Mort Kondracke, on Brit Hume’s little roundtable, just said that John Edwards is aspiring to be the George McGovern of the 2008 campaign. He also said that Edwards was an advocate of ‘bugging out of Iraq’.
Flashback: It’s 1972. In one corner is a President that is authorizing burglaries at home and expanding the bombing campaign abroad. In the other corner is a decorated World War Two veteran that knows the war is lost and there will be no profit in spending three more years postponing the inevitable.
Yeah, it’s true most Americans preferred Nixon in November 1972. But then we had the Watergate investigation and the collapse of Saigon. Seems to me that a McGovern candidate is EXACTLY what we need in 2008. But you’d never know that America can learn from its mistakes if you listened to the pundits and editorial boards of this country.
It sounds like Gore isn’t running, so if that’s the case we could do a lot worse than John Edwards.
Me thinks it’s time to get our left-right bearings straight here.
There’s only TWO potential candidates in the field that are more progressive than Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. Kucinich and Sharpton. EVERYONE else in the field is to the political right of Nixon and Goldwater. Nixon had a 70% tax rate on the top tax bracket and price controls, for Pete’s sake. Goldwater supported the 70% top tax bracket rate when he ran for President.
Remember… to those sitting on FAUX News panels Nixon looks like McGovern, too. That’s how far right this country has traveled since Nixon and McGovern ran.
Edwards is a little better than most of centrists, because he grew up in middle-class background but Edwards was a member of the DLC was a member of the DLC when he was in the Senate, too.
Expect no saviors from this batch of centrist Presidential candidates. All we’re going to get is damage control out of them.
John Edwards’ father was a millworker in a South Carolina textile mill. I count that as blue collar, not middle class. Textile workers today average about $12.59 an hour in the U.S., which was about $2.57 when Edwards was heading off to college (National Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Fine with me if you call Edwards or anyone a centrist. But to seriously compare any contemporary candidate to Nixon or Goldwater is a useless exercise (so is comparing any of them to McGovern). Times are different, and issues are very different. Certainly the top income tax rates are not the fault of any of the Dem candidates.
Edwards was in the DLC a long time ago, but I doubt they are interested in him now, nor have I seen him say anything about the DLC since before 2004, though he may have. The DLC has been all Hillary all the time since the day after the 2004 elections, if not before that.
Related to the DLC and its business-heavy emphasis, I note that the US Chamber of Commerce, that bastion of corporate greed, rates Edwards and Kucinich identically: 30 out of 100, an anti-business rating.
Sharpton is one heck of an orator, but I have no regard for him as a candidate. His 2004 run was funded by a Repub or Repub group, I suspect to draw votes away from Howard Dean.
John Edwards’ father Wallace spent most of his career as a supervisor in a mills. Big difference. Southern mill workers live in poverty in company owned housing. Supervisors buy their own houses, and they aren’t in the union. In the South, that’s dead center middle class. John Edwards wasn’t born yet when his father was actually still a millworker.
Please stop acting like the 1970’s are ancient history. That’s two decades, not two centuries. It wasn’t a different time. The only thing that has really changed since then is this country veered sharply right and then drove in a ditch.
The DLC was an effort by the corporatocracy to marginalize any/all political forces that attempted to wrest any power away from the corporations. It’s been a magnificent success. Edwards was a part of that effort.
I heard it too. Our excuse, MSNBC had Carlson on and it was a commercial. I couldn’t spend that long in the bathroom…
But use it as education. This is the new “talking point.” McGovern was a loser, and so they want to paint everyone they think might win as a loser too.
It almost sounded to me like they want Hillary. I’m thinking they know this war is an absolute loser for them, and they feel their only chance would be if if they had someone that couldn’t completely tar them with it.
They definitely want Hillary. It not only sells advertising, but it would make it very hard for Dems to hold the House, or at least many house seats.
that 2008 will resemble 1932. A transformative, deeply liberal candidate sweeps to victory and changes the direction of America for the better for a generation.
I’m afraid it may actually resemble 1976 (best case) or 1928 (worst case).
Neither is acceptable, and neither would stop the bleeding that Bush has caused in his 6 years as Idiot in Chief.
John Dean put a reference to his 2001 book, The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court, in his last commentary at FindLaw. Dean reveals his role amid the Nixon lies that brought down Justice Abe Fortas, and the impeachment attempt (by Gerald Ford) to force Justice William O. Douglas off the court. In a day by day format, he will explain the chicanery used to nominate Rehnquist. Reading this tale of lies and deception is agonizing enough; to realize that BushCo is doing a lot of the same thing (removing US Atty Carol Lam, for one) makes Dean’s documentation extremely valuable, IMO.
McGovern appears in the book only incidentally, with his statement that he would nominate a woman to the Supreme Court if he were president.
This is absolutely an attempt to start a particular phrase circulating about Edwards. Which is one reason why I do appreciate your not putting Edward’s name in the title!
I think the MSM is working very hard to put Hillary up as the front runner and the ultimate candidate – no matter what the rest of the potential electorate thinks. It reminds me of how the coastal presses react when there’s no East Coast team in the World Series. Not only would Hillary be the easiest target for the Right Wing to take out (so they think), they wouldn’t have to leave their comfortable salons and actually travel out on the hustings so much. Campaign headquarters in NYC! Just think of how convenient that would be!
Calling Edward’s a McGovernite at this juncture is a bit of a stretch.
McGovern’s candidacy grew out of the ground work that was laid by McCarthy, in 67-68, and was an extension/continuation of the set of principles that were more closely aligned with the dirty hippie, anti-war movements and grass roots populism. Following the disaster in Chicago in 68, McGovern was instrumental in in re-configuring the Democrats nominating system to one that was decided by primaries, rather than by the Machiavellian tactics of smokey, machine driven, back room deals…see the McGovern Commission, which led to a great deal of disatisfaction within the party:
For a more detailed exposition, than I’m able/willing to give at this time on the campaign and the political climate at the time, I highly recommend Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail ’72. If you’ve not yet read it, it is, IMS, a pretty accurate description of the situation, both on the ground and within the halls of power. And, if nothing else, a wonderful example of Gonzo Journalism at it’s pinnacle.
Unfortunately, McGovern was defeated decisively by RMN, by perhaps the largest margin yet in a presidential election.
This is not to say that Edward’s doesn’t have the potential to become such a candidate, but the situational parallels are strikingly similiar…a vastly unpopular war, an economy that is becoming increasingly stratified…see McGovern’s Guaranteed Minimum Income Proposal/Platform Plank, an entrenched party elite that is threatened by the populist/antiwar proposals……and a corporate controlled media and fund raising, propaganda machine that would make Nixon tumescent in his grave.
At this early date, Edward’s is certainly my favorite of those that are actively running, announced or not. The missing link, so far, is the grass roots groundswell that will be required to put him over the top vs the Clinton/Obama machine, which appears to be the early favorite of the DLC as well as the opposition.
A lot’s likely to happen in the very near future that could drastically alter the playing field for all involved, and the propects that the dynamics of the 2008 race may well be a considerably different paradigm that what we expect.
We shall see.
John McCain: The truth.
Thanks, dada. I smell a great diary here.
I’m afraid it’d get too personal if I attempted it.
John McCain: The truth.
Thanks, but I don’t have your knowledge or your personal edge.
The late, great HST – how I mourn his passing. What truths he could be telling now. He was one of my early favorites through his dispatches to Rolling Stone.
I used to respect this guy. However, today, he is just an ex-alcoholic (possibly current alcoholic) obsessed with kissing insider butt to get dirt.
A useless tool is the best description for him.