Law Professor and contributing Nation editor Joel Rogers, writing in the Madison Capital Times, provides a list of reasons why John Edwards is more progressive than John Kerry. First he lists the candidates' similarities, and then he distinguishes Edwards:

Where Edwards diverges from Kerry is in addressing a series of issues of distinctive concern to progressives - inequalities of race and class, abusive corporate power, neoliberal globalization, ghetto poverty and prisons, the importance of worker and community organization outside the state. And what makes him distinctive is not just that he regularly touches these third-rail issues, but is effectively running on them.

He is unabashedly pro-union. He regularly challenges white audiences to confront the white problem of continued racial injustice. His "two Americas" stump speech is all about class. He appreciates and notes the sheer pervasiveness of corporate crime - from tax evasion to union avoidance, predatory lending to environmental degradation, unsafe working conditions to subsidy abuse.

He is sharply critical of the "Washington consensus" on international trade and finance. He talks about the growth of poverty and dead-end poverty jobs. And he's the only candidate who does this in language that ordinary voters understand and are moved by. Better still, Edwards is relentlessly upbeat about America's ability to solve these problems. He's not another Clintonesque "I feel your pain, now let me tell you why I can't do anything about it" sort of guy. He has a real program of democratic renewal. And it is largely ours.

...He wants to raise labor and environmental standards, invest heavily in worker training and continuing education, and build the public infrastructure needed to achieve a shared prosperity. He also wants to get beyond the free trade/protectionism frame for international economic policy and commit the United States clearly to both defending living standards here and enabling sustainable growth in the Third World.

The best news to us:

He also would have us shrink our bloated prison population and return its present members more successfully to society by better distinguishing non-violent drug crimes from other offenses; restoring abandoned treatment and training options; and re-enfranchising those who have done their time.