As an Edwards supporter, I’ve been recently amused by the urgent tone of those who argue that the Edwards campaign is flagging because of its decision to accept public financing. It’s over they say. The campaign is already dead in the water.
Indeed, what I find interesting is that so many people are, on one hand, arguing that the Edwards campaign is already over while, on the other, simultaneously going out of their way to persuade people that it's over because Edwards can't win the general.
It reminds me of a line from Clov in Samuel Beckett’s play, Endgame:
If I don’t kill that rat, he’ll die.
If Edwards’ campaign were already over, no one would have to announce its funeral. It would be a non-issue; it would make no difference which side you took. But, precisely because it’s not already over, it does make a difference, or, to put it another way, precisely because those who oppose Edwards have needed not just to point out facts about public financing (which no one disputes) but also to persuade people what follows from these facts (which Edwards supporters do, with good reason, dispute), news of the Edwards campaign's death has been greatly exaggerated.
My purpose in this diary, though, isn’t necessarily to perpetuate the dispute over whether Edwards could win the general. It’s to turn the tables on that dispute by suggesting two things: first, that arguments about electability, whether for Edwards, Clinton or Obama, are always already partisan and speculative (if elections were decided in advance by a candidate’s electability then no one would need to campaign or, indeed, to worry about tallying the final votes in an election at all) and, second, that people should take Edwards seriously not because he’s electable (which can mean nothing more or less than that he has a chance of winning) but because he’s right, and what he’s right about is that there is an unjust and massive divide between rich and poor in this country, a divide that the policies of those on the right and those on the left (in recent decades) have been complicit in widening. His message, in other words, isn’t an alternative to the question of whether he's electable; it’s what constitutes that question.
The arguments that have been marshaled against Edwards depend upon the following facts—facts which, in my view, are accurate and well researched:
• There is a $50M cap during the primary season for a candidate who has taken public financing.
• The primary season lasts until August of next year.
• The campaign’s decision to take public funds means that it cannot coordinate with the DNC, unions and 527’s directly.
• The Republicans will mount attack ads against Edwards if he wins the nomination.
The problem is that those who oppose Edwards have tried to fuse an interpretation of these facts with the facts themselves (and many contributors have made this argument more fully than I will, so I won't waste time by being redundant). Public financing may or may not be another in a string of populist talking points that allow Edwards to smash the GOP opposition, since it dramatizes to the average voter, in a clear and straightforward way, that Edwards is truly committed to fighting the interests of elitist big money. But the way that the actual facts have been thrown back and forth as battering-rams to smash an opponent’s head reminds me of a piece by the artist Bruce Nauman.
People have been pointing to facts in these arguments not because they think the facts will settle anything but because they think it will poke their opponents’ eyes out.
A much better argument for why Edwards should get the nomination is that he’s right about the issues. And I think he is right. He’s centered his campaign on making a moral argument about economic injustice. Consider these facts:
• 36 million Americans are in poverty.
• America’s Gini Index (i.e. a measurement of economic inequality) is significantly higher than other Western nations and has been exacerbated by Bush’s tax cuts.
• The salaries of top earners have increased in recent years even as average salaries have stagnated.
• And last but not least: Democrats have recently avoided making economic injustice a main issue in Presidential campaigns.
Indeed, the very resistance on the part of Democrats in confronting and reforming this problem reminds me of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s "Resistance to Civil Government," written in response to Massachusetts’ implicit support of the 1846-8 invasion of and war with Mexico (sound familiar?) that was imperialistically being waged, in Thoreau’s view, to expand the boundaries of slave territories:
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politics at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.
That’s why Edwards is such an important candidate and that’s why he can win: because he’s challenging the Democrats on ethical grounds to face the growing economic inequality in this country that they, as a party, have been trying to pretend is invisible. Edwards’ campaign has creatively and consistently been able to dramatize and foreground, again and again, his argument about Two Americas.
Finally, for anyone who thinks Edwards will lose the general because of financing, consider this: if the election really is all about the money, then we’ll never see Edwards in the general in the first place, since Hillary and/or Obama will be able to buy a nomination by burying Edwards with spending. So rest easy. But we Edwards supporters envision a different outcome, and we’ll protect our eyes the Timbuk3 way: we’ll just wear shades.