Remembering the Strengths of John Edwards

All the top Democratic candidates have definite strengths to bring to the job of being president. Adam C. Smith apparently is doing a series of article listing the strengths of the various candidates; alas, he's also doing Republicans as well. Fair enough. But Smith has a good list of some of Edwards strengths in the St. Petersburg Times:

- Edwards has been the only candidate to move beyond broad rhetoric to propose a sweeping plan requiring everyone in the country to have health insurance by 2012. So far, he is setting the pace for laying out a specific and ambitious agenda and casting himself as the candidate for "transformational change."

- Having unambiguously declared he was wrong voting to authorize invading Iraq, Edwards has staked out a sharper antiwar stance than Clinton or Obama.

- Along with creating the most sophisticated Internet operation of any campaign, Edwards spent the last two years building formidable grass-roots organizations in key early election states like Iowa.

- He has aggressively courted labor organizations, from rallying alongside janitors at the University of Miami to speaking across the country to assorted locals. His campaign manager, former Michigan Rep. David Bonior, has deep ties to labor.

- Edwards, 53, maintains the sunny charisma from his 2004 campaign, but he is no longer the same scripted sound-bite politician. At a time when voters supposedly crave authenticity, the new Edwards is blunt, relaxed and even prone to admit occasionally, "I don't know."

John Edwards has other strengths that ought to be mentioned. One of those strengths is that he knows Washington is broken and that bandaids are no longer enough to fix the systemic problems that have been accumulating for a generation. Edwards is open to ideas but it's time to stop pretending that today's Republican Party has the answers; actually, the leadership of the Republican Party is now part of the problem. Maybe I'll try my hand soon at listing some of the strengths of the candidates.