I like John Edwards a great deal and, as I have said, am leaning towards voting for him in the primaries.

Something he said last night in response to a Charlie Rose question on the Yahoo/Huffington/Slate Democratic candidate mashup bothers me, though.

In the course of describing the reason for his candidacy--his desire to restore what he observes as the dimming belief and hope that Americans who work hard could live a better life--he said the following:

"...The extraordinary opportunity that I grew up with in America that allowed me to come from nothing to basically having everything, now--that when I move around the country...and I hear peoples' stories, it feels to me like there are millions of people in this country that no longer believe what my parents believed, which is that if they worked hard their kids would have a better life...It seems to me...the old American dream...is distant and dim for millions of people, whether it's because they don't have health care or they're living in poverty or they're just middle class families that are struggling just to pay their bills..."

http://debates.news.yahoo.com/ (click on Edwards on the left side of the screen, then on Bill Maher grill on step 2, to pull up the segment; then move the timer a bit more than halfway across to 3:15 to hear Rose's question

and Edwards' response)

I wholeheartedly support his efforts to expand opportunity and improve living standards for middle class and poor people, but the first part of what he said bothers me, where he describes himself as having come "from nothing".

Excuse me.

He did not come "from nothing". By the available accounts he came from a loving and proud home that happened to have struggled to go much beyond making ends meet.

That describes a huge number of people living in our country today. A great many of these families and individuals will always struggle to go much beyond making ends meet. This does not make them "nothing". I don't think Edwards believes that but I hope he'll choose his words a bit more carefully in the future.

From what I have observed and experienced, for most Americans, the occasional lottery ticket purchase aside, life does not consist of reaching for any sort of brass ring. It consists of trying to get by and hopefully do a bit better than that, to do a good job of raising their kids, and to earn a reputation for being a decent human being while enjoying the company of family and friends for as much time as they can carve out of their lives.

Yes, most would not want for it to be quite so hard. But a great many people in our consumer society, still, don't measure their value or their success in life by how much wealth or possessions they are able to accumulate.

For me the American dream means that birth is not destiny, that if you are born or live in this country you will have real, publicly supported opportunity (primarily through much enhanced education and health care, retirement assistance and help finding re-employment if you lose your job due to inevitable changes in the economy) to make choices about what kind of good life you are going to pursue.

But this entails that all citizens are valued and therefore will not be left to have to climb Mount Everest from birth to attain as much. This is in fact very far from the current reality in our country, notwithstanding that, when people are asked, these are the things they say they want their out-of-touch, almost alien, government to help them with.

I hope Democratic presidential candidates, who I think have their hearts in the right places, will not use words that will enable those with love and care and pride in their lives to think that someone asking to be their president thinks they are nothing because they lack large means.