Saw John Edwards Tonight

Senator John Edwards made an appearance at UC Berkeley today as part of his Opportunity Rocks tour across the nation, designed at engaging young people in the fight against poverty. It is a tour sponsored by the Center for Promise and Opportunity, whose director is Senator Edwards.

The event was attended by somewhere around five hundred people, as all of the seats were taken and people were standing all around the room. Edwards came on at about 6:20 and spoke until about 6:45.

His main theme was that poverty is bad and that we should do something about it. He detailed it by talking about Katrina and talking about how we have 37 million people that are under the poverty line and how they live on a razor's edge, etc, etc. All of that was good and all, but he failed to take it a step further and really challenge any of us students to get involved. Instead, he sort of just kept saying a lot of the same things over and over. Repetition is certainly a key to learning, but this is Berkeley, we understand that poverty is bad.

Also, he made it seem like no politician could really be trusted to get anything done on this matter. Now, if this was some outsider or some ordinary citizen, I might take him seriously, but this was a former Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator who was saying this. Although I agree to an extent that there will have to be a movement behind this, there will have to be cooperative politicians who are at hand as well.

He also kept getting back to the theme of college students being the harbingers of change, as it has been that way with a number of movements in the past. I think that this is becoming a bit of a broken record to be honest. We are certainly very active and quite organizable, but we are also a bit overrated when it comes to change, as we haven't really been doing that much lately. Perhaps we are more apathetic on the whole or possibly just less idealistic as we used to be, but I think that we have become more of the default player when it comes to social change, the recurring character.

But for what is it worth, it is absolutely essential that we start talking about poverty again in this country. Edwards talked about the War on Poverty and how it really wasn't a complete failure, but is often construed to be. And he talked a little bit about some Democratic standard policy proposals, like increasing the minimum wage and increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit. This was certainly better than nothing, but it still left me wanting.

Lastly, it was no surprise to me that Edwards mentioned Iraq only once. And it was in passing. And it still elicited enormous applause, although I am sure quite a few people were unimpressed by his bandwagoning. If you are going to mention Iraq, you can't just say (I'm paraphrasing), "And what is going on in Iraq is terrible", and be done with it. But Senator Edwards can. And then he can avoid confrontation on that issue by not allowing Q+A at the end.

Overall, he was a good speaker, not the great speaker some make him out to be. But, I could really tell that this mattered to him and that he believed it should matter to us. However, he just couldn't sell it all the way.

UPDATE: Wow, apparently there were about 1500 people there. I am pretty bad at estimating crowds, but that is just embarassing how off I was.