Many of you will be envious when you hear that I was able to be at the 6:15 am "Welcome Rally" for John Edwards in Manchester, NH. About a dozen of us gathered in deep-frozen Dover, NH and headed over to an old mill building Manchester to give John and Elizabeth (as well as Kate) a warm welcome back to the Granite State. The event shows a lot of what is good about the state of politics in America and some of what is wrong.
It is great that a candidate like John Edwards can still speak the truth to power and still fight for regular working people while still being taken seriously. And even though several hundred citizens did risk hypothermia to journey to Manchester in the dark, the event still shows how marginalized the political process has become....
I felt a little bit like I was back in the mid-1990s when I went through a brief fascination with techno music and also with the underground "Raves" where DJs spin unmar Some of the Raves I attended were in the same general vicinity, i.e., downtown Manchester. The event was in an old textile mill near the Merrimack River, with no signs directing us there. (The snowbanks in downtown Manchester were full of yard signs, of course, including our guy's, but those had nothing to do with the rally.) After driving around in circles (nearly running over Fox News's Carl Cameron at one point while making a U Turn in front of the Channel 9 building) we finally spot some activity in front of one mill building and after driving around the block one more time we spotted our event.
The building was originally built as a textile mill, and was abandoned when the industry headed south to Edwards's native Carolinas before eventually heading overseas. The space was just the right size to hold the number of people who showed up, and it made for an apt setting for a great piece of political theatre. However it seemed like a somewhat shabby setting... or maybe just a funky setting... for a key event in a campaign which will soon (I am confident) make Edwards the most powerful person on the planet. It makes a huge difference who wins any Presidential election, and this one is especially important... and yet the crowd was no bigger than the crowds which used to turn out for the underground Raves I attended in the same general vicinity. And the venue was no fancier. (In fact it was less fancy: the fire exits were scarily inadequate, and the lack of security was even scarier. We were in an enclosed space, rallying for a candidate who poses a very significant threat to the Bush-Clinton corporate consensus, and yet there was virtually no security.)
Not that music isn't important, but politics matters a lot more. It matters to all of us on a deeply personal level. The few hundred of us who got up in the middle of the coldest night of the winter so far to greet John Edwards know that all too well--- but most of the population has been anesthetized by the corporate media into thinking that politics doesn't matter. Hopefully Edwards will wake up a few more of us over the days and months ahead.
(Yes there were a few cameras in the back of the room, but the coverage will try to make the point that this is a meaningless sideshow and that we really oughta leave politics to the professionals and worry about Britney Spears instead.)