"When a merely honest man appears he is a comet--his fame is eternal--needs no genius, no talent--mere honesty."
- Mark Twain
John Edwards Visits Hannibal's Demo DaysAn honest man in politics is met with cheers
The scene:
Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, at a banquet held as part of an event called "Democrat Days", which isn't really about elected officials. It's a unique experience. It doesn't happen in many places. The grassroots control what happens in their own arena — as opposed to decisions made from 'the top of the ticket'.
John Edwards drew cheers from the party faithful when he said:"This party has always fought for people who don't have a voice. This party has always believed that everybody should have an opportunity to do well. And we believe that we have a moral responsibility to help those who are struggling.
During an interview, he said:"If you spend so much time talking about your proposals and your programs, people don't know what you're made of inside. They need to know what it is that drives us every single day, and as simple as that sounds it is at the core of what people look for when they vote for a presidential candidate."
He urged Democrats to stay true to their roots and communicate clearly about what Democrats believe.
There were 650 people in attendance, and such a large crowd in a non-election year is unusual. The Democrat Days organizer John Yancey credited much of that to John Edward's popularity with the people.
Missouri Democrats at the event were fired up over their belief that Republicans, while controlling the governor's mansion and the Legislature, are hypocritically embracing policies out of line with the religious values that their [Republican] party claims to espouse.
The confluence of former Senator Edwards with his appearance in the boyhood home of Mark Twain recalls, to my mind, a quotation from Twain's "A Tramp Abroad", where Twain visits the opera and sees a performance of "Lohengrin".
This was while a gorgeous procession of people marched around and around, in the third act, and sang the Wedding Chorus. To my untutored ear that was music--almost divine music. While my seared soul was steeped in the healing balm of those gracious sounds, it seemed to me that I could almost resuffer the torments which had gone before, in order to be so healed again. There is where the deep ingenuity of the operatic idea is betrayed. It deals so largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously augmented by the contrasts. A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.
I would imagine the Democrats in Hannibal got that feeling yesterday upon hearing John Edwards, a man they see as refreshingly honest, realistically optimistic, and firmly standing in the hope for the healing of our land.
