James Lowe: Issues Real People Care About

Well, it’s campaign rhetoric we’ll be hearing from now until next November, but sometimes the points made actually mean something to the average person. John Edwards frequently repeats the story of a man, James Lowe, born with a cleft palate, rendering him essentially speechless for fifty years of his life. Why would a man with a treatable condition like cleft palate go without surgery for half a century, living essentially mute?

Money.

James Lowe didn’t have coverage for the surgery that would’ve transformed his life, so until he stood on line for thirteen hours to get help from a free clinic, Lowe was left without speech. "I never got no education because I was too embarrassed to learn. I can't read or write," he said. A coal miner for most of his life, his employers figured Lowe didn’t deserve care that would allow him to speak.

Appropriately, Edwards was moved to anger by Lowe’s story and made it into the centerpiece of one of his commercials.

A hat tip on the commercial to Ezra Klein, who points out that if more of our debate were about issues like poverty, healthcare, and the distribution of wealth concerns underlying stories like Lowe’s, we might have a real movement for change in 2008.

See below for both the commercial and an exchange between Edwards and Lowe this past summer.