Edwards Touts Anti-Poverty Campaign
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Senator Edwards brought his anti-poverty campaign to New York yesterday, pledging to support efforts by a major health care union to secure higher wages and benefits for home health care workers.
“I will do anything in my power to support these workers and their cause,” Mr. Edwards said at a rally on the steps of City Hall sponsored by SEIU 1199, the nation’s largest local health care union.” All they ask is to be treated with some level of dignity and respect and for their work to pay enough and have enough benefits.”
The union, which represents about 30,000 home health care aides across the Northeast, has threatened to strike Personal Touch Home Care services, a New York-based company that employs about 3,200 union members, for better wages and medical coverage.
Mr. Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has traveled the country as a vocal anti-poverty advocate while contemplating a possible 2008 presidential bid. He refused to say yesterday whether he had made a decision about a possible candidacy, saying only that he is “seriously thinking about it.”
Venturing into the home turf of Senator Clinton, the presumed 2008 Democratic presidential front-runner, Mr. Edwards declined to comment on word that Rupert Murdoch, head of the press and broadcast conglomerate News Corporation, will be sponsoring a fund raiser this summer for Mrs. Clinton’s Senate re-election campaign.
“I wouldn’t presume to speak for Senator Clinton. She should speak for herself,” Mr. Edwards said.
News Corporation is the parent company of several outlets, including Fox News Channel and the New York Post, that regularly skewer Democratic lawmakers.
Mr. Edwards was also asked about a new book by Vice President Cheney’s openly gay daughter, Mary Cheney, in which she describes her reaction to Mr. Edwards’s mention of her sexual orientation in the 2004 vice presidential debate.
Ms. Cheney said she mouthed an expletive during the debate when Mr. Edwards praised the Cheney family for their willingness “to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter.” It was the same obscenity her father used that year in a much-publicized exchange with Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, on the Senate floor.
Mr. Edwards yesterday said he stood by his comments.
