Farewell John Edwards, and thank you

Matthew Hinton/AFP/Getty Images

If this photo doesn't make break your heart with regret for what might have been.... well, you don't have a heart.

If, as I expect, we elect a democrat this fall to the presidency, that candidate will have been shaped, pushed and pulled by the compelling and brutal honesty of the Edwards campaign. He has been the voice of the poor, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised in this country. He has become our conscience, the voice that says you may not look away from the homeless, the poor, the uninsured. You may not ignore the discarded and the unfortunates whose lives have been ruined by Katrina, or Vietnam or Iraq.

You must look.

And more, you must act.

He changed the debate, and he forced Clinton and Obama to come along with him. He led on every progressive issue and we will have him to thank if the country finally breaks the spell of this insidious, evil neo-gilded age. As Edwards said in his email to supporters yesterday:

This work goes on. It goes on right here in Musicians' Village. There are homes to build here, and in neighborhoods all along the Gulf. The work goes on for the students in crumbling schools just yearning for a chance to get ahead. It goes on for day care workers, for steel workers risking their lives in cities all across this country. And the work goes on for two hundred thousand men and women who wore the uniform of the United States of America, proud veterans, who go to sleep every night under bridges, or in shelters, or on grates, just as the people we saw on the way here today. Their cause is our cause.

Their struggle is our struggle. Their dreams are our dreams.

Do not turn away from these great struggles before us. Do not give up on the causes that we have fought for. Do not walk away from what's possible, because it's time for all of us, all of us together, to make the two Americas one.

Yesterday, after the video cameras turned off, and the stage had been taken down, and most of the reporters had wandered off to cover other candidates, John Edwards picked up a hammer and a drill and went to work building a home for one of the thousands of families displaced by Katrina.

The work goes on.

Thank you, Senator Edwards. Please don't be a stranger.

Krugman has a very fine column today on Edwards as well: The Edwards Effect