NASHUA, N.H. (Jan. 7) — A relentless John Edwards made his final plea to New Hampshire voters with a 36-hour bus marathon leading up to Tuesday’s primary.
“While everybody else goes to high-glamour events and goes to bed tonight, I’m going to be out working,” Edwards said at a Sunday night rally. “I’m going to be out working for votes, working for you, working for the kind of country that we believe in.”
Edwards will hold town hall meetings and rallies across the state throughout the marathon bus tour. His schedule calls for 13 events through early Tuesday morning. He went on a similar tour in the days before last week’s Iowa caucuses. He finished second in Iowa behind Senator Barack Obama and ahead of Senator Hillary Clinton.
The “Marathon for the Middle Class” was launched as the latest polls show Edwards’ support down four percent in recent days in New Hampshire. In a poll released Monday by the University of New Hampshire, Edwards was supported by 16 percent of those surveyed. Obama opened a 10 percent lead over Clinton (39%-29%).
In two events Sunday night, Edwards continued to stress his message of bringing about change, defeating the “status quo” and fighting for the middle class.
“The choice is clear for Tuesday,” Edwards said at an event in Nashua. “The choice is between the status quo and change. And my view is that New Hampshire voters, Iowa voters and America’s voters already rejected the status quo. We’re done with that. We’re about change.”
At the rally, Edwards directly described Clinton as a “status quo candidate” for the first time. The Edwards and Clinton campaigns exchanged barbs earlier in the day, culminating in Edwards saying the Clinton campaign “has no conscience.”
The hostile exchanges started when the Clinton campaign criticized Edwards for campaigning with Hilda Sarkisyan, the mother of a 17-year-old girl who died after her health insurance company denied her a liver transplant in December. The girl’s death received national media attention.
In response to the Clinton criticism on Sunday, Edwards fired back: “They have no conscience about what’s at stake here.” In a statement, Edwards said, “These families are what this is about. It’s not about them nor is it about me. It’s about whether we’re going to actually stand up and fight for these people.”
Edwards was campaigning again with Sarkisyan Sunday in an effort to continue his push of his plan for universal health care. He also again condemned what he has been calling the “entrenched” interests of corporations such as health care companies in Washington.
Edwards’ health care message and appeal to the middle class has been a main focus of his campaign. The marathon bus tour is designed to emphasize that appeal in small, intimate town-hall meetings.
In Nashua Sunday night, a crowd of about 100 people filled a meeting room above Martha’s Exchange restaurant. An hour earlier, Edwards was speaking with a crowd overflowing the cafeteria at the Gilbert H. Hood Middle School in Derry.
Edwards repeated his message of removing corporate interests in Washington. “These people are doing so much damage to the middle class,” he said. “If you don’t have a president who will take them on and fight them, a president who’s got some guts, who actually takes this fight personally and will never, ever back down, nothing will change.”
Edwards’ pitch to the middle class appealed to Rachel Rosenbaum, a 67-year-old grandmother from Newton, Mass. “Without the middle class and labor, we can’t restore America,” Rosenbaum said. “We need someone who can bring the middle class back.”
At both events, Edwards sharply criticized the outsourcing of jobs and the growing national debt. He warned that not acting now would leave the nation in shambles for future generations.
“That is the moral test for every generation of Americans,” he said. “Do we give our children a better life than we have? Do we make sure we left America better than we found it? And if we are going to meet that responsibility, then we have work to do.”
Edwards’ message resounded with Larry Roundy, a software engineer from Nashua. Job outsourcing and investing in American companies overseas is a crisis Edwards can fix, Roundy said.
“I want money spent here, not overseas,” Roundy said. “John Edwards can do that. He is sincere and surreal. He’s going to come into Washington and make a difference.”
At the end of each rally, Edwards implored his supporters to volunteer for him. The grassroots campaign cannot succeed without volunteers, he said.
“If you believe in what’s impossible in America, and if you believe in the future of the middle class, that’s what my campaign is,” Edwards said. “And I need you. I need you every step of the way. We can change this country together.”
(Heath D. Williams, a junior newspaper major, is covering the New Hampshire primary for The Pilot of Southern Pines, N.C.)
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