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The Netroots Candidate

By clock on December 28, 2006.

If you read the papers or watched TV today, you may have gotten the impression that Edwards announced his run this morning around 9am in front of TV cameras. Wrong! The MSM folks think they still matter and are blind to everything happening outside of their domain.

The first people he directly announced to were about 20 of us bloggers on a teleconference phone call last night around 7pm. Soon afterwards, his campaign posted this video on YouTube, soon followed by the launch of his website.

Then, after the NOLA announcement, he spent about two hours on DailyKos answering questions from more than 800 commenters. Also see his vlog interview on Rocketboom.

There are several bloggers, including Ezra Klein and Robert Scoble, who are travelling with Edwards over these couple of days, from NOLA to Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina and North Carolina. At each stop, there is a streaming video from the Town-Hall meeting on his website and he answers the questions sent online. Also at each stop, he spends about 15 minutes meeting with and answering questions from local bloggers.

I know of no other political candidate for any office who so "gets" the new online technologies and how they are changing the way campaigns are waged. I went to check out the HQ today - still unpacked boxes and very few staff - but hearing I was a blogger they were all very helpful and fortright: "We want to make you bloggers happy"!

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I like what Edwards is saying about universal health care. The healthcare system is so broken it can't be ignored anymore. Millions are suffering -- and it's a real drag on the economy. Energetic young people with ideas can't afford to pursue their dreams by leaving the jobs that provide their health insurance for themselves and their families. Boomers who would love to retire from jobs that have grown tiresome -- perhaps to start part-time businesses of their own -- grimly hold on to ride out the years until Medicare kicks in, because of the sky-high cost of individual health insurance premiums a their age. It's a progressive hardening of the arteries of an economy that was long regarded as the most dynamic in the world. Want to jump start the economy? Unclog our economic arteries with health insurance reform. If he can get us started in this direction, he's got my vote.