"We were the country where everyone in the world wanted to be like"

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- With Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama increasingly sniping at each other, Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards sees an opening in Iowa. Edwards, Clinton and Obama are in a statistical dead heat in the Hawkeye state, according to the latest polls, and, with a little less than one month left until the Iowa caucuses on January 3, Clinton and Obama are trading almost-daily attacks on each others character and judgment.

Edwards, wedged between two history making marquee names with multi-million dollar war chests, often gets lost in the conversation. The former senator from North Carolina doesn't seem to mind at all, in part because he sees an opening in the free fire range between Clinton and Obama. "I lived through this before. I know how this works," Edwards, who finished second in Iowa in 2004, told CNN. "I am actually having fun. I am having a good time. I feel very confident and very sure footed."

Edwards is banking Clinton's and Obama's bitter sound bites will backfire in notoriously-friendly Iowa. So, Edwards, the first and the fiercest of the Clinton critics, is dialing back now and emphasizing the vision thing. "It gets to be a very basic thing: who are we?" Edwards asked during a campaign stop in Waterloo, Iowa. "What is our morality? What is our character? What kind of country do we believe in."

"Do we believe in an America that is bullying and selfish and trying to impose its will and trying to expand its power around the world?" Edwards continued. "That is not the America that I grew up in. I grew up in an America where we were the light. We were the country where everyone in the world wanted to be like."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/04/edwards.also.running/

Even in grade school I suspected that idea was American propaganda ~ but we certainly have a lot of repairing to do now!

It's easy to have simplistic world-views as a kid. Of course we assume that everyone else wants to be like us. Why wouldn't they?

And hey -- some people grow up, go to college and grad school, own a couple businesses, get into politics, run a country, and STILL have simplistic world-views.