AP News, March 31st, 2007
John Edwards returned Saturday to his legal roots and his native state as he wrapped up a fundraising blitz.
Edwards stopped at a reception at the upscale office building of one of South Carolina's biggest trial lawyer firms, just across from Charleston's port and near the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier museum.
In his last run for president, the former North Carolina senator who made his fortune as a trial lawyer, was asking his colleagues to reach deep in their pockets get his first presidential bid off the ground. But it's different this time around, Edwards said Saturday.
"I think we're going to demonstrate very broad appeal. We continue, I think, to clearly to have a lot of support from the legal community. But I think added to that support is a broad array of financial support, including a lot of low-dollar support on the Internet," Edwards said.
But Edwards wasn't ready to talk about how much his campaign had raised, saying that it would be reported within the next few weeks.
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SUMTER, S.C. (AP) _ Democratic presidential hopeful Joseph Biden found a ready critic for his own criticism of the U.S. war in Iraq as the senator campaigned Saturday in the hometown of Shaw Air Force Base.
The Delaware Democrat said he has been right to criticize the Bush administration for its handling of the Iraq war. He told a crowd of about 60 at the University of South Carolina-Sumter that he is the only presidential candidate with a real political solution for the war.
But when Biden turned to the audience for questions, John Stevens, 79, a disabled Air Force veteran of the U.S. conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, had his own criticism to offer.
"The war's being lost in Congress by the people who give aid and comfort to the enemies that are killing our troops," Stevens said.
Biden said the problem in Iraq isn't a lack of support at home for American troops. He said he has pushed plans to properly equip troops, in part by providing mine-resistant vehicles made in South Carolina.
U.S. soldiers have been asked to remain enmeshed in what's become a civil war that requires different tactics, Biden said.
"We went to war with too few troops," Biden said. "Not a single general disagrees with that."
