Obama-Edwards Feud Brewing?

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As we near the Iowa caucuses, Senator Obama and former Senator Edwards have taken a break from bashing Senator Clinton to bash one another just a bit. (Making this scenario a little less likely.)

Obama had this to say about Edwards:

“The reason now that I raise this issue of the special interests is because everybody now in the campaign talks about how I am going to fight for you. Like Sen. Edwards, who is a good guy—he’s been talking a lot about, ‘I am going to fight the lobbyists and the special interests in Washington.’ Well the question you have to ask is: Were you fighting for ’em when you were in the Senate. What did you do?”

I was at Edwards events all day today, so I found an opportunity to get the candidate’s thoughts while at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Here’s what he said in response to Obama’s comments.

“I spent 20 years fighting these powerful corporations in courtrooms and winning over and over again. In public life, I’ve carried on the same cause. One of the most obvious examples is I co-authored the patients’ bill of rights, one of the biggest pieces of legislation taken on by the Democrats after we took over the United States Senate. I, Senator Kennedy, and Senator McCain were the cosponsors of it. We beat back the insurance companies and the HMOs and got the patients’ bill of rights passed in the United States senate.”

Edwards declined to go negative, as you can see. We’ll see where this goes. I’ll have more on Edwards in the next day or so.

My crude photographic representation of this situation after the jump.

obama_edwards_broken_heart.jpg

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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