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Nearly 300 undecided caucus-goers and supporters of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards braved unseasonably warm temperatures when they filed into Vernon Middle School’s gymnasium in Marion on Saturday afternoon. Many were expecting to hear the Democratic hopeful’s patent message of hope. No one, however, was expecting him to be accompanied by arguably the campaign’s best and most respected surrogate speaker, Elizabeth Edwards.
Not only did Elizabeth provide the introduction of her husband — “the love of her life for the past 30 years” — but she gave an audience member her thoughts following a question and performed “mommy walk” duties with Elle Marie, a fussy 4-month-old.
“[Elizabeth] just came up to me and told me to sit down and listen to her husband while she walked the baby around,” said excited mom Angela Barltrop. “It was pretty neat. She told me that she needed her baby fix.”
Elizabeth, who raised four children of her own, looked quite comfortable as she spent several minutes walking and bouncing the baby, who nearly immediately quieted and calmed. While she walked, she often stopped and exchanged words with members of the audience.
“I don’t have the opportunity to hold babies very often,” she whispered as she passed. “I’m loving this.”
John Edwards gave his wife a quick smile when she began walking with the infant, but otherwise didn’t let the incident distract him from the point of his visit.
“Our country needs a big change across the board,” he said. “The Bush years have been great for oil companies, big insurance and drug companies, and military contractors, but not for regular Americans. From universal health care to making trade deals work for American workers, as president, I will stand up to the special interests and fight for hard-working families.”
This type of tough talk was something Linn County Auditor Joel Miller wanted to hear during the event.
“John Edwards has been leading the way all the way through the campaign,” Miller said before Edwards arrived. “I hope to hear more of that — see more of him taking a stand, and being the first to take a stand, on the issues.”
While Miller focuses personally on a wide variety of issues including health care, the war in Iraq, the environment, and the economy, he says there really wasn’t a single stance that led him to support Edwards.
“The thing that I like about John Edwards is that he is a fighter,” Miller said. “He has been hitting the issue head-on. He’s been speaking the truth. He’s out there and doing the things that I think he needs to do as a leader — and I think he is best leader amongst the candidates. I want to see strong leadership and I want to see someone who knows where he’s going and he definitely knows where he is going.”
Kay Lammers, who sits on the Marion City Council and is trying to decide between three of the presidential candidates, asked Edwards “what good it would do to bring the unions back strong if all of the jobs are in Mexico.”
“I just feel that NAFTA was a mistake and we cannot lose anymore of jobs to foreign countries — that’s part of our health care problem,” she said. “I thought he had a very good answer. He didn’t answer me about not giving Halliburton any government contracts. But I’m talking about that type of company — we give them everything and they pull up stakes and go to a foreign country. We have to either penalize them or force them to pay when they bring their goods back into the United States just like any other foreign company. We simply cannot afford to bleed any more jobs out of this country.”
Don White wanted to know how Edwards would deal with global warming and other environmental issues.
“What he said fell right in line with what I believe,” White said. “I believe we need to tie economic development to green collar jobs because that type of work has to be done in America. You can’t outsource something that needs to be done here, where you generate or produce the energy. I believe — although I don’t know all the details of Edwards plan — that we can do it with renewable energy sources. We can do it without petroleum and without coal.”
Perhaps the most probing question came from a man who wanted to know what a Democratic nominee Edwards would do differently than previous Democratic nominees, when faced with similar a similar circumstance.
“If you are the Democratic nominee, and you find yourself in the position of Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004 at the end of a very close election and there is all sorts of voting irregularities and there are suspicions of whether or not things are fair, what would you do?” asked the man. “Would you fight? If the newspapers are calling for you to concede the race, would you? Would you do what Al Gore did or would you have acted more like Kerry?”
Before Edwards began to answer the question, he motioned back to Elizabeth.
“You’ll have to wait for me, then you can talk,” he said while looking behind him to where Elizabeth sat. He then turned back to the audience and smiled. “Elizabeth wants to say something,” he said and those in the gym laughed and clapped their approval.
“Will I fight?” Edwards asked back. “Yes. Absolutely — with everything I’ve got. Not for me, but for all the people in America who need us to stand up — for all those people who voted who deserve to have their vote counted.”
Edwards added that he was not in favor of electronic voting machines and, as president, he “would want to lead an effort to get us back to paper ballots.”
When Edwards finished, he passed the microphone to Elizabeth.
“The votes don’t belong to Al Gore or John Kerry or John Edwards,” she said. “They belong to you and it can’t be our decision not to count your vote. It belongs to you and the promise was made to you that your votes would be counted. That’s the first thing — it should never have been the candidate’s decision if the votes were counted.
“The second thing is this is the reason we need to nominate John. The truth of the matter is that you hear Democrats all the time say that we should win all the same states. After 2000, they said, ‘and Florida.’ And now they say, ‘We need to win all the states and Ohio.’ Why in the world would we take such a chance when we have a candidate who, in the battleground states, is by far the most electable candidate?”
Elizabeth went on to say that, when husband is the likely nominee and placed against the likely Republican nominee, he wins nearly every state. In the same situation, she said, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins less than half and Sen. Barack Obama wins less than a third.
“You want a cushion in the event that there are shenanigans someplace?” she asked. “This is the guy you need. What’s more than that, we need to campaign everyplace. Howard Dean is right. We need a 50-state strategy. Are we going to win Utah? Not likely, but that doesn’t mean we don’t play there and that doesn’t mean we don’t fight there. You know in 2004 we didn’t run a single television advertisement in the state of North Carolina and there was a North Carolinian on the ballot. Why? Because the pubahs in Washington all decided that we can’t win the state of North Carolina.”
An audio clip of the outlined exchange can be accessed below:
