Home > News > Candidate Edwards withdraws from race
Candidate Edwards withdraws from race
NEW ORLEANS (AP)
ISSUE: 78/18
Democrat John Edwards bowed out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday, saying it was time to step aside “so that history can blaze its path” in a campaign now left to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. “With our convictions and a little backbone, we will take back the White House in November,” said Edwards, ending his second campaign in the same hurricane-ravaged city where he began it more than a year ago.
Edwards said Clinton and Obama had both pledged that “they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.” “This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause,” he said before a small group of supporters. He was joined by his wife Elizabeth and his three children, Cate, Emma Claire and Jack. He waged a spirited, underfunded race on a populist note, pledging to represent the powerless against the corporate interests.
He finished second in the Iowa caucuses that led off the campaign, but he was quickly overshadowed—a white man in a race against the former first lady and a 46-year-old black man, each bent on making history. Edwards said that on his way to making his campaign-ending statement, he drove by a highway underpass where several homeless people live. He stopped to talk, he said, and as he was leaving, one of them asked him never to forget them and their plight.
“Well I say to her and I say to all those who are struggling in this country, we will never forget you. We will fight for you. We will stand up for you,” he said, pledging to continue his campaign-long effort to end what he frequently said was “two Americas,” one for the powerful, the other for the rest. The former North Carolina senator did not immediately endorse either Clinton or Obama. Both of them praised Edwards—and immediately began courting his supporters.
“I want to wish John and Elizabeth well and thank him for running a great campaign that was really important for millions of Americans,” Clinton told reporters in Arkansas. Edwards ended his campaign today in the same way he started it—by standing with the people who are too often left behind and nearly always left out of our national debate,” Clinton said.
Obama, too, praised Edwards and his wife. At a rally in Denver, he said the couple has “always believed deeply that two Americas can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose. So while his campaign may have ended, this cause lives on for all of us who still believe that we can achieve that dream of one America.” The impact of Edwards’ decision will be felt when Democrats hold primaries and caucuses across 22 states, with 1,681 delegates at stake.
Four-in-10 Edwards supporters said their second choice in the race is Clinton, while a quarter prefer Obama, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo poll conducted late this month.
