John Edwards' Incredible Utopian Promises

John Edwards says in an e-mail I received today,

Yesterday, I delivered a speech in New Hampshire where I laid out an agenda of transformational change to guarantee universal health care, stop global warming, close the education gap and end poverty at home and around the world.

Now that’s quite an ambitious agenda! It seems that every day the impeccable utopia that John Edwards promises becomes still more perfect than the day before. Naturally, John Edwards never proposed universal health care when he was in the US Senate.

But, which “education gap” does Edwards propose to close? Is it the gap between the educations of the rich and the poor? Or the gap between the educations of rich Americans and poor Somalis? This certainly is a revolutionary goal, but why didn’t he propose it during his six years in the US Senate?

Now, Edwards also promises to stop global warming, but is this even possible? We could immediately stop contributing so much to global warming, but even then the earth would continue to warm for some time to come, until the pollutants of the past and the decreased pollutants of the present worked their way out of the atmosphere.

Is John Edwards for real about global warming, or is he mostly an opportunist election-year convert to the issue? Can anyone remember John Edwards endeavoring to end global warming when he was a sitting US senator?

Now here are two truly troubling paragraphs of non-sequiturs from the Edwards e-mail I received. Edwards says:

Tackling global poverty is the right and moral thing to do. And it's also the smart thing to do for our security.

A great portion of a generation is being educated in madrassas run by militant extremists rather than in public schools. And as a result, thousands and thousands of young people who might once have aspired to be educated in America are being taught to hate America.

So, the solution to global poverty is to reduce the number of Muslims who attend madrassas, by providing more public schools and obliging Muslims to attend them, so that the world’s poor can aspire to go overseas to school? Haven’t we learned that restructuring Muslim societies is not a wise goal for Americans who desire to live in peace? This proposal sounds like a plan to infuriate Muslims and invite mockery, but certainly not a plan to end world poverty.

And why ever is John Edwards suddenly so concerned about madrassas in the context of this electoral year? Hmmm.

Still, John Edwards' utopian promises continue seemingly infinitely. In this one e-mail, John Edwards also promises to “end the scourge of poverty in America within 30 years,” which is five and a half presidential terms after the next two-term president leaves office. I certainly understand the logic behind this 30 year balloon promise: It’s a way to express profound concern about a serious problem now, while leaving all of the serious solutions until two-generations from now.

Personally, I would prefer campaign promises that can be kept within my lifetime. But, Edwards clearly wants to win the votes of people who abhor incremental change, even when only incremental change is possible.

So why not add yet another incredible promise? If we can end all poverty "at home and abroad", surely we can end all crime in the United States as well! Why not promise the end of all crime? When it comes to utopian 30-year baloon promises, talk is still very cheap.

John Edwards is surely a good man, but the more utopian promises he makes to the idealist/unrealists among us, the more he sounds like a slippery snake-oil salesman.

Cross-posted unedited, with other essays, at http://francislholland.blogspot.com

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