John Edwards, the former U.S. senator and vice presidential candidate, has been traveling around the country to support anti-poverty efforts such as raising the minimum wage.

Edwards, considered a prospective candidate for president in 2008, recently spoke with Q editor Jane Ruffin. Excerpts:

Q: You’ve been talking to Democrats all around the country lately. Why are Democrats seeming unable to adopt a single overarching political message to appeal to voters?

A: I believe we are. I think what the Democratic Party is focused on is filling the void of moral leadership that is missing in America. That includes issues like what I believe is the greatest moral issue in America today: 37 million people who live in poverty. Expanded beyond that, it means 46 million Americans who have no health care coverage, and beyond our borders, it means America providing moral leadership in the world. I think there is a void in America’s moral leadership in the world. And so there are lots of substantive components to what the leadership of the country needs from us and the world needs from us, but I think it’s all framed by doing what’s right and moral.

Q: You put that in terms of doing what’s right and moral, and yet it seems like Democrats have trouble talking about religion? What’s your take on that?

A: First of all, I think that the way I talk about it is there are a lot of faiths in America. America embraces all those faiths, and it’s one of the great things about our country. So the reason I use language like what is right and just and moral when I’m talking about, for example, the issue of poverty and doing something about the issue of poverty, it goes across all the faith traditions in the United States. And my own belief is that we, the Democratic Party, have to provide moral leadership on issues like poverty because no one’s doing it. It is desperately needed.

I have spent the last year, hour after hour after hour, meeting with families all over the country who live in poverty, and these folks deserve a chance, and they deserve somebody to speak up for them. It’s not just people who live in poverty. Middle-class families are having a terrible time getting by every day.

We, I’m talking about my party, the Democratic Party, we need to be their voice, we need to be their champion — not just speaking up for them but with real specific, concrete ideas about how to make their lives better, and that’s some of what I’ve been working on on the issue of poverty.

Q: On the subject of poverty, the columnist George Will suggested that you really haven’t taken the time to study, reflect and really master this subject. What do you say to that?

A: That he’s think he’s dead wrong. I don’t think that is what he suggested. But I’ve actually spent a huge amount of time on the issue of poverty, not just since the election was over. It’s something I was interested in before that. Can I just talk about what I think needs to be done?

Q: Sure. A: There’s a whole range of things that we need to do about poverty in America. What George Will was talking about and what others have talked about is they believe that the war on poverty, which was initiated in the 1960s, was fatally flawed. I think an honest assessment of the war on poverty is it did a lot of good, but there were problems.

And by the way, the war on poverty grew out of Michael Harrington writing in the early ’60s about “the other America,” which got the attention of President Kennedy and then President Johnson, who led the war on poverty. What happened with the war on poverty was in some cases money ended up in bureaucracy and never got to the people who needed help. In some cases, we created a cycle of dependency, which was a very unhealthy thing. But there were some good things that came out of the war on poverty. Because of the war on poverty, we actually cut the poverty rate in this country in half in about a decade, and because of the war on poverty we have Medicaid today, we have Medicare, we have Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. These are laws that benefited generations of Americans. So we did some things right. We also made some mistakes. America makes mistakes when it’s engaged with big issues.

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