DKos diary, 12/30/06 – John Edwards in New Hampshire

Letter to the director of Good Work, a non-profit in North Carolina which assists the working poor enter business throughout the South:

John: I saw John up here in Portsmouth, NH, yesterday afternoon. He had 1,000 people waiting to get in who didn't have tickets. They say it is a larger crowd than he ever drew when he ran last time. In my mind it was almost perhaps a mystical thing because it is so unlikely; out-of-context and out-of-place for us Yanks - John is now virtually in the center of an entire world in transition & opening a new gate - he is called into a turning of historical events and seems able to so far ride the dragon. He trusts people. He trusts the crowd.

When I heard him talking outside without seeing him I thought I was hearing Jimmy Carter - his North Carolina accent is getting more and more rural Georgia. His program is Carteresque; the poor, the working class - presenting a shift from the billionaire chic of the DLC and I think it could well form a Democratic matrix for the next 20 years. Pretty much Jimmy Carter is the "Great Father" of this campaign and if it works it will be great day for our country and for the world - and for the South. I'm having trouble myself seeing it work and I am only about 70 to 80% there. Seems too good to be true. I'm feeling there must be some naivety but having four kids myself and raising them in the hills of NC I know what kind of man he is to some degree and must be (and had I lost one of my own as he did I think I'd of just ended it in the creek).

I felt when the country came so quickly - almost overnight - to hate Jimmy Carter was when he was just getting going and starting to go in the right direction; good things and great things maybe need to go underground for 20 years or so to fall fallow, spread roots and get grounded. The same folk that hated him liked him right much just a year before - then turned instead to the Hollywood illusionist & Mommy. Anyway, of this I am sure; the thing that began with Ronald Reagan ends with George W. Bush and it ended yesterday.

We have seen two faces of the Christian South; Jimmy Carter was the first we Yanks heard of this or for that matter, it was the first time we bothered to listen at all to the South in our history. It was to our Northern surprise a universal vision of fairness and racial healing with an astonishing lack of egotism. Now we have seen the second face of the Christian South and it has descended us into a maelstrom of global tribalism in a 12th century war among Jews, Muslims and certain people who call themselves Christian - although they are led by a Connecticut Yankee who conspicuously hates his own kind and finds only a primal root in red clay and Texas desert. But it all ended yesterday with a good Texas hangin'.

We who have roots and kin and have shared blood in the South can ask ourselves this about these two faces of the South we have seen since Watergate: Which is the Emperor? Which is the Sith? With Jimmy Carter we saw the real South and the possibility of being in this country a real Christian. An era ended yesterday with the death of Saddam. Quite possibly a new one began on the same day with John Edwards. He didn't say much about foreign policy except to denounce the quagmire in Iraq and call for a reduction of troops by one third. It's ok. As it would be with Kerry, Obama, Vilsack or Warner, Edwards' foreign policy can be described in two words: Wes Clark.