ByGeorge!

June 2007

Top Democrats Take Center Stage at GW

By Rachel Muir

Within the span of a little more than a week, four of the nation’s top Democrats spoke to standing-room-only audiences in three separate visits to GW. On June 4, presidential contenders Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) took part in an unprecedented forum on faith, values, and poverty held in the University’s Lisner Auditorium. The forum, which was broadcast live on CNN and moderated by the network’s Soledad O’Brien, was presented by the Christian social justice ministry Sojourners.

The three candidates answered questions about how faith and religion shape their politics and personal life—with topics ranging from alleviating poverty and the nation’s response to Hurricane Katrina to abortion and gay marriage—in individual 15-minute appearances on stage.

Edwards spoke first, discussing his Southern Baptist roots and personal religious journey. “My belief in Christ plays an enormous role in the way I view the world,” said Edwards, who credited faith and prayer with giving him “the strength to keep going” after the death of his son and his wife’s diagnosis with cancer.

Calling poverty the cause of his life and the great moral issue of today, Edwards outlined an agenda to eliminate poverty over the next 30 years, including a living wage, the right to unionize, affordable housing, and universal health care. “It’s not just an agenda I talk about—it’s part of who I am as a human being,” he stressed.
For his part, Barak Obama spoke of faith’s power to effect positive change. “Faith can inform what we do,” he said. “Faith can say forgive someone who has treated us unjustly. Faith can say that regardless of what’s happened in the past, there’s a brighter future ahead.”

Obama also stressed people’s responsibility to help one another.

“I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper,” he said. “These obligations need to express themselves not just through our churches and our synagogues; they need to express themselves through our government.” He said that his agenda as president would include increased funding for education, transitional jobs, and a higher minimum wage. “We want to make sure people are sharing in the benefits and burdens of the global economy.”

Appearing last, Clinton talked about her grounding in the Methodist religion. “I take my faith very seriously and very personally,” she said. “I come from a tradition that is suspicious of people who wear their faith on their sleeves. A lot of the talk about faith and advertising about faith doesn’t come naturally to me.” Responding to a question about her husband’s infidelity, she said, “I’m not sure I would have gotten through it without my faith.”

In response to a question about abortion, Clinton said her hope is to make the practice “safe, legal, and rare.” She added, “The pro-life and pro-choice communities have not been willing to find much common ground. I think that is a big failing on all of our parts.” She also called on the left and the right to come together to provide health insurance coverage for the uninsured, dubbing the current situation “a moral wrong.”

The forum marked Clinton’s second visit to GW in as many weeks. On May 24, the presidential candidate chose the University to unveil her health care plan, speaking to an audience of primarily medical students in the Jack Morton Auditorium.

Calling the current system “outdated, ineffective, and unsustainable,” Clinton laid out a seven-point plan to revamp the nation’s health care, including improving access to preventative care, expanding electronic medical records, increasing the use of generic prescription drugs, and ending insurance companies’ practice of “cherry-picking” the healthiest individuals.

Clinton said her proposals could cut health care costs by $120 billion a year—saving the average family $2,200 annually—while improving the quality of health care. “I think Americans are ready for change,” she said.

Al Gore also called for change—in his case a return to democratic discourse—in a May 29 speech at GW. In the lecture and book signing hosted by local bookstore Politics and Prose, the former vice president discussed democracy and his new best-selling book The Assault on Reason at Lisner Auditorium. Saying there’s “a crack in the foundation of democracy,” Gore criticized the Bush administration’s record on a host of issues, including the Iraq War and global warming. “I am certain that I am not the only one here who has had the feeling that for the past several years something has gone horribly wrong with the way American democracy operates,” he said.

Gore pointed to the nation’s longstanding tradition of free and open discourse—essential components of democracy that he said have been compromised in recent years. But, he said, all is not lost. “We have available to us the new tools and opportunities that can, if we use them correctly and with passion and commitment, bring us a solution to what ails American democracy.”

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