"Americans are looking for something moral and just. Something other than this mess in Iraq we are engaged in."

"They need a champion. That champion is you." So said John Edwards, stopping by the UW campus today on his "Opportunity Rocks" tour. The message:

Poverty is the great moral issue facing America today....

The number of Americans living in poverty rose by 1 million in 2004 and now stands at 37 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"It's not a complicated thing," Edwards said. "It's just wrong."

Katrina exposed the ugly face of poverty. "We saw that poverty has a face in America. It's largely black," he said.

Edwards, dressed in faded jeans with the sleeves of his blue oxford shirt rolled up, said that the typical African-American family has about $6,000 in assets and that the typical Hispanic family has about $8,000. White families have about $80,000, he said.

Most of the nation's poor are people who work or are capable of working, Edwards said. Many of them are single mothers who are working two or three jobs for minimum wage. They are working 15 to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week, trying to survive and give their kids a better life, he said....

Asked what his dream ticket would be for 2008, he responded, "Somebody who would stand up and fight for the kind of people we're talking about here today."

Before Edwards spoke, Scott VanDerven, 51, was musing about Edwards-Feingold in '08.

"It's youthful. It's certainly not traditional. But is it too far left for mainstream voters?"

In case you were wondering what John Edwards was up to! Personally, I'd rather hear John Edwards try to come up with ideas for lifting people out of poverty than John Kerry offer his plan for Iraq.