PROVIDENCE – After keeping a low profile for most of the last six months, former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards took the stage at Brown University’s Solomon Hall last night to talk about his passion for ending poverty.

Edwards saw his presidential hopes dashed a year ago in January when he lost to then-candidate Barack Obama in South Carolina primary and later saw his reputation go up in flames after admitting in the summer than he had had an affair with a campaign worker while his wife had cancer.

Last night he addressed the infidelity issue only obliquely when a student who said she had been one of his campus organizers asked if it was “just or fair” for candidates to be held to a “higher” moral standard.

“Here is what I believe,” he answered. “It is not for a candidate to decide what is appropriate and what’s not appropriate. That’s something every single American has a right to decide for themselves. We live in a free country where people have a right to voice their views and have a right to form their views without limitation…

“It is not for me to impose on anybody what they can observe and can’t observe. I have my own view, which I will keep to myself. But I believe it is enormously important to have the best thinkers and the best visionary people to lead our country where it needs to go.”

Edwards came to the campus at the invitation of the Brown Lecture Board. A board member said it was her understanding that Edwards’ speech, for which some students had to be turned away, was his first public speech to a college audience since early last fall. The North Carolina Democrat, who was John Kerry’s vice-presidential running made in 2004, now spends his time at the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which he founded at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Edwards at times sounded like a candidate once again, railing against a “completely dysfunctional heath care system’ that he said has left nearly 47 million people with no health care and millions more in fear of losing it.

The system, he said, “does not work… By the way, it will never work until we get health care right for every American.”

He also bemoaned the country’s dependence on oil, arguing that “it is not just an environmental nightmare, but something that has a stranglehold on the U.S. economy.

When a student asked him how one reconciles the need for environmental reform with the economic realities of a crippled economy, he said he thinks “it is a fundamentally stupid concept that in bad economic times we ought to continue doing the things that got us into bad economic times.”

He said he supports President Obama in making it clear that help for the Big Three auto makers should be “directly tied to their willingness to transform the way they are producing cars.”

Twice – first when a student asked what’s holding political leaders back from tapping into the revenues that could be had by making drugs legal, and again when a student asked what is keeping leaders from adopting measures that would force people to give up their dependence on oil – Edwards replied, “politics.”

“The simple answer is that we won’t solve the problems we are faced with with half measures,” he said in response to the drug question. “They need to do that that are politically risky.”

Edwards said that while he considers all the issues as important, the one he cares most about most is global poverty. He said he plans to devote himself to the issue “until the day I die.”

“What am I up to? Whatever I can do to have the most impact on the poor…This is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. It is not an economic issue. It is a moral issue.”

rdujardi@projo.com