oregon has taken some of those steps on its own.

She also said she would have liked to hear more about how to create jobs.

"When you have a job, you have the ability to put food on the table, pay for a house and something for health care," she said. "Unless we get busy at creating jobs, we're going to continue to talk about poverty."

During his speech, Edwards said his 2002 vote to authorize the use of U.S. military force in Iraq "was wrong" in retrospect, "and I take responsibility for that."

He said 40,000 U.S. troops should be withdrawn now and plans should be made for most U.S. combat forces to come home within 12 to 18 months.

"We will never get other countries in that region to engage (in Iraq) as long as we are the occupying force," he said.

Edwards was invited by Sen. Margaret Carter, D-Portland, the conference chairwoman.

She called him "a Southern JFK," evoking images of the charismatic and articulate John F. Kennedy, the Democratic president who said in his 1961 inaugural, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

"I wanted someone bold enough to talk about the real issues in America," Carter said. "You cannot talk about those issues without talking about poverty."

pwong@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6745