I have been supporting Edwards since 2006 for a variety of reasons. He's a good man, with a good message, and good policies. I would gladly have him as my commander in chief, and I hope he remains in American political life.
However, I've been struggling of late with the question of my proper role as a Democratic voter in the primary. I believe I have an obligation to have my beliefs expressed through my vote. I believe I also have an obligation to express what I believe is best for the party, and the nation, through the ballot box. Crassly, sometimes these latter points might be reduced to "nominatability" or "electability" but in turn, it's also partly a process of myself listening to what other voters are saying about why they are choosing a particular candidate.
Oddly, it was in consideration of my reaction to Clinton's media bounce and a thoughtful self-consideration of why I have been opposed to her candidacy, and the re-consideration of the three major candidates' positions that made me decide, finally, that I am indeed going to jump from Edwards to Obama, and cast my vote in the February 5th California primary (absentee, soon) accordingly. More explanation/rationalizations on the flip, and your opportunity to express your reaction, of course.
There's a lot going on here, bear with me.
(1) Policy - Record
I believe policy positions and the record of the candidate supporting those policies are important criteria, but not exclusively so. I'm not going to do a checklist here: Edwards is closest to my position list, Obama's not that far off. I don't think this is as important as some of the more hardcore position activists do.
One reason I downgrade this slightly is that any Democrat (at least in this cycle) is going to be preferable to any Republican, and in turn I cannot hold a party nominee accountable to any single issue I'm interested in, since no matter the nominee the party's consensus positions and the national interest and that person's judgement are going to ultimately determine what happens on a given issue, not my greatly-filtered and masked specific policy positions.
I do buy the criteria that matching a candidate's positions on paper to one's own is a valuable exercise. In point of fact, Kucinich always comes up tops on that list when I'm just doing checkboxes, and that's a perfect example of why using policy positions as the sole determinant of a vote is flawed. I believe Kucinich would be a lousy chief executive because of many of the other personal qualities he has, intellectual, political, and historical. The devil's in the details. Executives don't necessarily lead through checklists of positions; they lead via heuristics and working towards goals.
Let's use Iraq as an example in seeing how policy turns into record.
Obama was against the war from the get-go, but that was easy to do from the State Senate, so I give him only partial credit. I understand the pressures that Edwards and Clinton had to vote for the authorization at the time. Much to Edwards' credit, he has unequivocally renounced his vote, much in contrast to the continued mixed messages Clinton has given about her stance on the war. So I don't hold his original vote against him, either.
Yet all three of them, really and truly for practical purposes, have the same position despite differences in stated policy on the stump. The position is 'we need to get out of Iraq, we should do it expeditiously, but we're not going to pull out tomorrow and precipitously'. (Honestly, only Kucinich and Bill Richardson had significantly different positions on Iraq, which were, they're leaving tomorrow, screw the consequences.)
I could go down a list of positions and issues, and the ordered priority of what might be most important might be arguable, but I actually trust all three of these candidates to try to do the right thing here. I trust Clinton a bit less because of her history of a politics of convenience, which I think is actually masking a bit of innate hawkishness. But we're now veering into a non-policy, non-record equation, which will be discussed a bit more below.
For that reason, while I have a slight preference for Edwards' overall positions vis a vis Obama, and a bit more still over Clinton, I am not counting this as a heavy weight per se.
(2) Executive Ability
I consider this a combination of factors - evidence of an analytical decision-making process, willingness to consider all the factors, decisiveness, management skills, consistency, flexibility in the face of a change in situation, an ability to prioritize, an ability to know what fight to pick when. In short, getting things done.
The record of experience comes in handy here, as does the person's life story. The three major candidates actually have quite different stories in this area, and I'm not saying that as a negative on any of them. They're unlike the more traditional profiles the Republican candidates are projecting in terms of executive or military experience, and it's something that will be a weakness for our nominee in the fall on paper.
There are personal qualities which support the perception of executive ability, but I'll deal with that separately.
Clinton frankly has the inside track on the record here, in that whether or not she chooses to claim this explicitly as experience -- and in many ways I wish she would -- being the President's spouse is a unique pipeline into what is required on the job. She has not chosen to be explicit about this since there are oddly practical issues with how to express this, but it's been implicit everytime she claims "experience".
I don't consider experience in traditional executive roles to be the determining criterion here. Many great leaders have come out of milieus that are not classic leadership roles.
The bottom line for this discussion was that this was never what I considered to be a strength for Edwards in the first place, and as such it's not a qualifier among the three candidates at this point, for me.
(3) Political Ability
I don't doubt that Clinton has mastered the art of the insider in the back room. That's what I'd call the art of the deal, and it's a key element in getting things done. It's just not what I would consider to be the truly important political ability.
I look, oddly enough, at FDR and Reagan as examples of different types of political ability in building popular support. The common thread to them was they were able to communicate effectively not just with people who supported them, but with people who didn't support them.
Persuasion is one great aspect to the political art. Inspiration is another part. Compromise is another. I believe Clinton has the ability to work a compromise, and occasionally persuade, but in part because of who she is and the baggage -- fair or not -- she carries, persuasion is not her strong point. Edwards inspires me, but he's running on a platform of confrontation, not compromise. I understand it, but I haven't agreed with this approach. I believe Obama has all three abilities, in lesser doses individually perhaps than the other candidates, but it's a nifty package. And both he and Clinton are clearly quite inspirational to different sets of voters; I personally find Obama more inspirational.
All that said, I am being a bit calculating here, in that I am trying to judge an ability here, not my own emotional reactions to each candidate. This is the one area where I've been convinced by the campaign itself that Obama has more ability than Edwards. Part of this has been his success, but part of it has been in his ability to engage. As much as I personally like Edwards, I've been disappointed in his ability to read the tea leaves correctly and make his own personal adjustments to his message and presentation. Those are fine points in a mature political animal that are essential for the political aspects of leadership in a President. It makes me kind of wish Edwards had stayed in the Senate, in that his passion and commitment may actually have taken him far higher there than in pursuit of the White House (ditto, frankly, Clinton).
(4) Personal Characteristics
Much of this is going to be a bit subjective, but I have to be honest with myself in my own reaction in trying to sort out what it is I'm experiencing.
There are some obvious things you'd like in a President.
A strong work ethic -- no laziness. Check on all three candidates.
Honesty. Check on all three, with a slight downtick for Clinton for her equivocation on many issues in the past. I give Obama a lot of cred here for his book, which is really something. Edwards has hit his stride more in 208 than 2004 in coming across as authentic, although I've never doubted his honesty (and I can't quite say that about Clinton.)
Intellectual capability. God, we are in an embarrassment of riches with all three of them. No dummies in this lot, not something I could say about the Reds this time around.
Empathy (ability to listen, place oneself in the other guy's shoes). All three candidates have different degrees of empathetic and sympathetic ability. This is a tough issue in a President, because at some point they're going to be asked to do something awful, like fire missiles at somebody or cut a program that will put people in the streets because there's some other priority in the budget. As a party we're generally much better than the other party. Individually you can see this as a sort of tradeoff (false, perhaps) between "tough choices" and "feeling your pain". This is why I value empathy over sympathy, in an elliptical way. I note this is as much about understanding your opponents, and your enemy's, mode of thought as much as anything else. And this is where Obama's oddly centrist and simultaneously far-out life story really does come into play. The guy had lived on a farm and in a big city. He's lived, if you will, in a white world and in a black one. He's lived in America and he's lived abroad. I have a great deal of respect for Clinton's achievements in an age where women have come into their own in politics, but she's had a steady and ready path of opportunity in this world. Edwards has a more classic rags-to-riches story, and I believe there's a strong reason why poor white guys from the South have had resonance in the electorate as a whole, since they embody simultaneously a mainstream experience and a recognition of adversity. But I think Obama's story rather uniquely trumps Edwards' this time around.
Don't get me wrong -- Edwards passionate and obvious connection to the people of this country, first and foremost, is what drew me to him in the first place. I don't see that wavering at all. How that translates into the practical sphere of national and world politics for him is an open question. This is a second major area where I've been persuaded Obama is the right guy at this particular time, where I started out thinking that Edwards, as being a safe figure in a way, was the person. I see the reaction to his candidacy around the world, and I marvel at it. I'm hungry to have that reaction again as an American. An exemplar, the avatar of the real American dream, of Martin Luther King's vision and Langston Hughes' vision and Horatio Alger and a host of others. I have come to see Obama as having a real shot at having some unique personal characteristics -- of who he is, of how he came to where he is. If only Nixon can go to China, to quote the Klingon proverb, then maybe only a half-black, half-white, half-Kansan, half-Kenyan born in a majority Asian state who spent half his early years in a half-muslim country can bring America and the World back into synch, and for that matter America back into harmony with itself.
(5) Being Practical
This is the item I've really struggled with in the past weeks and months, and it's a valid question. You can phrase it as "electability" if you like, but I think that may be a false way of looking at it. I think it was a perceived set of "electability" criteria in Iowa in '04 that propelled Kerry to the win there, and ultimately the nomination, that were falsely-framed in terms of a couple of facts of his biography (his war record). The Clinton camp tries to phrase this in a rather, IMHO, immature way of saying that, well, Obama hasn't been tested by the Republican attack machine the way she has, which of course can also be articulated as saying he doesn't have Clinton's inherent negatives (deserved or not) to overcome.
At this point in the decision-making, I believe all three candidates are electable. I think Clinton will have a much harder time because of the (rather unfair, but not 100% so - mabe only 98% so) way she's been depicted by the right. The reality of electability is the flavor of the month often has more appeal to the electorate. From that sense, I'd rate Clinton and Edwards as about equal for different reasons, but they're both tired-out figures in national elections. Obama retains the flavor of the month feel, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
What this has come down to me is the fact that Edwards hasn't gained traction, and having taken matching funds, even if he regains it in the polls, he's just not able to go the distance with money as deeply as Clinton and Obama. The idealist in me may say, 'hey, money shouldn't drive the process' but the pragmatist in me is reminded again of the old saw from Mark Hanna 'there are two important things in politics -- the first is money and I forget what the other one is.' Money, for better or worse, is a practical articulation of peoples' willingness to articulate their belief. I may take some wrath on this, but it's in some ways more democratic than the primary process. We all have a chance to vote with our pocketbooks before the primary season gets started. I voted early, in this sense, for Edwards. But I wasn't joined the way Clinton and Obama were.
Here's where I get down to brass tacks in the differences between the three. I won't flog a dead horse here, but there's a huge difference in the type of money Clinton and Obama have raised. I find more hope in Obama's spread of donor base than in Clinton's same old party machinery. This is the difference between a DLC establishment candidate and somebody with genuine grassroots appeal.
Why didn't Edwards get this? Hard to say. You can point at a number of factors, maybe the fact that despite the fact his dad worked in a mill (dunno if you heard about that) he is, in the end, a rich white guy who made his money as a trial lawyer. I don't demonize him for that. It's just a hard story to make into a man-of-the-people story. And I think that in the end Edwards' profile as a southern white protestant from poor roots, insofar as it was a successful formula in American politics from Andrew Jackson to LBJ to Jimmy Carter, may have finally run its course in what America wants to dream about itself. And honestly, the demographics of this country no longer center as much on that profile of a person.
Money, traction, engagement -- these are not just horse race elements. They're indicators of potential. I may not like it, but I think Edwards has disqualified himself from the race in the fall in part because he didn't find the right track to run on in the primaries. Functionally, it's impossible for him to win the nomination without some odd political lightning striking, ala Tom Eagleton's mental health record coming to light, or (please excuse the reminder here, painful as it is) RFK's assassination in mid-primary season.
For that reason, I don't begrudge Edwards' decision to stay in the race, but neither do I think that's a reason to keep supporting him.
And in realpolitik, I just don't buy at this point that I'm not helping Clinton by voting for Edwards, since my second choice, where my vote would go if Edwards were formally out of the race, is Obama, and I have a clear preference for Obama over Clinton.
THE BOTTOM LINE FOR ME
Some may accuse me of rationalizing a decision here, but I made my decision on two factors, ultimately.
The first is the last point I made above: in practical terms I think this has been reduced to a two-person race. This has nothing to do with the media or the skewed process in Iowa and NH per se. It has everything to do with the national mood and our place in the world and how money gets translated into votes, and my bottom line here is I want a winner in the fall, and I'll take the best kind of winner I can get. I no longer see Edwards as a potential winner. Call me a craven reactionary to the media story if you will, but I think there's truth to this.
The second is genuine persuasion. I stepped back a bit and thought about how I would feel the day after the election if Obama, Edwards, or Clinton were the winner in November. I want the kind of America that can vote for an Obama. I want the kind of respect back in the world if we had him in office. I want that kind of presence and drive and freshness on the scene. I want to challenge ourselves to "Let America be America again" as Langston Hughes put it.
If executive ability, policies, and so forth are a wash, and I see both a vision for the Presidency -- it not this nation, at least putting the office back into a position of respect and credibility -- and a markedly different political ability to persuade -- then I have to admit to myself, Obama is the guy I'd be thrilled to wake up and see in the oval office.
Senator Edwards, if you ever read this, I want to thank you whole-heartedl for personally engaging me, for articulating the issues about poverty and the class chasm in this country, for never forgetting that we formed this country for a more perfect union and to promote the general welfare, not to serve specific interests. You are a class guy. I'm not without regret at having come to this decision. You may rest assured that I am making this for positive reasons and not as an indictment on you or your fitness for office. You would've been a great President, and may still be.
Senator Clinton, I have not been your most ardent fan. But in recent days I have thought deeply about this and I have gained some more respect for you. I think you also would be a good President, but you must forgive me if I don't think you'd be the best among our three major candidates.
Senator Obama: you have my vote. Make me proud.