John Edwards: Too Soon for Political Obituary [View All]

January 13th, 2008

by Jayne Lyn Stahl

So, maybe the media has timed out on John Edwards. Maybe the pay for view press has decided to shrink the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination to two candidates, but this would be premature evacuation. Every contender with the stomach for it has the right to remain in the race for as long as he or she wants without the benefit of primetime postmortems.

Isn’t it bad enough that we try, and convict, those who are only suspected of committing a crime on our TV newscasts? Is this any way to run a democracy? Yeah, into the ground, I think.

If we, in this country, weren’t so insistent upon novelty, and looked instead to competency, John Edwards would be, by far, the clear leader as the nominee of the Democratic Party. Yet, in keeping with their time-honored tradition, the Democrats will instead show their uncanny ability to foul it up all just when a victory is most needed, and instead of delivering an end to a war which has lasted longer than Vietnam, we will, yet again, deliver a nominee who is guaranteed to pull an LBJ and keep fanning the flames of war in the name of bringing the boys home. The lies are the same; the only thing that’s changed is the calendar.

While it’s true that any Democrat nominated must secure as many crossover Republican votes as possible, if we think of government as a large ship, what happens when all the weight is in the center?

As long as any candidate places his, or her tonnage solely in the middle, the ship of state must sink. That was John Kerry’s problem; not willing to go out on a limb, sticking with the tried and true—is this what it means to be experienced? But, even more daunting for him, Kerry wasn’t a fighter. If Kerry were a fighter, he’d have held out for every last vote to be counted, in Ohio, and we would not have had a second term of George W. Bush who didn’t even deserve a first term.

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http://blog.pdamerica.org/?p=1627