Tim Hall
London Telegraph
Thursday, December 28, 2006

FLASHBACK: U.S. Sen. John Edwards at Bilderberg

John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, has announced he will again run for the White House.

Mr Edwards has taken the risky decision of launching his second presidential run in the normally slow news week between Christmas and New Year. Although they have yet to declare their candidacy, Senators Hillary clinton and Barack Obama are widely expected to throw their hats into the ring.

Mr Edwards launched his campaign last night in a poor New Orleans neighbourhood, where thousands of people are still living in poverty following Hurricane Katrina.

The former North Carolina senator reiterated to his supporters that there are "two Americas" - one for the comfortable and another for the struggling. He has proposed a series of work, housing and school measures aimed at lifting millions of Americans out of poverty in the next 10 years, and called for a goal of ending poverty within 30 years.

"I’m running to ask millions of Americans to take responsibility and take action to change our country and ensure America’s greatness in the 21st century," he wrote on his website, under the slogan "Tomorrow begins today."

Mr Edwards, the son of a millworker and the first person in his family to attend college, was one of the country’s most successful and wealthy personal injury attorneys before entering politics in 1998.

He left the Senate after one term to run for president, entering the primaries as a potential "fresh face" before candidates like Howard Dean and John Kerry overtook him.

As his rivals dropped away, Mr Edwards kept plugging his economic message. He rose to become the last major challenger for Mr Kerry, who won the nomination and chose Mr Edwards as his vice presidential running mate.

Unless former vice president Al Gore makes a late entry into the fray – perhaps on the back his successful global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Mr Edwards is likely to be one of the big challengers for the Democrat nomination in 2008.

Mr Edwards has been out of office since he stepped down as senator for North Carolina to run for president in 2004, and has used the time to court voters assiduously in the key states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where the first party primary and caucus votes are held. His legwork has paid off, giving him a 20 per cent lead over Mrs Clinton in Iowa, where the 2008 campaign begins in earnest in 13 months' time.