John Edwards for President-New Haven Register: Edwards rallies for Lamont crowd

New Haven Register: Edwards rallies for Lamont crowd

Aug 18, 2006 2:09 PM

Mary E. O’Leary
New Haven Register
Aug 18, 2006

NEW HAVEN — Former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards rallied several hundred people Thursday in a rousing populist speech for U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont, telling the crowd Americans are eager for change and real leaders.

"This campaign, including the primary election, is about change. It is what America is hungry for," said Edwards, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina. "America no longer wants the same old politics that they have now seen for decades.

"They are looking for not politicians, but leaders. They are looking for somebody who will tell them the truth about what is happening in America today and somebody who has a different vision for where America needs to go. The man who is telling the truth and the man who will provide that vision in the next United States Senate from Connecticut is Ned Lamont," Edwards said to cheers from the crowd gathered on the lawn of Yale University’s medical campus on Cedar Street.

His appearance was sponsored by the Lamont campaign and Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which is trying to organize 1,800 workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Edwards has spent the last year going around the country with an anti-poverty message and is expected to be a presidential candidate in 2008.

Last week, Lamont won the Democratic primary against three-term incumbent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman by 10,000 votes in what was seen as a referendum on the war on Iraq and Lieberman’s support for that and other policies supported by the Bush administration.

Edwards, who was the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2004, while Lieberman served that role in 2000, said he thinks Lieberman should drop his independent candidacy. Edwards is one of some 27 current and past senators backing Lamont in the race.

With a huge American flag as a backdrop, Lamont said "one of the first calls that Joe Lieberman got (after the primary) was from Karl Rove (Bush’s senior adviser). The first call I got was from John Edwards," Lamont said as example of Lieberman’s popularity with Republicans, which a poll Thursday said gives him an edge in the November election.

Lamont then launched into his platform speech on the need to raise the federal minimum wage, to provide universal health care and affordable housing and to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. As he has for the past six months, he said President Bush’s foreign policies have failed and have left us less secure.

"One of the reasons we are making bad choices is because right now we have the best government money can buy in Washington, D.C.," he told the receptive crowd of his disdain for the 63 lobbyists in the nation’s capitol for every congressman.

"No more Republican rubber stamp Congress. We want someone who is going to hold this president accountable. No more one-party rule down there in Washington," said Lamont in an appeal to also elect Diane Farrell in the 4th congressional district; Joe Courtney in the 2nd District and Chris Murphy in the 5th District.

Edwards apologized for his initial support for the Iraq war and says we now need to move out 40,000 troops and come up with a plan to bring the rest home in the next 12 to 18 months, a position similar to Lamont’s.

"I was wrong and I take responsibility for that," Edwards said, but he called the members of the armed forces serving there "patriotic and courageous."

His theme was America’s moral responsibility, first to its own people, and then to the rest of humanity and he said that entails telling the truth. "I don’t know anybody in their right mind who can think what is happening in Iraq right now is working," he said. "We need to make it clear that we are going to leave Iraq and the best way to make that clear is to actually start leaving." He blasted the Bush administration for just "reacting," rather than helping to solve the world’s problems. "There is absolutely no indication that we have any long term vision for the kind of world we want to live in."

Edwards, who has traveled the world with his message, said other countries see Amercia’s power. "They know we are rich. Here’s what they want to know from us: Do we actually care? Do we actually embrace our responsibility to look after interests beyond our own?..I believe you do. The problem is our leadership does not and the world does not see it. We can change that."