John Edwards: I'm not looking back

    In Kansas City Wednesday afternoon to stump for a bump in the minimum wage, John Edwards pointed to a litany of issues bedeviling the country:

    Health care. Poverty. Iraq. Spiking gas prices. Hurricane Katrina.

    President Bush, he said, "doesn't have the respect of the American people."

   So the question I put to him in an interview after his talk at a Midtown union hall was: In your private moments, do you ever look back and wonder how you managed to lose to this guy in 2004?

   The 2004 vice-presidential nominee wasn't biting.

   "Well, actually, what I wake up thinking about these days is what should we do about people who live in poverty? What should we do about people who don't have health care coverage? And (I think about) so many middle-class families like the one I grew up in who are struggling to surivive every day.

   "Because we're better than this. America can do better than this."

   And that was that.

   Oh, Edwards said he hadn't decided yet whether he'll run in 2008.

Posted by Steve Kraske 3:03 p.m.