John Edwards
Name: John Edwards - Johnny Reid Edwards
Date Of Birth: June 10th, 1953
Hometown: Seneca, South Carolina
Political Party: Democrat
John Edwards has had life filled with trials, both legal, and personal. He was born in South Carolina on June 10th, 1953, but moved around a lot as a child, and landed in Robbins, North Carolina. While he was there he played football and was the first person in his family to get a college education. He met his wife at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they have been married for 30 years.
When Edwards graduated college, he worked for a law firm in Nashville, Tennessee. After that he moved to Raleigh, North Carolina and he joined the law firm Tharrington, Smith and Hargrove. Edwards began seeing success in his practice and was considered the top plaintiff’s attorney in all of North Carolina. As a result he decided to open his own firm, which he did in 1993.
John Edwards began his political career by running for U.S. Senate in 1998. He won the election with a margin of over 80,000 votes. Shortly afterward, in 2000, he was the Democratic nominee for Al Gore’s potential picks for Vice President (which also included John Kerry and Joe Lieberman).
In September of 2003, Edwards decided to officially announce that he was going to run for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination. Throughout his campaign for the nomination, he was one of the only real threats to Kerry, and did well until March 2nd, when Edwards ended his campaign for President. He withdrew from the race in North Carolina on March 3rd, 2004, but he did manage to become the running mate for Kerry. He has again entered the presidential race in 2008.
Political Views Summary:
John Edwards is dedicated to helping college students remain in school. He is pro-choice, and is against a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage, but wants to leave that up to individual states.
He wants to seek to withdrawal the troops in the Middle East and believes a troop surge is foolish. He also believes that the government needs to seek more time investing in health care and education in order to keep kids from getting involved in crime.
One part of Edwards’ health care plan is laid out by requiring employers to either cover employees or pay a payroll tax that will be used to fund regional health insurance pools that are run by the government, and also making individuals purchase insurance from the health insurance pools.