John Edwards stepped aside and suspended his presidential campaign today but said he will continue to work for economic justice, universal health care, working Americans, ending poverty, and for one America.

Jonathan Tasini at Working Life had this to say about Edwards:

"The question is: what now? I'm hoping that he becomes the Al Gore of economic struggles. Gore rose dramatically in stature--far beyond what he ever achieved as a political figure or a candidate running for office--when he became THE political voice on climate change. I'm hoping that Edwards, who made it clear that the campaign to end poverty in America was the calling of his life, now continues that fight. As a non-candidate, more people (and, maybe even, the pathetic press) will tune into a message that comes from someone who is not running for office.

"Working Americans--the people who Edwards wanted to represent and whose policies and positions were superior to the other major candidates--will need an advocate for them past the general election. In the past several months, I've told virtually every person or audience that I've spoken to that, no matter who wins, we--that would be, labor advocates or people trying to build an economic justice movement--will still have a fight on our hands because the system that a new president would confront (whether they feel audacious and hopeful or not) will be hard to change without a movement out in the country demanding that change."

And Barack Obama made this gracious statement about John Edwards:

"John Edwards has spent a lifetime fighting to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the struggling, even when it wasn't popular to do or covered in the news. At a time when our politics is too focused on who's up and who's down, he made a nation focus again on who matters – the New Orleans child without a home, the West Virginia miner without a job, the families who live in that other America that is not seen or heard or talked about by our leaders in Washington. John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this – that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose. So while his campaign may end today, the cause of their lives endures for all of us who still believe that we can achieve that dream of one America."

Finally, Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones has this to say about Edwards and this coda to his campaign

"In New Hampshire, I heard him compare at length the economic struggle of one hard-working family with the insane annual salary of a corporate CEO. He was the only serious presidential contender I've ever seen that was willing to engage in open and unapologetic class warfare."

Actually, it was not class warfare, but unapologetic truth about the reality of economic and class inequality, one of the hallmarks of Shrub's eight years in office; a disaster Dubya and his Bushites inflicted on everyone, especially regular working Americans.

This sentence from Stein's piece just about sums it up, "He took the rhetoric of the Democratic Party and gave it backbone."