“The choice we must make is as important as it is clear. It is a choice between corporate power and the power of democracy. It is caution versus courage. Calculation versus principle. It is the establishment elites versus the American people.”
Edwards has made this a master theme of campaign, identifying his willingness to fight the corporations and “beat them again and again” as the major feature distinguishing him from his chief rivals for the Democratic nomination. All the Democratic candidates are for “change,” Edwards notes, but “the real question is how change occurs.” His answer comes straight out of Frederick Douglass, who observed that “power never concedes without a fight.” Without directly saying so, he rightly suggests that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are wedded to a cautious and cowardly corporate-insider model that will compel them to betray their democratic- and populist-sounding campaign promises once they attained power.