Trumpeting core Democratic values in the days before the Super Tuesday primaries, John F. Kerry and John Edwards reached out to voters in California with pledges of support for the poor and working class.
In a day abbreviated by the Los Angeles Times/CNN candidate debate at USC, Kerry flew into Los Angeles from Minnesota on Thursday afternoon and headed immediately to a Vons supermarket in Santa Monica to show his solidarity with striking grocery workers.
The Massachusetts senator pushed for a benefit dear to his heart and theirs -- affordable and available healthcare.
Edwards, a senator from North Carolina, meanwhile, spent the morning in San Francisco, imploring voters there to join him in a crusade aimed at wiping out poverty and improving the lives of millions of Americans. He continued to pound themes he has promoted for several days in Ohio, New York and eight other states that will hold nominating contests Tuesday -- trade and tax policies.
"The real battleground states in this election," he said, are poverty and class divisions.
Kerry got to Santa Monica just in time.
Less than five hours after he shook hands, signed autographs, shouted "si se puede" (yes, we can) and called the strikers "heroes to this country," the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and the grocery chains reached a tentative agreement in the five-month dispute.
"I want to say to every single one of you that I believe that it would be better for this country if George Bush had an understanding at all of what all of you have been going through and what you're fighting for right here on this line," Kerry told the workers, who chanted "Kerry! Kerry! Kerry!"
"Every single one of you are heroes to this country, because you've been out here fighting not just for yourselves but for the right for every single person in this country to have healthcare," he said.
He promised to place affordable healthcare at the top of his legislative agenda if he becomes president.
Kerry told the small throng of picketers -- who were outnumbered by the crush of media, Secret Service agents and Santa Monica police officers -- that he was not a latecomer to their struggle. In fact, he said, several months earlier he'd visited a picket line at a different market.
Edwards spent the morning in the community room of the Delancey Street Project, a drug and alcohol treatment facility on San Francisco's Embarcadero, where he received the endorsement of a coalition of neighborhood activist groups.
