Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate and class warfare
enthusiast John “Two Americas” Edwards and his wife might spend
their anniversaries at Wendy’s (at least when there are newspaper
photographers and cable news anchors in the parking lot), but the
other 364 days of their year are played out in much swanker
quarters.
Considering his much-lauded penchant for what passes for
“populist” rhetoric theses days — “Let me say this in simple right
and wrong, black and white terms,” Edwards bravely
told one New Hampshire crowd during primary season. “I say no
to kids going to bed hungry in America. I say no to kids not having
clothes to keep them warm” — one might be tempted to assume that
the former senator put his Georgetown house on the market for an
asking price of $6.2 million dollars as a prelude to finally
joining a commune.
Alas, another progressive hero is about to bite the dust. The
sale is not a precursor to Edwards liquidating his worldly
possessions for redistribution among the proletariat, but, rather,
simply a fundraiser for the country estate currently being
constructed for him on a 100 acre plot in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina. (Is it just me or is anyone else surprised there are 100
contiguous unpopulated acres in Chapel Hill? Must be a “who you
know” thing.) That’s right, faster than you can say “plantation,”
Mr. Edwards is building himself one.
It’s a good thing his mill worker father taught him “the value
of a hard day’s work,” because even with shrubs, that is a
lot of lawn to mow. This will be ameliorated somewhat by the
fact that the Edwards family also plans to sell their Raleigh home.
But they will hold on to their Wilmington area beach house. After
all, man cannot live on 100 acres alone.
Nevertheless, before anyone gets the wrong idea and start
thinking being a sappy, spoon-deep politician with nice hair is the
only occupation that pays better than being a ruthless, client and
venue shopping trial lawyer…Well, it just isn’t like that.
Edwards is a working stiff again with a new job heading the
University of North Carolina Center on Poverty, Work and
Opportunity, which plans to explore “innovative and practical ideas
for moving more Americans out of poverty and into the middle
class.”
The first lesson, I suppose, is that one way to escape the
tyrannical socioeconomic prison George W. Bush has fashioned and
get to the promised land where normal folks relax on their 100 acre
plots with periodic beach house breaks — the “other America,” as
it were — is to get some university to pay you to study poverty.
For real poor people this should be a cinch; a real work-from-home
opportunity.
In view of their current living situation, some of you cynics
out are probably thinking maybe John Edwards and his kin are uppity
folks who don’t really understand how you live. Pshaw. If the
family learned one thing living in Georgetown it was how it feels
to toil all day and then come home to a house with only seven
bedrooms and six full baths, with their friends embarrassingly
being forced, on occasion, to use one of two half-baths.
But as Elizabeth Edwards explained recently to the Washington Post, this perky little family
rolled up their sleeves and made the home work for them.
“We pretty much gutted it, but we wanted to keep the character
of the house, since so many people knew it,” she said. “But it
needed to be more family-friendly for us.”
So how does Elizabeth define “family-friendly”? Probably not
much different than your own Ma and Pa defined it. She just wanted
to add on what every family with two young children can barely get
by without — 2,000 new square feet, an enclosed porch, central air
conditioning, a new study, a new room above the garage, and the
little matter of replacing the home’s flooring with heart pine from
an old mill in South Carolina.
That at least partially explains why Edwards is selling a house
he bought in December 2002 for $3.8 million less than three years
later for $6.5 million. At first the disparity had me worried that
Edwards had completely sold out and had perhaps become possessed by
the profit motive.
Still, as much as I instinctively trust trial lawyers, I can’t
help but wonder why Edwards didn’t buy, say, a 50 acre
estate and maybe build a homeless shelter or even send money to
that girl he talked about in his speech following his South
Carolina primary victory.
“Somewhere in America, a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed
hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as
today,” he told the crowd. “She’s one of 35 million Americans who
live in poverty every single day, unnoticed, unheard.”
It sounded as if Edwards was actually deeply concerned about
this nameless, faceless, probably entirely fictional young girl. It
seems entirely unlikely a Democratic politician would use a
caricature of a poverty-stricken person simply to score some
political points.
Perhaps with the $6.5 million from the Georgetown house he can
take her shopping at Wal-Mart for a blanket and a new cardboard
box. Then maybe grab something off the dollar menu at his favorite
restaurant, Wendy’s? It would probably even all be tax-deductible
if on the car ride over he studies her for his no doubt critical
work at the University of North Carolina Center on Poverty, Work
and Opportunity.
But even if you can’t empathize with the Edwards’s politics —
basically, massive expansions of government bureaucracy to be in
turn paid for by massive tax increases — I think all of us can
agree on what an absolutely miserable experience moving is, even if
it is to a modest 100 acre country seat.
“I’m sitting at the desk in the study now and there’s nothing on
top of it,” Elizabeth Edwards laughed to the Washington
Post from their Georgetown home as it was being emptied. “It
doesn’t look like anybody lives here anymore.”
Ah, now she knows what it’s really like to live in the other
America.
