I agree, he's easily the best of the 'big' candidates. It could be that for a lot of progressives, the only thing they've heard about Edwards in the last year is that he paid $400 (or whatever it was) for a haircut. The MSM-types appear to hate him as much as they hated Al Gore in 2000. Which of course is another point in his favor.

This is all about posturing. It looks good if you vote for a woman or a black person.
It has nothing to do with who makes the best sense for America.
That should tell you something about the American people.
It has nothing about who is the best person to lead, but everything about image.

_{repressive governments mix administrative clumsiness & inefficiency with authoritarian tendencies.}

He's not my top choice, but none of my choices will make it (Kucinich, Gore).

As an interesting side note, I was talking politics with my oncologist the other day and he told me that Edwards scares the bejesus out of him and he could never vote for him. I asked why, since my onco is actually very progressive and very smart and well read. I guess Edwards' career with medical malpractice suits has him spooked. He said a friend of his had copies of courtroom transcripts from some of Edwards' cases and, after reviewing them, he thinks Edwards lacks pretty much any ethical or moral compass. Kind of flies in the face of what I know about Edwards, but I sure would like to get my hands on those transcripts just to see for myself now...

The Edwards campaign hit the skids the day after he made a comment about Iran that echoed Dirty Dick Cheney's talking point "everything is on the table" (including bombings and possible nuclear attacks). It was such a witless gaffe that his former supporters (me included) were instantly repelled. I considered it then to be a "disqualifying" remark by a man I formerly considered too smart to play along with the neocon frame game.

Don't politicians study rhetoric? Are we past the age where people like FDR, JFK and MLK actually understood the moral ramifications of their own message?

It was god damned disappointing, I'll tell you. And then Barack Obama started taking foreign policy tips from fucking Joe Lieberman. What in the fuck is the matter with these people?

"Death before being dishonored any more." - Col. Ted Westhusing

It's been a few generations, if it ever was, that the Americans, went to elections for Ideas rather than image and money.
So america always get what it deserves.
And it's been down hill for awhile.
I repeat myself, america is becomming the mirror image of the ols Soviet Union and new Russia, but the oligarch here are the corporations (think Haliburton and the MSM).

I'd like to see Edwards pull it off. Sadly I think the conspiracy of the corpos and corpo owned media will take him down just as they did Howard Dean. The big money in the country wants Hill or Obama to win because they will own them. Not so much for Edwards.

Thanks for pointing out the strong polling. We need our own "noise machine" to pound that meme over and over. The media took it away from Dean by using the "unelectable" word in almost every paragraph about him. With that and the manufactured scream, it worked.

If the progressive blogs were to do continual blog storms pushing Edwards electability maybe he could get more traction. Maybe.

*Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable*

more than helps. By not coming out for a primary candidate the netroots become fractured. He and the others in my opnion, want to play w/ the big boys and not get caught on the losing side, and will stay on the sidelines, waiting for the coach to put them in. Ned Lamont is a perfect example, they pushed had for him to win the primary, but said not a word during the general election, as it appeared the powers-that-be Dems would prefer to take Lieberman back.

It's just like the impeachment issue, they're taking orders from the top, but god, don't accuse them of it. I had a 15 min conversation w/ Atrios last Sat night about why he thougt it more important to use his platform to snark on Friedman Units and the media as opposed to protecting the integrity of the DOJ via impeachment. His answer was he wasn't going to waste his time on something that would never happen anyways and that his time was better spent on snarking the media. Tell me he's not hooked in. and thje same w/ Kos, hundreds of diaries about impeachment, but never a word on the front page until very recently. And in my conversation w/ Kagro X, he indicated he needed help convincing his higher ups at dKos to tackle the subject. When I congratulated him for his efforts on getting it to the front page, he pointed over to Markos and said, "Please go tell him that"

I thought I did, but I think it was his brother, cuz he looked at me funny. and when I looked over at the next person there was the Markos I recognized. I tell ya, if you want to get unvarnished opinions, hang out in the hotel bar late at night.

oh yeah, Stumpy was there w/ me. y'all should throw a shoutout.

maybe later I'll give you my impressions of Edwards and staff from Tuesday's AFL_CIO debate. I got to speak to David Bonior for a while, because I gave him a check for 2G that day, that'll buy you a couple minutes of his time.

I just read the Economist today and the difference in tone of their coverage of YKos this year compared to last year was striking. This year they were talking about the impact of netroots on fundraising and campaining and talking about how the presidential candidates had got good value for their time by attending. Last year if I remember rightly they were pretty snooty about the whole thing and dismissed the kossaks as loony left.

With Edwards is he always reminds me of Tony Blair.

Tony talked a good progressive game, had great poll numbers, looked to be a "uniter not a divider" and was great on domestic issues...then we Brits elected him and got Iraq'd. Turned out Mr Tory Blur would say anything to get elected and all his good domestic stuff was really Gordon Brown's idea.

Then again, both Obama and Clinton both leave that same sense of deja vu for this Brit.

However, I'm rather impressed with Richardson's latest foreign policy piece at Harvard International Review. I really need to get around to blogging about it. And I'm very surprised it hasn't been talked about by any of the big progressive blog-names.

Regards, C

One of the parts of the record that you look at in a candidate is how his current views compare with his past views. It was a danger signal that George Bush at 50 still believed what George Bush at 20 believed, except at 50 he had appropriated God to justify his callowness. And what we got was a President who never grows or changes.

Edwards has evolved in the right direction. He entered politics in '98 with his Senate run (yeah, I know, rich guys start near the top). He was barely politically competent and took a lot of (I think bad) advice from the more experienced aides, especially on what you have to do to represent a conservative state (Conventional wisdom -- accept the label and become conservative). Nonetheless, he campaigned and voted reasonably progressive. Throughout his career, he has become more and more progressive and developed more and more confidence in his own political judgment (I think seeing the Kerry campaign close up and personal cured him of any trust in the experienced consultants). In toughness, perseverance, and learning curve, he keeps getting more impressive.

I walked up to David Bonoir and some other guy outside of Soldier Field before the AFL-CIO debate last Tuesday and handed them a check for two thousand dollars. And I gave them some speech along the lines of:
"look at my hands, these are the hands of a manual laborer, this is why I'm giving you this check, to stand up for the little guy"
(right now my hands are wrecked w/ burns & scars from cooking, I've been a very clumsy chef the last few weeks)
and they said oh thank you, give us your phone number so we can get all your info for contribution reporting. OK
so then Edwards does his usual debate points which kinda piss me off, see here:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/7/21733/19575

and his line about not taking federal lobbyist money.
The guy w/ David Bonoir calls me this week, "OH, I showed your check to John on the way in, thank you, blah, blah, blah" we play phone tag for a while, then I leave my e-mail for him to send the contribution form to me. but now I've got his return address. this is who he is:

http://capitolnavigators.com/staff.htm

this is who he represents:
http://capitolnavigators.com/clients.html

I shot him an e-mail this afternnon about lobbying for GM as they're about to cut my father's pension and healthcare coverage. I'll see what he says.
I still haven't cancelled my check, because I still want to believe, but goddam, it's getting hard.

...is out.

"The spectacle of this great nation which does not know its own mind is as humiliating as it is dangerous." ~ Walter Lippmann

See how the candidates compare on the Political Compass -- Left/Right, Authoritarian/Libertairan

I note that Biden is about the same position as Edwards.

Clinton may be a target of Rove's reverse psychology
In a tactic from the '04 Bush-Kerry match-up, the strategist could be trying to divert attention away from a more formidable Democrat.
By Peter Wallsten
August 19, 2007
LA Times - WASHINGTON — Day after day last week, outgoing White House political strategist Karl Rove delivered slashing attacks on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. Her healthcare record was "spotty and poor," he declared. Her candidacy was "fatally flawed," he said. And no one with her negative poll numbers, he stated, "has ever won the presidency."

Why did Rove, who often stays in the background, step forward to deliver such public attacks -- especially when the Democrats haven't begun to choose their presidential candidate for 2008 and when the general election is more than a year away?

The answer might seem obvious: Rove saw Clinton as a formidable opponent and wanted to get his licks in early.

For high-level campaign professionals like Rove, however, that kind of thinking may be too simple.

The decision to focus on the New York senator to the exclusion of other potentially formidable Democratic standard-bearers such as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois offered a rare glimpse into a world where things are not always what they seem -- the world of modern-day electioneering, whose denizens often prefer going from A to B by way of Z.

In this case, Rove's weeklong broadside against Clinton -- which he is expected to repeat in multiple appearances on television talk shows today -- looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush's reelection bid.

The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush's reelection.

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove's team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party's nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.

Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn't easily be painted as "nutty."

If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd's own words:

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds.

"So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards," Dowd said. "And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce" around Kerry.

"It wasn't like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped," he said.

Nicolle Wallace, the 2004 Bush campaign communications director, recalled at the Harvard conference that the campaign "refused" to even respond to Edwards' attacks on Bush, not wanting to make him seem like a threat.

Edwards was selected as Kerry's running mate and now is vying with Clinton and Obama for their party's 2008 nomination.

Is Rove playing a similar game against Clinton? Is he trying to stampede Democrats into nominating her, having concluded that Obama, Edwards or someone else would pose a stiffer challenge to the Republican nominee? ... continued