Opinion: The rich lawyer and his poverty center

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John Edwards, the former senator and current multi-millionaire who’s made poverty a key campaign issue, used his nonprofit Center for Promise and Opportunity as a political base to develop his presidential run for 2008.

A hard-hitting page one article in today’s New York Times reveals how the main beneficiary of the organization to fight poverty was actually Edwards himself. He used the center to build and maintain a shadow political organization with his staff employed there and his frequent travels paid for. According to the article by Leslie Wayne, the poverty center covered Edwards’ expenses while he traveled internationally to meet with foreign leaders, hired consultants, attacked President Bush and traveled frequently to Iowa.

‘It all adds up to a remarkable feat of keeping a presidential candidacy alive without any of the traditional bases for it,’ Ferrel Guillory of the University of North Carolina told the Times. And Wayne wrote, ‘Edwards pushed at the boundaries of how far such organizations can venture into the political realm.’

This afternoon the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) issued a statement defending Edwards as ‘a steadfast ally,’ especially in the fight to raise the minimum wage and rebuild the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina.

‘In making poverty the defining theme of his campaign,’ association president Maude Hurd said, ‘Senator Edwards has shown his true colors. It is a sad statement that someone working not only to raise the issue of poverty, but to offer ambitious solutions and his (sic) put his feet on the ground to end it is attacked rather than applauded.’

--Andrew Malcolm