John Edwards speech on poverty at The Center for American Progress

Edwards was right in saying at the Center for American Progress that Katrina not only exposed America's dirty secret but presented a ''historic moment" when it is clear the country is ready to support action but is short on the leadership that can prompt it.

In a clue to his instinctive understanding of poverty, Edwards's summary of first principles includes the central concept (I first heard it from Hubert Humphrey on the subject of civil rights some 40 years ago) that confronting poverty is not something "we" do for "them."

"This is something we do for us -- for all of us. It makes us stronger; it makes us better," he said.

"instinctive understanding of poverty..." a gene missing from the house of bush dna...

Raising the minimum wage, after nearly a decade of stagnation, is the most obvious, but also dramatic, poverty-fighting step the country could take.

Another would be at least a doubling of the earned income tax credit, in effect a rebate for those with incomes too low to expose them to the income tax.

These simple ideas flow from a basic fact of modern life that is much too frequently forgotten -- nearly all officially poor people work full time.

''Nobody who works full-time should have to raise children in poverty or in fear that one health emergency or pink slip will drive them over the cliff," said Edwards.

working hard and playing by the rules, in the world of the r's, only means something if it makes you rich... rich is equated with value as a person... accumulating wealth is the principal index of character... if you can't manage to sock away the bucks, it's probably because you are essentially no damn good and don't deserve any breaks - and certainly not a free lunch...

[Edwards] still has an uncanny ability to reach people, and it is now a fact that what he emphasized during the campaign is today what the country clearly wishes its political leaders to emphasize.

"ability to reach people..." how interesting... i hadn't thought of it in that context before but there hasn't been one single time that i have felt touched as a human being by something that bush said... not once... being "reached" has nothing to do with the intellectual or the rational... when it happens, it's spontaneous and i know it intuitively... if bush was capable of "reaching" me, it would happen without my conscious participation... i also know that i'm eminently "reachable" should he ever decide to show himself as a real human being instead of a scripted charlie mccarthy, karl rove's version of edgar bergen's wooden dummy...

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