From a glancing contact with the emissions of some of the punditry, it seems that the question that has to be asked of supporters of candidates other than Hillary is ... Why don't you switch to Senator Clinton, the winner, as all the polls say?
In a comment this week, I stopped to reflect on how I became an Edwards supporter, and tonight I am thinking about whether John Edwards performance in tenaciously holding onto a national third place and a strong position in Iowa should cause me to change that. The answer, after the fold.
Isn't It Smarter to Switch Than to Fight?
... well, at least for and for those who do not opt out of the main fight by opting for Congressman Kucinich, or Senators Dodd or Biden, or Governor Richardson, or former Senator Gravel, or, in South Carolina, television commentator Stephen Colbert ...
... but for supporters of former Senator John Edwards and Senator Barrack Obama is, why in the heck do you keep up the forlorn cause? Give it up and go with a winner.
Now setting aside the question of whether someone can be a winner without actually winning anything except one quarter's fund-raising, the fundamental premise is puzzling. Why would you vote for someone in a primary because you expect them to win the primaries?
I'm thinking that the argument being pitched to the pundits and the Beltway crowd is leaking out in the phenomenon of groupthink, but for those of us who are neither professional politicians nor professional media types (whether conventional Main Stream Media or the new Main Stream Blogocracy), what difference does that make?
True Confessions: I Came Into The Blogosphere Via The OneAmericaCommittee Blog
Actually, when I first started following the political blogosphere, one of the first things I did was to try to find out, from overseas, what John Edwards had been up to since I'd supported him in 2004 ... and so I watched (by citizen vlogging), listened (by podcast), and read what he was saying as he criss-crossed the country supporting Democrats and Minimum Wage Increases and Union organizing campaigns in 2006.
And, since I returned to the US in the middle of 2005, I also got to see the difference between real news coverage and US news coverage with my own eyes. After a decade of watching both World and National news coverage provided by chartered public broadcasters ... the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and, especially, the marvelous Special Broadcasting Service ... the experience of re-entering the US media bubble was startling, as was the role of the progressive blogosphere as the only major form of media where substantial reality had a chance to filter in from the outside world.
But the Policies ... Won't Anybody Think of the Policies?
I am a development economist, so it is obviously appealing to me to have a US administration where a development economist could pitch a policy, and after explaining how and why it would help poor people in low income countries improve their lot in life, the question would be whether or not the case had been made, and the political question would be whether the program could be sold to a skeptical Congress. All my adult life, the political question would be, "what is the political pay-off for the administration".
However, as you can also tell by perusing my diary page, I also have a concern with the problems associated with the Climate Crisis and the impending Peak Oil Crisis, and am keenly aware of how rarely US politicians tell people the truth, that there are no magic technology answers to either crisis, let alone both together, that will allow us to proceed with plug-and-play replacements for our current way of doing things. So when John Edwards said ... I first heard it vlogged at a labor union picnic/luncheon event in New Hampshire ... that we also have to be prepared to sacrifice, I was impressed. And when I heard that tied to the now familiar phrase that it is time to ask Americans to be patriotic about something other than just war, I was very impressed.
And when I saw John Edwards at a techie convention answering a "red diaper baby" who challenged him on ball-less Democrats who are afraid to "take it to the mat", and he answered that he thought Democrats ought to abandon mealy-mouth phrases like "affordable" and "accessible" health care and say flat out that they were for universal health care, and drive through those who got in the way, I saw someone not only willing to propose Universal Health Care, but willing to "take it to the mat" in the fight for Universal Health Care.
So when Clinton and Obama announced, I already had my candidate. And if Edwards was not in the race, I would be torn between Dodd, as the candidate best expressing policies I wished to support, and Obama as the candidate proposing small, incremental progress mostly in positive directions ... that is, much the same reason as I had supported Edwards in 2004 when Gore decided not to run.
And I still am at the exact same place with Obama, after month upon month of watching, and peripherally participating in, the ongoing clash of the Edwards and Obama "camps", at times descending into unsavory and counter-productive net gang warfare, as it inevitably will on occasion when two inchoate groups of people meet, with each united by a candidate preference but on both sides representing all sorts of people and all sorts of internet styles.
Hey, Dude, You Put Hillary in Your Title
However, the more information I find about Hillary, the less appealing I find the prospect of her as a candidate. The most critical was when I actually read through her remarks when she cast a vote against CAFTA, which showed how deeply she believed (or elected to claim to believe) the banal conventional wisdom about "free trade" and "free trade agreements", holding up the terrible US-Jordan FTA as an example of what she would have required in order to vote in favor of CAFTA.
Since I returned to Ohio after a decade in Australia and, before that, six years in Tennessee, and as I work in a warehouse in Northeast Ohio and see how badly battered my state has been from the combination of long years of Republican Rule and the "bipartisan" policy of ripping the guts out of American Industry for short term financial windfalls for Wall Street, I simply have no patience for any number of "progressive social stands" as a barter with corporations, in exchange for allowing them to rip the guts out of my nation's economy.
So, basically, that's my "why not Senator Clinton". Its not enough to get the Governor's mansion back and get an honest Ohio State Secretary of State ... we also need a President in the White House that develops a majority economic policy counting from the bottom up, rather than, a la Senator Clinton, counting from the top down.
Well, OK, But She's Winning, So Give Up
Like I said, set aside the question of whether or not Senator Clinton has a cast-iron grip on the nomination ...
... I mean, look, when my kids were in the kid's version of football, one of the things they were constantly told was "play to the whistle". And when we went to Australia, and one of them got to be pretty good at association football, they were also coached to "play to the whistle".
... And, to be clear, that was the final whistle. Giving up now, before the starting whistle ... well, the technical term for that is "silly". Maybe its because Hillary supporters were so used to her being behind in the credible polls in Iowa, that they converted a lead in October into a victory in January.
... But the fact remains that a position in the 20's in October is a platform from which someone can win Iowa, so there are three candidates with a clear shot at victory in Iowa, and two of them are not Senator Clinton.
... That means, of course, that not only is Senator Clinton not a shoe-in to finish first in Iowa ... she is not even a lock to finish in the top two. Add that that half of the voters in the other early states will be actually making up their minds in the last month or so before their primaries ... and with those primaries likely to be even earlier this year, crowding so close to the Christmas Holidays, possibly even more will defer their decision to even later ...
... meaning that nobody can have any certainty about the possible positions on the ground in the other early states when the Iowa results hit, whatever those results may be ...
... and so, anyway, set aside the issue over whether Senator Clinton has a cast iron grip on the nomination.
I want to push the issues that are championed by John Edwards. Supporting the candidacy of John Edwards is the way available to me to do that. I have, indeed, been accustomed to deciding between candidates with any hope at all of the nomination and candidates that take stands I can support ... heck, since Carter versus Udall, before I could actually vote in a primary.
So why in tarnation would I abandon a candidate who has a hope of the nomination and takes stands I can support? That makes no sense.
So, yes, I will continue to support John Edwards. And, yes, I will continue to push Senator Clinton on the issues where she gives out index card sound-bites in the serial press conferences that are variously called "debates" and "forums" ... especially those issues where progressive Democrats needs a President who will run through the corporate opposition, rather than work to put progressive lipstick on a corporate-sponsored pig.
UPDATE: Checking out at 2am ... catch you on the flip side.