Last weekend, I decided to make a video blog post explaining why people should support John Edwards for president. Unfortunately, the full moon came up and this caused some technical difficulties. But I did the video anyway, and put in subtitles to make up for the fact that I could only bark and growl:
John Edwards isn't just the best nominee for werewolves -- he's good for ordinary humans as well. One of the things that I mentioned in the video above is his proposal to take away health insurance from Congress if they don't set up universal health care. It frames the debate really well, establishing two important points as presuppositions:
(1) Government-guaranteed health care is a good thing.
(2) Politicians who use your tax dollars to buy health insurance for themselves while denying it to you are bloodsucking vampires.
And if there's one thing I've learned in my years of being a politically active werewolf, it's that nobody wants their Senator to be a vampire. If the vampires try to filibuster or otherwise block universal health care, John Edwards will go to their home states and lead angry mobs against them with pitchforks, torches, and stakes. He lays out his strategy here:
I should also say something about the issue of spending caps, which has worried many people including Markos. Markos thinks that the spending caps that you have to operate under if you take matching funds will cripple the Edwards campaign in the general election.
But the campaign finance regulations don't actually work at keeping pro-Edwards ads off the air. As we've seen in the last few weeks, 527 groups operated out of the labor unions have been putting up good positive ads promoting John Edwards in Iowa. These 527 ads aren't limited by the spending caps. If Edwards gets the nomination, I'll just give my money to one of these 527s instead of the Edwards campaign, and so will everybody else who supports him.
And as Patel1946 has pointed out, there are ways to run money through the DNC as well (even with spending caps, Edwards can do unlimited fundraising for the DNC, and the DNC can turn that into unlimited pro-Edwards ads.) In the end, you'll see just as many ads for Edwards with matching funds as you would've without. Maybe more, actually, because of the obvious fact that matching funds are money.
In conclusion, Democratic werewolves and ordinary humans alike have good reasons to support John Edwards for the nomination.