I know that’s the case, but sincerity in a President is a pony I long ago ceased hoping to find.
But if we can stick to hedge funds, and only discuss Edwards in the context of his hedge fund involvement, I’d be appreciative.
You got me. I guess I’ll have to retract that part of my statement. 
Particularly the “systemic risk” section. The huge amounts of money and leverage involved means that when hedge funds fail, they can have a big impact on the rest of us.
The point is that this hedge fund bit further confirms that impression of him. More over, since he has been perpetually running for the last five plus years, it marks him as an idiot to not have seen how that plays exactly against his wished for image as a populist.
If you have it, I guess.
I see a guy who’s been pretty consistent over that time. You think he’s slick, but so what?
I keep thinking of RFK, forty years ago. (Don’t worry, I don’t think Edwards is the second coming of RFK - just analogizing. :)) Guess he shouldn’t have played touch football with the clan at Hyannis Port, that obviously destroyed his populist cred.
The part that I don’t see is how his raising the awareness of issues such as poverty and the bifurcation of America into two economically distinct countries - how this helps out the people at the hedge funds who are paying him the big bucks. The most effective way of making sure an issue doesn’t get addressed is to make sure it doesn’t get talked about to begin with.
Talking the talk don’t hurt them none a’tall. They care about what he’ll do and they know that he is one of them. If populist talk would get him elected then they are fine with that.
Except that, from their perspective, no talk is always better than talk. Talk might get people thinking. If you don’t even think about X, you don’t want X or wonder why X can’t be better, and that’s the best outcome for the corporatists. Best strategy is always to win without your adversary even knowing anything’s being contested.
Why would they care? They’ve already got a good corporatist in Hillary, who won’t try too hard to rock any boats.
If the populist talk was already percolating without a candidate promoting it, they’d want to create a faux-populist candidate to co-opt the talk. But Edwards started talking about ‘two Americas’ when nobody else (at least, nobody the papers would cover) was.
Baloney! That kind of populist twaddle has been around for ages. Pat Buchanan exploited it, Ross Perot tapped into it, and one of those two Americas was Nixon’s “silent majority.”
John Edwards sure isn’t the only guy to dive into that pool.
Can we at least distinguish between cultural populism and economic populism? And note that this corner of the conversation has so far clearly been about the latter, not the former?
Thanks so much.
Can such a distinction truly be drawn?
All populist campaigns have a strong socioeconomic element - and all of them aim at the lower end of that scale. If they didn’t, they couldn’t really be considered populist campaigns by definition.
OK, let’s go back to the beginning of your interruption:
You’ll have to explain to me how Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Richard Nixon attempted to raise the awareness of rising income inequality in America, and the problems that arise from a relatively small number of rich people living in effectively a different America from the rest of us. (Since that was what Edwards’ “Two Americas” “populist twaddle” was all about.)
I must admit, I’m dying to hear this.
Listen, I do not doubt that Edwards has certain concerns for the poor and certain economic ideas. However, these are rather distinct from his populism as such, which isn’t a coherent political philosophy (and never has been) so much as it is a rhetorical style that has been used by politicians of many different stripes over the years.
Like Perot’s rhetoric, or George Wallace’s, or Huey Long’s, Edward’s rhetoric finds a bogeyman and a victim - and instantly empathizes with the latter while blaming the former for much of the nation’s ills.
It has always been a very powerful message, and has always found a willing audience. Let’s remember that when George Wallace was shot in Laurel, Maryland (not far away from where you live) he was speaking to a sizable crowd who mostly listened approvingly to his message. He them went on to win Maryland and several other states in the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination race.
IOW, you just define economic populism out of existence, and define it as a strictly cultural appeal that might incidentally involve some economic aspects.
Feel free to do that for your own purposes, but that had nothing to do with the discussion DSeid and I were having. We were using the word in a different way, talking about clearly different things.
I’m sorry this isn’t clear to you.
I see your point.
So if some politician had worked for, say, Halliburton, you would support his election so that he could “sensibly rein in their worst aspects”. And politicians with experience in the oil industry are well situated to advise on the various aspects of energy policy. Just like trial lawyers are the best folks to go to about tort reform.
Right? 
Regards,
Shodan
They aren’t evil, but people who are working for hedge funds are making a shitload of money right now and there’s not a lot of oversight or regulation. That leads to a perception, rightly or wrongly that something shady is going on.
My problem with hedge funds-they can get SO big, that a panic (engendered by rumor) can lead to a banking crisis. Take the case of LONG TERM CAPITAL MANGEMENT: the US taxpayers had to bail it out! So(paradoxically) the rich are NOT allowed to fail-the working people HAVE to prevent them from losing! this “insurace” is NOT afforded to the working class!
Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to point out the obvious. It’s always good to have a friendly accomplice in the audience to feed me my setup questions. 
Let’s say Sen. Shmoe, in between stints in Congress, goes to work for the widget industry. If he’s an outright opponent of the widget industry - believes widgets are bad, and that it’s unfortunate that we can’t actually ban the little suckers - then he’s simply a hypocrite.
If he believes that the widget industry is basically OK, but is subject to abuses and needs to be regulated, then working for the widget industry might do any of several things. It might disabuse him of the notion that it needs to be regulated, or it might help him get a better fix on what regulations are needed and would be effective without substantial harm to the industry’s legitimate aspects, or the closeup view of the industry might show him that widgets are evil. A variation on the first alternative is that he might preserve his original beliefs in his own heart, but sell out and publicly advocate that widgets don’t need regulating.
If he believes that the widget industry can do no wrong, shouldn’t be regulated, and is deserving of abundant Federal subsidies over and above its natural profit margins, then working for the widget industry might disabuse him of some of those notions, but chances are his beliefs are independent of any facts he might learn from a stint in the widget industry. What he’s likely to learn is greater understanding of how legislation can be best crafted to exempt the widget industry from regulations applying to other industries, and how to make the widget industry eligible for greater Federal subsidies.
I suspect the rest of the answer can be worked out by the student.
I noted above that the particular fund Edwards worked for and invested in is also highly involved in the subprime mortgage market.
This kind of hedge fund news isn’t helpful to Edwards, even if it does not involve his particular hedge fund.
So, nothing to suggest Edwards did anything wrong here, but that because of the chain of associations one can make, it might make Edwards ‘look bad.’
The subprime mortgage market angle is particularly unhelpful, given Edwards’ opinions on housing, debt and poverty. Time will tell whether this touches him more closely - it may come to pass that the involvement of his fund in that lending will hurt it in the same way that it hurt Bear Stearns.
In any case, it highlights the hypocrisy angles I mentioned above. And I note that nobody has outright stated that this isn’t a legitimate political issue. Clearly it is.