Elizabeth Edwards Makes Campaign Stop In Oklahoma

Thursday, June 21st 2007, 6:18 pm

By: News On 6

TULSA, Okla. (AP) _ The war on terrorism under the Bush administration has become a vaguely defined concept without boundaries instead of a weapon to fight the people who attacked America, the wife of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said Thursday during a campaign stop.

``We do have a fight against terrorists around the world, particularly al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who we seem to have forgotten,'' Elizabeth Edwards said. ``And instead of moving like a laser against people who actually did us harm, we have created this huge war against terror, which is amorphous, and what it means it has no boundaries and so anything that the president wants to throw into that, spying on us, torturing in our name, we don't believe in that.''

Edwards spoke at a news conference before a fundraiser at the Greenwood Cultural Center, where about 250 supporters were expected. It was Edwards' first trip to Oklahoma since 2004, when her husband was running for vice president alongside John Kerry.

Edwards said her husband initially supported the war because he saw intelligence that turned out to be erroneous and that he regrets trusting President Bush with the authority to go to the United Nations to build international support.

``We've got this huge amorphous thing in which the president has thrown all these things, and every time you complain he says, 'you don't understand, we have a war against terror,''' Edwards said. ``If in the effort to protect our liberties and our people, we give up our liberties, we haven't done ourselves a very good service in the long run.''

Besides the war in Iraq, Edwards also outlined her husband's platform of universal health care and addressing the widening poverty gap in America.

``Right now, the top 300,000 wage earners in this country earn as much as the bottom 150 million,'' she said. ``It is an astounding statistic.''

Edwards, who discovered earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned, said she was in good health and has an opportunity to use her situation as a window to talk about people who don't have health care.

To pay for Edwards' universal heal care initiative, people making more than $200,000 a year would have their taxes raised to what they were under President Clinton. She said if most American people knew what they were trading for, they would overwhelmingly choose universal health care.

``I don't think people making over $200,000 thought they were doing so poorly in the 1990s,'' she said.

Latest polls suggest Edwards trailing Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Watch the video: Elizabeth Edwards Stops In Tulsa