Welcome home, John.
Some final thoughts. First is, too bad about Iowa. Edwards did well there in ‘04. He needed to win it in ‘08 to have any chance against his two very strong, very well-financed opponents. But Iowa borders Illinois. Most of Iowa’s population is within easy driving distance of Chicago, Obama’s hometown. Barack Obama’s young supporters dominated the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3, helped immensely by the fact that they weren’t in school (and so could fan out to precincts across eastern Iowa, maximizing their impact), and they were well-organized to get where they needed to go by both Iowa- and Illinois-based staffers. The impact on Iowa of the Chicago Democratic machine has been under-reported, I’d say.
Still, let’s give this to Edwards — he ran a strong second in Iowa, ahead of Clinton and not that far behind Obama despite having much less money and a much smaller campaign staff. Which leads to my second thought: Edwards tried to convey a message to voters about how much trouble this country is in … deep trouble. His was a campaign about the globalization of capital, the imperatives of corporations dependent on global finance, and the perilous position of working-class and poor Americans absent a national government that will stand up for them when the capitalists won’t. It was a campaign about the extent to which, however, our national government is a captive of capitalists, and their lobbyists, and their political action committees. It was a complicated campaign — one that perhaps would’ve benefited from some of Ross Perot’s charts and graphs (not to mention his half-hour TV infomercials).
But, to be blunt, Edwards’ message is not one that most Americans want to hear — or are ready to take in. They don’t want to be told that the American dream is dying, and their kids’ futures may well be bleaker than their own pasts. They’d rather be told that, sure, we got problems, but nuthin’ we can’t fix if we all work together — which is the Obama message. I don’t know when Obama first started to quote MLK in his stump speech about “the urgency of now.” All I know is, he was using it by the time I heard him in Durham two months ago. And when I heard him, I thought to myself that Obama was covering an Edwards riff, except that Edwards didn’t just talk about urgency, he embodied it in every speech he gave, every issue he raised, every problem he described, every solution he offered. — more below —
Edwards’ actual urgency, as opposed to Obama’s dry statement of it, caused many a pundit to rip him apart (as NPR’s Juan Williams did again today): He’s too strident. He’s too angry. What’s he so angry about?
So we shouldn’t be angry over, just for example, the war? Or how about the fact that, thanks to a health-care industry out of control, we spend 2X as much as other industrialized nations for a medical establishment that doesn’t give us any better results than theirs … while it fails to offer basic services to almost 50 million uninsured Americans?
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Point is, Iowans heard Edwards’ urgent message over a long enough period of time that they came to understand it and — many of them — to agree with it. But given the mainstream media blackout of Edwards (beyond the $400 haircuts and the “he’s too angry” bulls—), most voters never heard it at all, or if they did, they didn’t hear it with sufficient clarity to overcome their natural tendency to tune such bad news out. America in trouble? That just can’t be.
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Then there was the critique — again from the MSM — that whatever the validity of Edwards’ arguments, he himself must be inauthentic since he voted for the war and such other MSM-backed gems as the bankruptcy bill back when he was in the Senate. He’s no fighting progressive, they all wailed. He’s just pretending to be one. (Just look at his big house.)
On this subject, I profess no insider knowledge. Here’s what I do profess. When John Edwards first declared himself a candidate for the U.S. Senate a decade ago, I remember thinking that his grip on national issues was awfully shaky (and I said this with a full understanding of how shaky my own was, and still it was better than his). He’d been a trial lawyer specializing in medical malpractice and insurance cases. So he had a good understanding, at an operational level, of how profit-driven health care doesn’t really work very well and will screw the really sick patient — the Valery Lakeys — if it can get away with it. And he extrapolated from that to a thinly supported complaint about the power of special interests and lobbyists: if elected, he promised, he would represent regular people, and never take the PACs’ money.
But Edwards, back then, had yet to think deeply enough about the direction of the country, nor had he really studied — let alone come face-to-face with — the many other ways that global capitalism’s control of our political system is poisoning our futures. He was, indeed, the sunny optimist, and he was still the sunny optimist when he threw his hat in the ring for president in 2002.
By late 2003, Edwards’ thinking had evolved into “the two Americas” speech, which finally did spell out the many, and fundamental ways, that the rich prosper while the poor and the middle-class are falling behind in our country. But the “two Americas,” while good on the problems, wasn’t that much when it came to solutions. It wasn’t until 2006, following his losing Kerry-Edwards experience and a yet spent marching with ACORN and working on anti-poverty issues, that Edwards started to offer a serious analysis of why the “two Americas” was happening, and getting worse, and what it will take to change it. Why it’s happening is corrupt politics. Period. What will it take to change it? A set of policy prescriptions on health care, energy, war, jobs, infrastructure, progressive taxation — all of that — plus a full-scale assault on the American psyche in order to get them enacted against the opposition, foot-dragging, lying, smears, bribes and other standard operating procedures of the American political establishment, MSM included. That’s what Edwards was talking about in 2007 and, until this week, 2008.
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My take: Edwards is a smart, determined guy whose heart really is in the mill towns where he grew up. And the more time he spent in politics, and the more he learned about how American government works, the more he understood not just how it works against average Americans but why it works against them and how much the deck is stacked in favor of capital — which is global — and against the hometown laborer. I think his evolution from concerned citizen to fighting progressive was genuine.
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Should he have voted against the war in 2002? Absolutely. But face it, that was a tough vote to cast for a southern Democrat from perhaps the most military-friendly state in the country outside of Texas. Much easier for an Illinois state senator representing a liberal South Side of Chicago district to say the war was a blunder back in ‘02 … and then what did Obama do to stop it after he was elected to the U.S. Senate in ‘04?
But count that last bit as one more way that Obama got ahead in ‘08 and blocked Edwards’ path. Obama managed to be the anti-war candidate without being strident about it, was credited with a huge victory in Iowa even though it was the neighboring state to his own, and then won a crushing victory in South Carolina where more than half the voters were African-American … and it just happens to be Edwards’s native state. That’s what you call not your year, Johnny. But you made a helluva run.
Hopefully, some of what he said will endure. Paul Krugman, in The New York Times today, thinks it will — and that Edwards’ great contribution will be his universal health-care proposal, which if enacted by the country would help the poor, bolster the middle-class, help the economy, save money (unless the industry works its magic to turn “reform” into more money for them — now that would be an upset, eh?) and as Krugman’s said many times before, remind a country that is woozy from the propaganda of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era just why progressive policies really are a good thing.