Which candidate said, "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?"

IOWA BULLETIN [updated 12:11am ET]:

I still can't get terribly excited about this whole Iowa business, especially since almost everything about the caucus results is apt to be grotesquely misinterpreted and/or stretched wildly out of proportion, but for the record, the Washington Post website is showing:

DEMOCRATS (100 percent of precincts reporting)
Obama, 38 percent
Edwards, 30 percent
Clinton, 29 percent
other, 3 percent

REPUBLICANS (87 percent of precincts reporting)
Huckabee, 34 percent
Romney, 26 percent
Thompson, 13 percent
other, 27 percent

Already on washingtonpost.com we hear about how Senator Clinton has suffered a "stinging setback" (Chris Cillizza, who else?), and how Huckaroo "[rode] a wave of evangelical fervor to victory" (with, oh so predictably, no mention of his populist rhetoric).

Maybe. (I guess if enough people say Senator Clinton was stingingly set back, she was.) Still, I think David Sirota came a lot closer to the mark earlier today:

"[N]o matter who wins, it is absolutely great that economic populism has taken center stage so far in the presidential contest. Thanks to candidates like John Edwards and Mike Huckabee ignoring the Punditburo's attacks and trumpeting the populist line, Wall Street-backed candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have had to resort to posing as populists as well - and that's a good thing. The more candidates channeling the public's righteous anger at corporate greed and economic inequality, the better."

--Ken

"Would you even be willing to utter the words, 'I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?' 'Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil -- including the root of global warming -- is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace."
--Michael Moore, speaking rhetorically to Al Gore, in his current open letter, "Who Do We Vote For This Time Around?," assessing the three leading Democratic presidential candidates

"Do you feel the same as me?" says Mike. "That the Democratic front-runners are a less-than-stellar group of candidates, and that none of them are the 'slam dunk' we wish they were? Of course, there are wonderful things about each of them. Any one of them would be infinitely better than what we have now."

That's what has him reaching out to Al Gore. But this ringing declaration has clearly gotten his attention. I'm sure everyone knows which of the Big Three candidates said, "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy." It couldn't have come from Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. It has to be John Edwards.

Mike makes clear that he's not endorsing anyone at this point. "This is simply how I feel in the first week of the process to replace George W. Bush," he says. But he's clearly thinking along the same lines that Howie was the other day:

Whoa. We haven't heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. He won't take the big checks from the corporate PACs, and he is alone among the top three candidates in agreeing to limit his spending and be publicly funded. He has said, point-blank, that he's going after the drug companies and the oil companies and anyone else who is messing with the American worker. The media clearly find him to be a threat, probably because he will go after their monopolistic power, too. This
is Roosevelt/Truman kind of talk. That's why it's resonating with people in Iowa, even though he doesn't get the attention Obama and Hillary get -- and that lack of coverage may cost him the first place spot tomorrow night. After all, he is one of those white guys who's been running things for far too long.

And he voted for the war. But unlike Senator Clinton, he has stated quite forcefully that he was wrong. And he has remorse. Should he be forgiven? Did he learn his lesson? Like Hillary and Obama, he refused to promise in a September debate that there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of his first term in 2013. But this week in Iowa, he changed his mind. He went further than Clinton and Obama and said he'd have all the troops home in less than a year.

Edwards is the only one of the three front-runners who has a universal health care plan that will lead to the single-payer kind all other civilized countries have. His plan doesn't go as fast as I would like, but he is the only one who has correctly pointed out that the health insurance companies are the enemy and should not have a seat at the table.

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