by John Chase
BOONE, Iowa — While trying to make his case that if elected president he will provide health care to all Americans, John Edwards on Sunday was forced to defend his tough talk on the stump that he won’t compromise with insurance companies and drug firms.
The campaign of rival Sen. Barack Obama questioned the former North Carolina senator’s commitment to his rhetoric by reviving a quote Edwards gave nearly a year ago about what role corporations should play in the health care system.
Edwards on the campaign trail has hammered a theme of fighting corporate greed in America as a key strategy to providing economic justice for all Americans.
The February 2007 story from the website, mydd.com, quotes Edwards as saying that “you try to bring everybody to the table” — a seeming contradiction to his talk on the trail that he won’t sit down with corporate interests in hammering out a health care policy.
But Edwards said Sunday that there is no contradiction.
He said he that quote was an answer to whether insurance companies would still involved in the health care system under his plan, which he says they would.
“What I was talking about then was what we needed to do to actually bring about universal health care and the difference between single-payer, government-run health care and what I’m proposing,” he said. “I don’t eliminate insurance companies from the health care fix…People have choice in my health care proposal between a private plan and a government-run plan.”
Edwards’ defense came with just days before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 in which public opinion polls place him in an almost dead heat with U.S. Sens. Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.).
Obama has recently trained his sights on Edwards for the much-sought-after undecided voters as the candidates crisscross Iowa. Edwards himself has launched plans to campaign for 36 hours straight beginning Tuesday.
On Sunday, campaigning along with his wife and children, Edwards continued to make his final case to voters with an unyielding attack on corporations that he says are “stealing your children’s future.”
“Are we going to let this corporate greed destroy the middle class of America?” he asked a crowd of 400 jammed inside the Gigglin’ Goat, a spacious restaurant in Boone, Iowa. “They have an iron-fisted grip on your democracy.”
Indeed, Edwards didn’t back away from claims that, if elected, he would refuse to sit down with corporations to negotiate policy initiatives, and said that anybody that suggested compromising with insurance, drug and oil companies was wrongheaded.
“That is a complete fantasy,” he said. “You can’t nice these people to death. They will never give their power away. The only way we’re going to get their power away is we’re going to have to take their power away.”
“Anybody who says to me that they want me to sit at the table and negotiate? Never,” he said. “I won’t do it.”
Later, Edwards told a crowd in the western Iowa town of Carroll that when voters are deciding who to elect president to take on the big corporate interests “you better send somebody into that fight, send somebody into that arena who is ready for that fight.”
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“Because we have an epic fight on our hands,” he said.