I've been thinking a lot in recent days about why John Edwards has never quite closed the sale for me.
Yes, John Edwards is my #2 candidate. I prefer him to Hillary Clinton by a wide margin, to the extent that if it's Edwards rather than Barack Obama who emerges as the more viable candidate after Iowa and New Hampshire, I will not only support him but will also likely donate to his campaign and advocate on his behalf.
And also, in the interests of full disclosure, there were two candidates that I was almost certainly going to support if they entered the race, regardless of whomever else entered the race. One of those candidates is Al Gore, for reasons that I hope are fairly self-explanatory. The other of those candidates is Barack Obama. I've known about Obama for upwards of 10 years -- he was my representative in the State Senate way back when I was an undergraduate on the South Side of Chicago, and a lot of us knew back then about his record of community activism and the transcendent sort of politician he had the potential to become. So, when Obama entered the race, I didn't have a whole lot of thinking to do; it was as though my next door neighbor had decided to run for President. If Al Gore had also entered the race, I would have had a difficult decision on my hands, but (un)fortunately that did not happen.
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With that out of the way, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about politics, and as much as I feel like I should like John Edwards, I have never entirely warmed to him for reasons that I've had a little trouble articulating. Yes, I have some concerns about his voting record in the Senate, but that's more a secondary issue for me than a primary one, insofar as I'm basically willing to believe that he'll represent the positions that he's represented on the campaign trail if elected to office.
Instead, the issue is something else, which I did not quite understand until the past couple of days. Namely:
1. Who exactly is John Edwards fighting against?
and
2. How exactly does he plan to carry out this fight?
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Who exactly is John Edwards fighting against?
I understand that John Edwards is taking on the "special interests" in Washington. This term is used very frequently in his campaign literature, as in:
John is ready for this fight – because fighting special interests on behalf of regular, hard-working Americans is what he’s been doing his entire life.
However, as I hope we've come to understand in the recent swiping over 527's, the meaning of "special interests" is at least somewhat ambiguous. Is organized labor a special interest? Is a group like the Human Rights Campaign? Greenpeace? The ACLU? Definitionally speaking, they probably are "special interests".
This is why I find Barack Obama's calling Edwards out about labor-funded 527's to be at least somewhat persuasive. There have been several diaries written about how, in criticizing Edwards for this behavior, Obama is being anti-union. But in fact, the same argument would seem to carry much more weight if applied to Edwards himself. Is John Edwards against all interest groups? Or just the interest groups we don't like? If the former, isn't he tarring some of the "good", progressive interest groups with the same brush? Does he want the Human Rights Campaign and Greenpeace to shut their doors? If the latter, who is the arbiter of which interest groups are appropriate and which ones are not, and how on earth does that translate into any kind of reform to the political process?
In listening to John speak about "special interests", I am reminded somewhat of the use of the term "special rights", which has been employed in several contexts, usually by those on the right, and almost always as a euphemism for "the civil rights of people we don't like". That is, their rights are deemed to be illegitimate -- but usually not for any philosophically or constitutionally sound reason.
Certainly, there are a few groups -- the insurance lobby, for example -- that are almost universally disdained in American society, and certainly by those us on the left. More often, however, the term "special interests" is used as a sort of catch-all bogeyman, a sort of Orwellian shadow enemy that we need to fight -- if only can find him first. In this respect, I find the term just as empty and Luntzian as something like "family values". If "special interests" becomes "interest groups", it loses a lot of its appeal. Likewise, if "family values" becomes "Christian conservative values", it too loses its rhetorical force.
How exactly does he plan to carry out this fight?
If you accept my contention that Edwards has done a poor job of defining his enemy, it stands to reason that he is also likely to be unsuccessful in planning for battle against that enemy. However, even if we are more generous to him on the former question, how to engage this enemy is not quite clear.
For example, let's look at one of those universally agreed upon "special interests": the insurance lobby. There is no doubt that the insurance lobby is quite important in framing the debate over health care.
However, they are not actually the people we are engaged with. The people we are engaged with is the Republican Party, and the battleground is the Congress. And in fact, it is quite fortunate that we are not directly engaged with the insurance lobby, because they have absolutely no reason to compromise. John Edwards is right when he says (paraphrasing very slightly) "they're not just going to give their power away". On the other hand, it is not like we're going to beat their power out of them either.
No, the task at hand on health care reform is actually a lot more specific, and somewhat less daunting. To achieve health care reform, we must get an acceptable piece of legislation passed through both chambers of Congress, and signed by the President. This can be accomplished by:
- Achieving a 60-seat Democratic majority, with no defections or
- Changing the rules of the Senate or
- Getting a sufficient number of Republican senators to join a Democratic majority to pass the legislation.
#1 is is largely out of the President's hands (although, it is another reason to think about the 'coattail' effects of electability). #2 is not an area that I have tremendous familiarity with, but I gather it's something that would take years, if not whole decades, to achieve.
So that leaves us with the third strategy. Republican senators may be beholden to some extent or another to the insurance lobby, but they are not absolutely beholden to it. The Republicans have other constituencies to worry about too, the most notable being the voters in their state. So the real question we should be asking is this:
How are you going to convince a sufficient number of Republican senators that it is in their best interest to ignore their insurance lobby constituency, and instead act on behalf of other constituencies -- like the voters in their district -- who might in fact want health care reform passed?
This task is not necessarily easy, but given the likely configuration of the 111th Congress, it is a task we have some chance of accomplishing. Perhaps you operate by shifting the public paradigm on issues like health care reform, to the extent that any senator who failed to support such legislation would risk an electoral liability. Perhaps you promise to compromise with them on some other issue, in exchange for their votes on this one. Perhaps you believe that there is a greater "truth" out there -- and that they can be persuaded of this truth, given sufficient political willpower. Perhaps you believe that their overriding interest is not actually the insurance lobby, but rather the unity of the Republican Party -- and so you change the rules of the game such that there is less of a penalty to be paid for breaking ranks from one's party.
These are all potentially effective tactics. However, we have no idea which one of them John Edwards is planning to employ.
Barack Obama, at least, seems to have put forth some coherent set of tactics, some considered theory of change, which in his case, seems to involve:
- Sitting all sides down at the table and looking for common ground WHILE using the bully pulpit to frame the discussion in one's own terms;
- Providing what, in game theory terms, can be described as "forgiveness" from the tit-for-tat politics of the present day; a way out of the Prisoner's dilemma, if you will.
Obama's assumption is that the opponent's position is malleable, at least up to an extent. And this assumption is the assumption we have to make, because if the opponent's position is not malleable, then we will not get health care reform, no matter what we do. Until such time as the rules of the Senate are changed or we achieve a 60-seat majority, Republican cooperation is both a necessary AND sufficient condition for passing comprehensive health care reform.
Let me repeat that again. Republican cooperation is both a necessary AND sufficient condition for passing comprehensive health care reform.
So how do you get Republicans to cooperate? I don't think you do it by threatening to fight them. Nor do you do it by climbing into a defensive crouch and refusing to engage them, as Hillary Clinton seems wont to do. Obama, at least, seems to have identified the problem correctly -- and thought about ways to solve it.
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In short, the reason that I've yet to be deeply convinced about John Edwards' candidacy is because I find his framing of the problems somewhat empty. Firstly, he has not correctly identified the opponent (which is fairly specifically the Republicans in Congress, NOT the lobbying groups themselves, and certainly not "special interests" e.g. interest groups writ large). Secondly, he lacks any actionable theory of change for when he does engage this opponent.
In fact, I believe that Edwards' rhetoric may in fact be counterproductive, to the extent that it antagonizes an opponent whose cooperation we need. It is the political equivalent of empty carbs, which feel good going down, but which ultimately leave us wanting.