Earlier, I had some strong criticisms of Obama. I didn’t really care about the “he ain’t black” stuff–that’s for the birds.

Today I was taping for The Barbershop, and one of the bits was about Johns Edwards’ poverty tour. I originally planned to compare Edwards’ platform on poverty to the non-existent platforms of Obama and Clinton, and wanted to double check just to be sure.

Obama has definitely stepped his game up. Here is his poverty platform. He’s cribbed some ideas from Edwards–his battle against mortgage loan sharks was presaged by Edwards for example. But he’s got some interesting ones of his own. The idea of giving environmental jobs to people in cities who needs work is a great one and one likely taken from the folks at worldchanging. This is the type of idea exchange/sampling/biting that I can roll with.