John Edwards Pulls Out of Presidential Race
San Francisco Chronicle, January 30th
Speaking from Katrina-devastated New Orleans where he announced his campaign 13 months ago, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards withdrew from the Democratic presidential primary race Wednesday, setting off a scramble to woo his supporters and the 56 delegates he had won.
Edwards offered no endorsement of either of his rivals, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but said that both pledged to him that they would make eradicating poverty a central theme of their campaign after Edwards told them of his planned withdrawal.
“This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause,” Edwards said Thursday.
But if he’s going to be a kingmaker, he needs to endorse someone soon: Voters in 22 states cast ballots in Democratic contests Feb. 5.
Edwards got comparatively little media coverage in the shadow of the much better-funded campaigns of what could be the first African-American or woman to win a major party presidential nomination.
Even after Edwards finished second in the Iowa caucus, he received only a fraction of the media coverage that Obama and Clinton did in the following days, and slightly more than former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican who barely competed there, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s campaign coverage index. Click here to read more in the San Francisco Chronicle.