Two people I have been proud to support in their political campaigns are teaming up. Dean Gene Nichol of the University of North Carolina School of Law, who was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate here in Colorado back in 1996 when he was a law professor at CU, is hiring former Senator and VP candidate John Edwards to be the head of the new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the law school in Chapel Hill.
The poor are the most underserved group in the country as far as legal services go, so this new center will help address what I am sure is a great need in North Carolina as elsewhere. Republicans are claiming that there is a political aspect to Edwards' hiring -- as if they never play politics with university faculty hiring decisions. I say, so what if there is.
What I liked about both Edwards and Nichol as candidates was their focus on not just the "middle class" (which has been defined upward to include anyone who isn't buying a condo at the base of Vail with cash) but the actual poor. We've got a serious poverty problem in our country that given our great wealth we ought to be able to handle. Seeing Edwards and Nichol get together to work on poverty issues gives me some hope for the future, and not a little bit of regret over what might have been.
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