I'll be voting for John Edwards in Tuesday's Wisconsin presidential primary. I think all progressives should vote for him in all remaining primaries.

With Howard Dean in meltdown, Wesley Clark having dropped out of the race, and the rest of the Democratic field still invisible to voters, this race has effectively narrowed to Kerry versus Edwards. And Edwards is our better shot at getting progressive values stamped clearly on the national ticket.

Come November, of course, I'll happily vote for whomever the Democrats finally nominate. That includes John Kerry - a fine social and free trade liberal with the courage of his convictions. In truth (no comparison to Kerry implied) I'd vote for Homer Simpson if the Democrats nominated him, so badly do I want George Bush gone.

But in the meantime I'm for Edwards, who matches Kerry on mainstream Democratic issues but goes beyond them, in a clear progressive direction.

To begin with what they hold in common, Edwards and Kerry have similar views, all pretty good, on health care, women's rights, Medicare and Society Security privatization and the environment - including the idea, recently revived by the Apollo Alliance, of an aggressive national project to achieve sustainable American energy independence within a decade.

They also share the baggage or ignominy of having voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This was at least stupid; they should never have trusted Bush's word on anything, even matters he knew to be about life and death.

But I think it's time to move on. They were lied to. And there's a big difference between a senator authorizing the potential future use of force, based on misinformation, and a president fabricating that information and actually declaring war.

Bush's contempt for truth and disregard for life are the real sins on Iraq, and Kerry and Edwards committed neither. I'm close to certain we wouldn't now be in Iraq if either had been in the White House.

Where Edwards diverges from Kerry is in addressing a series of issues of distinctive concern to progressives - inequalities of race and class, abusive corporate power, neoliberal globalization, ghetto poverty and prisons, the importance of worker and community organization outside the state.

And what makes him distinctive is not just that he regularly touches these third-rail issues, but is effectively running on them.

He is unabashedly pro-union.

He regularly challenges white audiences to confront the white problem of continued racial injustice.

His "two Americas" stump speech is all about class.

He appreciates and notes the sheer pervasiveness of corporate crime - from tax evasion to union avoidance, predatory lending to environmental degradation, unsafe working conditions to subsidy abuse.

He is sharply critical of the "Washington consensus" on international trade and finance. He talks about the growth of poverty and dead-end poverty jobs.

And he's the only candidate who does this in language that ordinary voters understand and are moved by.

Better still, Edwards is relentlessly upbeat about America's ability to solve these problems. He's not another Clintonesque "I feel your pain, now let me tell you why I can't do anything about it" sort of guy. He has a real program of democratic renewal. And it is largely ours.

So, for example, Edwards wants to commit America explicitly to promoting "high road" competition - high wage, low waste, more socially accountable - and getting off the "low road" that's dragging down wages and increasing inequality.

He wants to raise labor and environmental standards, invest heavily in worker training and continuing education, and build the public infrastructure needed to achieve a shared prosperity.

He also wants to get beyond the free trade/protectionism frame for international economic policy and commit the United States clearly to both defending living standards here and enabling sustainable growth in the Third World.

He wants to change trade rules to promote an upward rather than the present downward leveling in global wages, environmental standards and worker rights; to open the World Trade Organization to sunlight; to move international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund away from imposing cookie-cutter structural adjustment on weak economies.

And in a campaign that otherwise has barely mentioned the problems of urban areas, or America's astronomic rate of incarceration of its central city residents, Edwards brings up these issues too, and has developed views on both.

To revive our urban areas he favors a strategy - in labor market rules, economic development strategies, transit investments, education and training and social services - of upgrading regional metropolitan economies to the high road, and integrating central cities into them.

He also would have us shrink our bloated prison population and return its present members more successfully to society by better distinguishing non-violent drug crimes from other offenses; restoring abandoned treatment and training options; and re-enfranchising those who have done their time.

Together, these policy changes would amount to a quiet revolution in what have to be near the top of America's social and economic problems - the devastation of most of our urban cores and the sheer waste and neglect, and then imprisonment, of millions of their inhabitants.

And then there is the personal stuff about Edwards himself - his own story, told in an accent many Americans recognize as their own, and one whose hearing can only help a national Democratic ticket. This story too is about class, race and democracy.

Unlike Bush and Kerry, Edwards didn't go to an elite prep school, then to Yale, and then to Skull & Bones. He went to state schools in what was then a very poor state. And he made his money taking down big corporations beating up on little people, many of them black.

He's seen a more democratic society work. He's an example of the opportunity it can offer even those who keep their values. And now, a middle-aged millionaire white Southerner from a right-to-work state, he simply wants the same opportunity for all.

This is a message as American as apple pie, violence and the Gettysburg Address, and Edwards is uniquely credible in carrying it.

So at this point in the campaign I don't think a strategic progressive vote is for Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich - neither of whom has a chance. But neither do I think we need to muffle our voice in the crowd now seeking a coronation for Kerry.

If we want to send a progressive message that will really be felt, and maybe even choose a president, progressives should vote for Edwards.

Joel Rogers, a contributing editor for The Nation, is a professor of law and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Copyright 2003 The Capital Times

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