Reply #23: well, as mentioned, I am an Edwards fan also, [View All]

[mahina]

and strongly so. In fact the closest I've gotten to a dispute around here was defending Elizabeth; turns out they were talking about a different Elizabeth :)

But I have to say that as pained as I was about the hair thing, the experience thing is just as incorrect about Obama. Our individual lack of knowledge about a candidate does not constitute lack on the part of the candidate themself- people tell me Edwards doesn't have a platform on xyz, and I tell them he actually does, and how to find it.

They just genuinely don't know what isn't repeated on the news ad newseum. (he he.)

Anyway as far as being born into privelege, I have to say you really have this wrong. He was raised by a single mom with help from his grandparents. When his Mom, who was so dear to him, was dying of cancer, he was pouring over the insurance documents line by line and word by word because they were trying to deny her care. I think John Edwards would understand this very well and I hope his supporters do too.

He came from very modest upbringing. He had a scholarship to Punahou. The Makiki neighborhood, where he grew up, is working class. (Just because he grew up in Hawaii, doesn't mean he was priveleged. Somebody has to clean the pools, wash the sheets etc. at the hotels, and a lot of those folks live in this neighborhood.)

He does have the great advantage of a fantastic education, which was available to him due to the scholarships he won, as a result of his incredible brilliance. I realize that sounds kind of funny, but my son's dean was his dean, and I know a lot of people who knew him in school, and it is 100% true. Everybody knew he was going to make a difference in the world, and that is rare way over here in Hawaii.

He has the same amount of experience as JFK and Abe Lincoln did when they went to Washington. He was an Illinois senator before he was a US senator. The pundits act like state legislatures are nothing, but he did a lot of great work there. One of the laws he got through was to videotape confessions, because people were getting the stuffing beat out of them to confess.

Please know if the shoe was on the other foot, it would be hard for me too, but not so hard if our candidate was John.

His life experience of going from the top of his class at Harvard Law, to directly go work as a community organizer on the streets of Chicago for a tiny fraction of what he could have been paid in a heartbeat, tells me his heart was still in the right place then, and I know it is now.

Best of luck, aloha.

hey ps, a vice president of the bank makes something like 35-40,000, and here, that does not go very far. Although an accomplishment for a woman at that time, it's not super rich, it's middle class.

pps, photos of Makiki. No slum but it's working class for sure.
OK!