Edwards got it right about poverty

This article ran locally in the WSJ on Saturday, but I thought that it was worth a repeat.

By Thomas Oliphant for the Boston Globe:

In any collection of Americans who have earned the right to say I told you so, John Edwards should make every short list. But, in character, last year's Democratic vice presidential nominee passed up a nice chance to do that yesterday.
Instead, the person who insisted on pressing the country's diseased political culture to confront the moral issue of poverty long before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast used some nice spotlight time to continue pressing.
Edwards was right in saying at the Center for American Progress that Katrina not only exposed America's dirty secret but presented a ''historic moment" when it is clear the country is ready to support action but is short on the leadership that can prompt it. In a clue to his instinctive understanding of poverty, Edwards's summary of first principles includes the central concept (I first heard it from Hubert Humphrey on the subject of civil rights some 40 years ago) that confronting poverty is not something ''we" do for ''them."
''This is something we do for us -- for all of us. It makes us stronger; it makes us better," he said.