DATELINE: Boston, Massachusetts

That’s how it seemed when we saw the southern preacher-man speak in Winnacunnet High School, in Hampton, NH on Monday. Officially, of course, he’s not a socialist. No-one is. The western hemisphere’s few remaining socialists were tragically wiped out at some point in the mid 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Tony Blair jumped up and down on the lefty mattress so hard that all the reds under the bed got thoroughly squished. The word has been wiped from the lexicon of acceptable political terminology in my short lifetime, amazingly.

But John Edwards’ speech rang the rusty socialist bells in my head. It awoke dormant memories of listening to Tony Benn and reading George Orwell as a teenager. It went further than the vagueries of Obama’s indistinct attacks on Washington and establishment politics. Edwards started beating the drum for an end to corporate lobbyist influence on the Presidency, and didn’t stop until the crowd were in raptures. At one point he called out Exxon Mobil by name for their obscene executive bonuses – which is something I’m used to hearing on May Day trade union marches back home; not so much from a mainstream Democratic presidential candidate.

“These moneyed lobbyists have an iron-fisted grip on our democracy. They control what is happening. Every. Day.” he declaimed, pronouncing it ‘aar-heeun feeested gree-ip’, as is the wont of South Carolinians. The small crowd of teachers and middle-class locals burst into applause. “I’ve been fighting these companies for twenty years. I am proud to say I am the only candidate not taking money from special interests and corporate lobbyists. And let me say this: there is no difference between corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans. If you think swapping one for another is going to make a difference, you’re living in never never land.” Cue an even louder clatter of applause.

“So what I want to know is, are we finally going to stand up, and say ‘enough is enough, we want our democracy back’? Because we have a fight on our hands here… In my America, the people who work in the mill are every bit as important as the people who own it. I know I’m supposed to be politically careful, but I’m just going to say it: corporate lobbyists are ruining our democracy.”

What I want to know, which I can’t find out from the road, and is probably a matter of opinion anyway, is is this guy for real? (a) Does he mean what he says? and (b) Were he elected, could he follow through on it?

In Portsmouth that morning we’d met Edwards supporter Anthony Donovan, a super-cool, leather-jacketed, silver-haired writer and documentary-maker on peace and diplomacy from NYC. Anthony explained his support for Edwards in terms that would be pretty ‘old-left’ back in the UK: “the rich keep getting richer, regular families have to struggle just to get by, and Edwards is the only one who is going to fight the corporations that make this the case. We really need that right now.”

That, to me, is modern socialism. Not communising industry and agriculture, not wearing khakis and building dour concrete carbuncles, but using what Edwards described as the Presidential “bully pulpit” to restore a long-lost relationship: so that citizens once again guide their elected officials, not corporate lobbyists. In fact hang on, that’s not socialism, that’s just democracy.