Edwards’ hits and misses on Meet the Press

February 5, 2007

It’s unfortunate, but whenever I think of John Edwards and Meet the Press, I think of the then-senator sitting down with Tim Russert in 2002. It didn’t go well. Edwards offered some pleasant rhetoric and clever turns of phrase, but Russert kept pushing to pin Edwards down on details and specifics. Edwards was unprepared and came across poorly.

That was five years and a presidential campaign ago. I watched Edwards yesterday on Meet the Press and saw a confident candidate who was very well versed on the issues. There was no stumbling, no dodging policy specifics, no fudging the details. Edwards will probably never be considered a policy wonk — his strengths as a candidate are his ideas and his eloquence on the stump — but I’d be hard pressed to imagine anyone watching the interview and thinking Edwards is an empty suit. Even on Iran, on which Edwards’ recent comments have become problematic, his responses were reassuring.

There was just one thing that bothered me. On gay rights, Edwards said he’d support civil unions for gay couples, partnership benefits, and gays in the military, but not gay marriage. Here’s why:

“I think it’s from my own personal culture and faith belief. And I think, if you had gone on in that same quote, that I, I have — I, I struggle myself with imposing my faiths — my faith belief. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church, I was baptized in the Southern Baptist church, my dad was a deacon. In fact, I was there just a couple weeks ago to see my father get an award.

“It’s, it’s just part of who I am. And the question is whether I, as president of the United States, should impose on the United States of America my views on gay marriage because I know where it comes from. I’m aware of why I believe what I believe. And I think there is consensus around this idea of no discrimination, partnership benefits, civil unions. I think that, that certainly a president who’s willing to lead could lead the country in the right direction on that.”

This doesn’t quite add up. Edwards doesn’t want to impose his religious beliefs, which is good, but then says he’d oppose gay marriage as president because of his faith, which is less good. If a president lets religion dictate his or her policy, isn’t that indirectly imposing religious beliefs on others?

I appreciate the politics of all of this. I also suspect Edwards’ position will be similar, if not identical, to most of the top tier Democratic presidential candidates. Civil unions have become the mainstream position (Bush has endorsed them), but many Dems just aren’t ready to take that final leap.

They might as well. For a voter motivated by anti-gay animus, it won’t be a close call — a Dem who supports civil unions, partnership benefits, and gays in the military is going to lose that vote to the GOP, unless the Republicans somehow nominate Rudy Giuliani.

I won’t consider gay marriage a litmus-test issue in the primaries, but the top Dem candidates will need to have a compelling answer to this question. Edwards’ response wasn’t it.

Post Script: By the way, looking over the headlines, this was apparently the most important exchange in yesterday’s interview.

MR. RUSSERT: Universal health care, noble goal, but that’s 47 million more men, women and children. How much would that cost and what kind of plan would you propose?

SEN. EDWARDS: It’d cost between 90 and 120 billion a year once it’s– once it’s fully implemented. […]

MR. RUSSERT: Would you be willing to raise taxes in order to help pay for this?

SEN. EDWARDS: Yes, we’ll have to raise taxes. The, the only way you can pay for a health care plan, from 90 — that costs anywhere from $90 billion to $120 billion is there has to be a revenue source. The revenue source for paying for the plan that I’m proposing is, is first we get rid of George Bush’s tax cuts for people who make over $200,000 a year. […]

MR. RUSSERT: But you’d be willing to increase taxes to provide health care?

SEN. EDWARDS: Yes, absolutely.

Unfortunately — and yet, predictably — the media focus had almost nothing to do with Edwards’ policy, and everything to do with a tax increase.

February 5, 2007 at 11:12 am

no matter what these people keep saying, civil unions is NOT equal to gay marriage. and for him to say that he can’t support gay marriage because of his religious beliefs is frankly extremely offensive to me. what about my religious beliefs? don’t they count?

the ultimate solution to this problem is to simply make civil unions the legal relationship between people, no matter what the sex, and make marriage simply a religious ceremony that each religion can treat as they wish, but with no legal standing. (let’s see how the right wing thinks civil unions are okay if that’s all they can have too……..)

Finally a candidate with the compassion to support universal health care and the honesty to use taxes to pay for it (as opposed to using record indebtedness to cover mass murder).

I agree about gay marriage: we won’t lose any votes for the doing the right thing that we’re not losing already, and it would be a chance to demonstrate some moral leadership instead of cowardice.

The media, in its Russert aspect, is still trying to portray the old “tax-n-spend” profile of Dems. In reality, it’s not actually “raising taxes;” it’s mere “rescinding a reduction that shouldn’t have been given in the first place.”

Here’s how I think this may work: Tax reductions are rescinded to pay for adequate universal healthcare. As the “single-buyer” purchases healthcare in greater volume, the volume-discount model of pricing begins to kick in, and the overall price goes back down a bit. Eventually, the occasional small employer gets on the single-payer bandwagon and pays a bit less to provide his/her employees with coverage—and this can snowball to the point of allowing many employers to do the same thing.

At the same time, providing healthcare coverage to people who would otherwise have no coverage means that providers—doctors, dentists, opthamologists, emergency centers, and hospitals—don’t have to “foot the bill” by increasing the costs of services to those who “do” have coverage, or an alternative ability to pay out-of-pocket. This would also bring down the overall costs of provision via a single-payer—and would likewise snowball.

The third issue is the R&D factor. Current research in surgical procedures is driven by the need to find better ways to get the job of healing people done, but R&D in pharmaceuticals is limited by the demands of the bottom line. The biggest lobby against single-payer coverage isn’t the insurance industry; it’s the boys and girls at Big Pharma who know full well that once government-based, single-payer healthcare becomes a reality in the US, it’s only a matter of time until “Dear Uncle Sammy” starts taking a look at THEIR industry, and realizes that pharmaceutical research, development, production and distribution can be done for a lot less money when the profiteering hunger of stockholders are removed from the funding matrix….

Watched a taped forum Edwards had with ? college Democrats last week on CSPAN yesterday. He did explain the civil unions/gay marriage thing and it made sense to me, coming from his upbringing. The Southern Baptists are very conservative, and for Edwards to support civil unions at all is a great thing. It takes a lot for someone to overcome a bigoted upbringing.

My particular brand of Christianity is more open than Edwards’ is, somewhere in between there and the United Church of Christ which is very liberal. A lot has to do with fear (as we have all seen since 9/11), and with how literally one takes the Bible. I support gay marriage, but many of my denomination do not. Officially our denomination does not. But we are allowed to disagree, thank goodness, and work for change.

I agree with just bill’s suggestion about civil unions being the legal relationship and marriage the religious one. But we must work towards making gay marriage accepted. What is wrong with two people who love each other committing themselves to marriage?

As far as gay marriage is concerned, we need to make the distinction between the religious sacrament and what amounts to a contract with the state; these are two different things, and while most people combine them by obtaining a license and having a religious ceremony, only the state-issued license is necessary for a couple to be endowed with the rights all “married” couples have.

As far as rights go, it’s time we left behind the notion that a hierarchy or caste system, where some people have more rights than others, and many with the most rights seem determined to keep their group as small as possible by denying those rights to others, is something we should be striving for. That energy needs to be directed at making sure all people have the highest level of rights, and working to achieve that goal will go a long way to uniting as as one people, instead of keeping us perpetually divided.

Lofty goals for sure, and not likely to gain much traction as long as the religious community refuses to understand that it has no role in government.

I agree with #1: government’s only job here should be issuing certificates of birth, death, and marriage (i.e., civil contracts) because modern societies have an interest in acknowledging such fundamental “vital events” along with changes in legal responsibilities which they entail.

Such legally relevant matters used to be in the hands of the church, which also supplied various religious ceremonies in connection with those events: baptism, funerals, weddings. Governments took responsibility for the legal aspects when they began keeping and publishing “vital statistics” (middle of the 19th century, beginning with England in 1844).

Religions ought not to intrude on the proper sphere of government: licensing. Governments ought not to intrude on the proper sphere of churches, whether we’re talking about the followers of Jesus, Satan or Priapus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/priapus

I say let the wingnuts have the word “marriage”. Civil unions are fine, and if it keeps the koolaid zombies in their crypts, than it’s worth the small sacrifice. If the zombies come out to vote in droves, they fuck everything else up, so let them have their damn word, and make civil unions mean the same thing in all serious respects.

On Edwards, he seems like a nice guy and all, but anyone who trusted Bush in late 2002 just isn’t very bright. There are plenty of smart people who made the right call back then. If we elect someone who screwed that big one up, I’m not confident we could count on them to get the next big decision right.

It’ll be interesting to see how the work Edwards has done since 04 pays off over the course of this campaign. My impression is that he could go either way as evidenced by mixed performances recently.

The civil union slash marriage business continues to baffle me, however, because it’s the state that grants licenses. The fact that some people choose to have the ceremony “blessed” in a religious setting or by a religious figure is immaterial. Someone as bright as Edwards who has the concerns he seems to have should be able to see that difference, use it to resolve his own conflict and articulate the difference. Not so, I guess.

Regarding his support of a tax increase, Edwards should be commended for his honesty, but he seems to walked into a well-marked trap by not explaining what we would get for paying higher taxes. Obviously, those of us who currently pay for or contribute to our health insurance will no longer have that expense — nor will employers who provide or contribute. Ignoring those factors make it sound like a tax increase would be a new burden — and fails to acknowledge how much those with insurance pay for the uninsured as it is.

Just bill has hit the nail on the head with respect to civil unions vs. marriage. The question that is not being asked at this point is “what is the State’s interest in marriage beyond the civil implications?” As soon as the “sanctity of…” gets stapled on the front it’s outside of the purview of the interest of the State.

Marriage is a contract between you, your partner(s?) and your god of choice, that contract may have implications within your social circle that go beyond the rights, duties, obligations and privileges implied by the civil union but the state has no interest in them. None.

sorry racerx, i don’t agree that civil unions are fine. as a gay man i am terribly offended that i don’t have the same rights with my partner as straight couples do. it is NOT the same, and it is NOT right.

I’m sorry for typos in my #6 comment. After linking the word Priapus properly, I repeated the URL, pointlessly. And the link for Church of Satan is this rather than one I used. I’ll plead my poor vision — the URL here had a period included as its last character; I didn’t see that (nor would I have expected to).

just bill – that license you get from the local courthouse gives you the right to proceed with a ceremony of your choice – civil or religious – and once performed and duly witnessed, should endow the gay couple with the same rights as those bestowed on straight couples.

“Marriage” is really just a default term, applied – incorrectly – to the state-sanctioned union of two people, whether they are straight or gay, and which does not require a religious ceremony in order for that couple to be considered “married” in the eyes of the state.

There is nothing wrong with the term “civil union” as long as that union is the same for all couples.

“i don’t agree that civil unions are fine. . . .i don’t have the same rights with my partner as straight couples do” – just bill

I’m not aware of all the details and intricacies of “marriage vs. civil union”, so I suppose that under the current ideas of what civil unions entail they may perhaps not be identical to the rights that coincide with marriage.

However, I believe racerx covered this when he stated:

“make civil unions mean the same thing in all serious respects” – racerx

I got married in a church. But, I would be very happy to have my marriage license revoked–as well as the marriage license of everybody who has one–and replaced with a “civil union license.” The state gets involved in marriage because of property rights, children, and other “legal” issues. Marriages should be performed by religious (or non-religious) organizations. I agree with Racerx; let the state deal with property and legal issues.

Let’s change the state’s paperwork for everyone and for equality. And let’s have the “traditionists” have their word “marriage.”

Give me a petition to sign to change everybody paperwork, and I will sign it!

i agree with you Anne, that the term civil union would be acceptable if it applied to everyone, but right now it doesn’t apply to everyone and the “union” is not the same. that is all i’m looking for – the same rights, privileges, and obligations as everyone else – and if that happens i really don’t care what it’s called.

i still am offended that people like edwards feel that i am not entitled to the same civil rights because it doesn’t square with “their” religion.

Oh, and CB give John Edwards and the other Democratic candidates A BREAK on this issue.

Edwards is walking a fine line that may prove to be tactically brilliant. In the short term he’s looking to diffuse the issue with southern bible thumpers, but that’s not the tactic I’m referring to. If Edwards ‘solution’ were adopted, opposition to full marriage rights would likely become too fringe and fractured to amount to amount to anything significant. If you can sidestep a messy battle while making a major stride in the larger war – why not?

Edwards is a great rhetorician because he understands that the art of claiming the center is not about moving toward it – it’s about pulling it toward you.

Too bad the media seems to be focusing on the raising taxes angle of a single payer health system. I’d gladly pay a couple of thousand dollars extra in taxes every year if I could get rid of over $4,000 a year in insurance premiums. If everyone is insured, the cost of healthcare will go down because of the premiums for uninsured patients that are built into medical costs and due to a reduction in all the paperwork and billing required to extract payment out of patients and insurance companies. The healthcare taxes could actually go down over time if the system is administered properly. The media shouldn’t cut off the nation’s nose to spite its face by looking at a perceived down side and not its benefits.

-the old “tax-n-spend” profile of Dems-

Every time I see this phrase I think, can’t we turn this on them, the “borrow-and-spend” Repubs…? After all, it’s my fifteen-year-old and her contemporaries who get to pay for this mess.

I had the exact same reaction to his answer on gay marriage: it makes no sense. To claim that his (anti-gay marriage) stance comes from his hertiage and the way he was brought up, and that he doesn’t want to impose that on anyone is complete nonsense. He uses his heritage and his bringing up to inform almost all of his policies (economic, taxes, health care, education). He cannot say my southern baptist heritage and working class background form the basis for a whole host of policies I want to “impose” on the country, but when it comes to gay marriage I’m scared to do the same.

The last I heard, Edwards was advocating a system of “universal” health care that would keep the insurance companies in the mix. Why the hell should we? The statistics for a single-payer system without insurance companies are there for all to see, almost every other rational country does it. Bottom line: they pay half as much per capita as we do for health care. Even if we end up doubling their amount we won’t be paying any more than we do now (albeit we’d pay it directly in taxes instead of the death by a thousand cuts system we have now) and could, theoretically at least, have care that’s got the potential to be twice as good (defusing the stupid arguments from the right about how poor the health care is in every nation with socialized medicine. If it was so bad, wouldn’t some of them be opting for our system after decades of experience?).
Edwards shouldn’t be pussyfooting around with a half-assed system that’ll be a friggin’ hodge podge and end up costing more. If he’d push for going whole hog into socialized medicine the numbers would back him up, and the tax increase issue could be defused. But I suppose it’s too late for him to see the light, he’s already concocted his Rube Goldberg health care plan and now he’s going to be stuck with it. Good luck trying to explain the ins and outs to the voters. Talk about a quagmire. The whole hog option would have been so much easier to convey, and better by far than the Frankenstein plan he’s cobbled together. Unless I’m reading him wrong. But as of last week what I read about his plan had the insurance companies tagging along screwing up the mix.

Claiming that it’s progressive to limit your acceptance to civil unions because you were brought up to be religiously bigoted is like claiming one is to be applauded for crossing the street instead of pummeling a minority because you were raised as a racist.

The more I learn about Edwards from Edwards the less I like him as a candidate. Doesn’t “separate but equal” ring bells with these guys?

Oh, and as for the gay marriage thing, I totally agree with #1 and the others who see it that way: marriage should be religious only. Stop calling it a marriage license. Just changing the damn name would defuse the issue. Want a marriage? Find a church that’ll perform one for you. Jeebus, we’re not living in the friggin’ Dark Ages anymore where the church runs politics.

Oh, wait a minute…

I’d gladly pay a couple of thousand dollars extra in taxes every year if I could get rid of over $4,000 a year in insurance premiums.

Exactly right. And why Edwards and other leading Dems can’t articulate this succinctly and forcefully is beyond me.

“Yes, Tim health care for everyone will cost money. But that money will come from savings. Employers and individuals will no longer have to pay expensive premiums. Huge amounts of wasted money that only pay for adminstration of claims and other paperwork will be saved. So, yes, some taxes will rise, but other forms of taxation will decrease. My plan will be a net win for everyone.”

So what if the “net increase for everyone” is a bit misleading. Paris Hilton and her crew may not have a net increase in their monthly dividend checks, but as they are a member of society, surely they will “benefit” from everyone having healthcare. Shorter waits at the emergency room, less risk of epidemics and pandemics affecting them or the people around them, etc.

why can’t dem candidates follow the lead of jfk, when asked about his religion? “my beliefs are my personal beliefs, but if elected, will follow the will of the people” or something along those lines? why is this so hard?

and the best reply to that tax increase b.s. is that certainly the cost to business of a small tax increase will be dramatically offset by not having to pay any more insurance premiums. it’s so obvious. which would businesses (and individuals) rather pay? a nominal tax or sky-rocketing and unpredictable premium increases?

but j.e. should never have let it be framed that way in the first place, because the first time the words “tax increase” come out of a dem’s mouth is the last time anyone can hear anything else he says.

Comment by just bill

Thanks for writing my comment for me, just bill. My thoughts exactly.

Marriage is something we can safely hand over to faithbased organizations.

Thank you John Edwards for helping me make up my mind about you.

I’d rather vote for a moron, er, I mean a Mormon, than one more goddamned Southern Baptist.

Back to the sawdust and the snake-handling. I knew I didn’t want another damn Southerner in the White House.

I knew I didn’t want another damn Southerner in the White House

I hope this doesn’t apply to Wes Clark.

I’ve never understood what people see in Edwards. Yeah he talks real nice, but what has he actually done in his life to deserve my vote?

Edwards is obviously unqualified for office. He’s a southerner, which automatically makes him a bigot — when it’s not making him a traitor. He can’t be gay, of course. He’s a southerner. Gays can’t be bigots. Edwards also had the courage to be honest in a forum where he would have gained more “points” had he avoided a charged question entirely, or simply parroted the “correct” line. This proves he’s an idiot. Not only that, but he has the audacity to hide all the stereotypes we so enjoy mocking from our pristine moral highground where we are not only holier than thou, but holier than anyone who will ever be. If you are unaware of that sacred and infallible height, just ask a gay person. Gays have endured the downward gaze of righteous bigots forever.

In Massachusetts, a marriage license isn’t enough, you still need a marriage ceremony performed by a licensed practitioner. This requirement should be dropped as well. If my life partner and I qualify for the marriage license (adults not currently married), I should be able to simply pay my money and get my license, just like anything else. If there were any reasonable requirement, it should come BEFORE licensure, just like anything else.

If I want to start up a company and employ 1000 people, I fill out a form and pay the money, that’s it. The state doesn’t require someone to sanctify my company. Mariage between two people, and a company employing 1000, which license has the greatest impact?

I agree that the word marriage has come to be translated into American english as a sacrament of various churches. In the current climate, there’s no political way to include alternatives as a “marriage.” It would be like going to city hall to get a baptism certificate, aka your boating license for the season.

As for Edwards, if he can’t say yes to a rapid transition to single payer healthcare, he can’t be taken seriously as a responsible candidate for the Democrats. He’s probably our best bet, being a handsome southerner. Our other candidates with cash (excepting Gore) do not have enough appeal to Americans who are led by their base fears. If Edwards becomes president without changing his mind about single payer healthcare, the nation will continue to spin downward toward dissolution.

As for Kennedy, he should have said that we would spend an extra hundred billion the first year, but might save that much each and every year after that, and cover everyone without all the hassles. He should have taken us on a little ride to the world where health insurance companies didn’t even exist – whoopee!

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