He May be Gone, But He's Not Forgotten

I know that John Edwards is so yesterday's news, especially now that he's dropped out of the race, but I wanted to add one last post-script about him. Along with a number of other bloggers who supported Edwards, when I heard that he was leaving, I posted a "postmortem" about his decision. See Good bye & Good Luck.

Since then, I've read a number of "testimonials" about Edwards, his campaign and his message. As usual, Paul Krugman summed up the candidacy of Edwards best, The Edwards Effect:

So John Edwards has dropped out of the race for the presidency. By normal political standards, his campaign fell short.

But Mr. Edwards, far more than is usual in modern politics, ran a campaign based on ideas. And even as his personal quest for the White House faltered, his ideas triumphed: both candidates left standing are, to a large extent, running on the platform Mr. Edwards built.

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Unfortunately for Mr. Edwards, the willingness of his rivals to emulate his policy proposals made it hard for him to differentiate himself as a candidate; meanwhile, those rivals had far larger financial resources and received vastly more media attention. Even The Times’s own public editor chided the paper for giving Mr. Edwards so little coverage.

And so Mr. Edwards won the arguments but not the political war.

Where will Edwards supporters go now? The truth is that nobody knows.

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One thing is clear, however: whichever candidate does get the nomination, his or her chance of victory will rest largely on the ideas Mr. Edwards brought to the campaign.

Personal appeal won’t do the job: history shows that Republicans are very good at demonizing their opponents as individuals. Mrs. Clinton has already received the full treatment, while Mr. Obama hasn’t — yet. But if he gets the nod, watch how quickly conservative pundits who have praised him discover that he has deep character flaws.

If Democrats manage to get the focus on their substantive differences with the Republicans, however, polls on the issues suggest that they’ll have a big advantage. And they’ll have Mr. Edwards to thank.

Another piece from Jim Booth of Scholars & Rogues, The Left will eat itself - a few thoughts about John Edwards and self-loathing among progressives, looks at the role of the media and the issues of class, race & sex as they played out during the 3-way race. In his view, not only did the media contribute to the fall of the house of Edwards by, in turn, either distorting his message or ignoring it altogether, the Democratic Party shares the blame because it has turned its back on its core constituency. As he explains:

Martin Bosworth wrote in his piece on John Edwards’ withdrawal from the Democratic Presidential race: “Edwards did not fit the assumed narrative the media wanted to run with in this campaign–he was the outsider, the guy who wasn’t campaigning on experience or the audacity of hope. Moreover, he was speaking painful truths about class, corporatism, and how our lives are dictated and controlled by the power elite. So the media machine cranked up the distortion and tried to smear him into oblivion with stupid trivialities. Yet, through all that, his message persevered.” (italics mine)

If this is true, why is JE out of the race?

What Edwards is really doing is paying the price for being a white guy at the time of historic (and mostly just) back lash against the “aristocracy of white guys” that has been the target of the concerted efforts of “liberals” who aren’t liberal at all. What these “liberals” (too often media pundits) are are ideologues who proclaim that someone would make a better (read “more media interest worthy”) Presidential candidate simply because that person is a) a woman or b) an African-American. Justice is one thing - ideology is another - this is ideology at its most reeking…. Yes, I hear your scornful retorts: “These are the times that try [white] men’s souls…” yadda, yadda….

I don’t say this to discredit Hillary or Obama, both of whom have real merit. I say this because the drive to push forward a woman or black candidate is (I fear) a media creation that allows the media then to control the narrative of the Democratic campaign - and the election. And the Democratic Party, which plays the sucker to every narrative the media creates for it, is playing the sucker again.

John Edwards has addressed overtly and directly real issues plaguing our country at this historical moment - the shift toward a class system that the “Repugnacans” have engineered - and their systematic removal of any realistic opportunity for those in the rapidly developing underclass to better themselves.

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The Left is rejecting Edwards because he reminds too many of us in the Left® of what WE came from - how we scrambled and worked and took advantage of opportunities made available by FDR, HST, JFK, and LBJ. It’s easier to glom onto the myth of Hillary as a deserving member of her gender or Obama as a deserving member of his race (despicably patronizing behavior masquerading as visionary open-mindedness) than to stand up and say “offering opportunities for people to better themselves has been and should always be a basic tenet of the Democratic Party.” That would mean supporting Edwards - who espouses these positions - and rejecting the more fashionable idea of supporting Hillary or Obama because they represent a “historic opportunity.”

See also, Sam Smith who likewise opines that the reason Edwards didn't resonate among Democrats is due to the covert class prejudices (can it be?) of so-called liberals, JOHN EDWARDS' HIDDEN PROBLEM. As he puts it, now that the voice of the economically disadvantaged is gone, "Now the righteous are safe to make what is in their mind a decent and diverse choice: between a black and a woman, one a graduate of Harvard Law School, the other of its Yale equivalent."

Of course, I do think their views have merit, but it doesn't hold true for everyone, thankfully. I'm a middle-aged, liberal, white woman who makes a fairly comfortable living as a lawyer. Yet I subscribe to that old-fashioned belief that we don't just have to look out for ourselves. While I would love nothing more than to see a woman and/or an African-American become President, I'm going to vote for the candidate (if I could) who has the best platform for the country. I think my friends and colleagues were somewhat surprised that I wasn't leaning towards Clinton or Obama because of the sex/race thing. Yet, after looking at the positions of the 3 candidates on the issues, I had to go with Edwards -- he's only one who got it right on most of the issues for me. It's interesting, because it also turns out that many of the blogs that I frequent also were Edwards supporters as well. I guess it's just a case of brilliant minds think alike.

An interesting look at Edwards' personality is found at John Edwards, Out but Unbowed. And as Brilliant at Breakfast notes, now that Edwards has departed, he's finally getting press. She compiles a few media retrospectives at Johnny we hardly knew ye.