After Edwards dropped out of the race, there were many tributes and appreciations. John Nichols delivered one of the best, in the Nation:
Edwards shaped the 2008 race, offering the first universal healthcare plan from a major contender, proposing the first economic stimulus package, making an issue of war profiteering. And he was heard. Obama's rhetoric has grown more powerful and effective as he has borrowed Edwards's policies as well as his populist phrasing. And when Clinton tells urban audiences she is campaigning to help Americans "lift yourself and your family out of poverty," it is impossible to miss the Edwards echo. Even Republicans like Mike Huckabee sounded like they'd been reading Edwards's position papers on trade policy. Now, as a noncandidate, Edwards can and should continue to shape the race. The desire of Clinton and Obama for his endorsement will get his phone calls answered. But perhaps an Edwards endorsement is of less consequence than his continuing presence. Forget the empty speculation about him as a vice presidential prospect; Edwards's best role will be as the voice of conscience for a party that has yet to recognize that its historic commitment to economic justice must be renewed in a time of recession.
For me--and for other Edwards supporters, I suspect--it was bittersweet reading such pieces. On one hand, he was getting overdue credit for running an unusually progressive, serious, and influential campaign. On the other, where was all this effusive support when Edwards needed it? Why were so few of the prominent progressives now heaping praise on him unwilling to hop on the Edwards train when it still had gas?
Not that it necessarily would have made a decisive difference. While it's hard not to engage what-ifs (this piece is full of them), they should be tempered by the knowledge that the outcome was likely inevitable given the money, celebrity, and history-making potential of his opponents. But the left's failure to coalesce behind Edwards assured defeat. When influential bloggers andreal world progressives finally lined up behind Edwards, it was just before the Iowa caucuses--way too late to have an impact.
The active support of the left could have helped counter the media brownout, which prevented many people from even knowing Edwards was in the race. It's amusing to see many progressives earnestly wondering why low income voters didn't back his populist candidacy in large numbers. How could overworked people who get their news from their local paper and snippets of talk radio know what my politically involved upper middle class friends didn't know: that Edwards was running a more progressive campaign than his chief opponents? You can't expect the mainstream media to focus on a third place candidacy that does nothing more sexy than lead on issues. That's why Edwards was dependent on the left.
Of course, the part of the progressive movement that Edwards most needed was labor, and the decision of many powerful unions, SEUI in particular, not to endorse him was a huge blow. The primary reason was JRE's standing in the polls. It's a legitimate (if maddeningly self-fulfilling) reason, one not available to individual progressives and publications who need not think so pragmatically. Most progressives have the luxury of simply supporting the candidate who best represents their beliefs. There's not much of a question that of the top three candidates, Edwards not only ran the most progressive campaign but also worked the hardest to reach out to progressives. Why did only a small segment of the base back him?
I posed this question to a prominent liberal, one who toils primarily offline. Call him Mr. Liberal. He told me that Edwards's vote for the war hurt him less than his (related) reputation for centrism. Faced with the superior positions and rhetoric of Edwards, the rival campaigns and their supporters had little choice but to question his sincerity, to portray his move left as sudden and calculating, and the MSM did nothing to disabuse the public of this notion. The sunny-centrist-becomes-angry-populist storyline took hold, as did the doubts about his sincerity in the form of the two-month Haircut Story.
In fact, his move left was much less dramatic than his detractors claim. Anyone who cared to look would see a strand of progressive populism running through his professional life. Even if you insist on dismissing the populism inherent in his trial work battling corporate power, you have to contend with his years in the Senate, during which, despite representing a conservative state, he won the admiration of Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader for what John Nichols describes as his willingness to "stand up on a number of anti-corporate issues." And it was the "sunny centrist" who in 2003 gave us the famous Two Americas metaphor, a hard-hitting class critique that won the praise of Thomas Frank, among many others. But these are facts, which have only a passing relationship to politics. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, many progressives believed (or claimed to believe) that Edwards had reinvented himself. A well-known blogger (and Obama supporter) told me that Edwards had never talked about poverty until "last month." When I informed him that in fact it had been part of his last campaign, he changed the subject.
Still, Mr. Liberal said that a Edwards would have won a poll of his colleagues and friends (a figure in the hundreds). But they didn't actively support him, he said, for a few overlapping reasons: they wanted to beat Hillary and thought Obama was the best bet to do so; because of his race, freshness, and talent Obama was the candidate they wanted to like; as opposed to Kucinich, Edwards wasn't progressive enough to be a choice of pure passion. In their eyes Edwards was neither quite viable enough nor quite progressive enough. At the same time, they were reluctant to get behind Obama given that there was a top-tier candidate in the race running a more progressive campaign. JRE's presence exposed Obama's moderation and chronic caution; with Edwards gone, they were free to endorse the candidate they'd wanted to endorse all along.
This was the story from only one corner of the progressive movement, but I suspect it played out in some form across the movement. Progressives questioned Edwards's ability to win the support of Democrats when it fact it was progressives themselves who were hesitant to get on board. They were reminiscent of high school students who don't want to like the likable kid because he isn't popular. At the same time, he wasn't someone whose credentials were so deep progressive were willing to reject Obama or put aside practical concerns--concerns that grew when Edwards opted for public financing.
Typical was thishorrible editorial by the Nation, which didn't endorse a candidate (Obama) until Edwards had dropped out of the race. The Nation's editors praised JRE's partisanship and populism, noting that he was "the only leading candidate to connect the war and the home front, bravely arguing that an ambitious domestic agenda would require cuts to the military budget." But what, according to the Nation, was the argument against him? He wasn't getting enough support! Around and around we go.
He has not managed to consolidate the traditional Democratic base, and while he has loyal supporters among organized labor, he has not sewn up union support across the board, nor has he excited a cohort of previously disenfranchised voters. Perhaps some have been turned off by the media's relentless fixation on the "three H's"--haircuts, hedge funds and houses--symbols of the gap between his populist rhetoric and his lifestyle.
Do you see what happened? JRE wasn't consolidating the base partly because of crappy MSM coverage, and rather than counter the crappy coverage, the leading liberal publication (and part of the base) cited his failure to consolidate the base as reason not to support him. The Nation let the MSM select our candidates.
The blogosphere also posed a challenge to Edwards. He was the favorite candidate among the blogospheric rank-and-file, but the enthusiasm wasn't shared by the bloggers who had the capacity to raise money for him and affect his press coverage. While big bloggers loved JRE's pugilism, they were unmoved by his economic populism. Why? Because the established blogs simply aren't very liberal on economic issues. A statement calling Dick Cheney a jackass will get your more love than a speech blasting corporate control of our government. Primarily interested in Iraq and civil liberties, the big blogs were immune to what many progressives see as JRE's greatest selling point: his opposition to neoliberal trade policy. For my money, one of the most exciting things that happened during the primary season was his statement for fair trade prompted by the Peru Free Trade agreement, but it barely registered on the blogs. This isn't a surprise, perhaps, when you consider that few bloggers even write about trade and that Kos, Matt Yglesias, and Josh Marshall are all conventional free traders.
To be clear, I'm not saying that all progressives should have rallied behind Edwards. Actually, I am saying exactly that, but it does no good to blame progressives rather than Edwards himself. He didn't close the deal.
Given the hurdles he faced, he needed to make an offer the left couldn't refuse. Bloggers and other writers constantly claimed there were no important differences between Edwards and other two. While some of us pointed out again and again and again that this claim was bullshit, its durability was a big problem for Edwards. And to be fair, by the end of the race the policy differences weren't huge. Edwards was, as Jonathan Cohn says, a victim of his own success. Once JRE had pulled the other candidates to the left, he had less daylight to expose. For example, in the spring Hillary spoke about enacting an incremental health care plan; by August she had a plan similar to that of Edwards.
It wasn't enough for Edwards simply to be better; he had to better in a way that was immediately understood by everyone, undeniable. It may seem unfair to ask the man running the most progressive campaign, one of the most progressive top-tier presidential campaigns in years, to be even more progressive, but what does politics have to do with fair? It would have been a different race if Edwards had, for example, come out in favor of a single-payer health plan. Such a position would have meshed perfectly with his populist, anti-corporate message and cast the rest of his platform in a different light.
Nonetheless, important differences existed, and Edwards could've done a better job of using them. During an NPR debate in Iowa, the issue of trade came up, and JRE neglected to mention that at that very minute the Senate was passing the NAFTA-style Peru "Free" Trade Agreement, which Clinton and Obama supported. One of the best things Edwards did in the campaign was to reject the Global War on Terror, but he seldom, if ever, mentioned that Obama and Clinton continued to buy into Bush's disastrous framework. Obama's top foreign policy advisor Samantha Power opposes it. Why doesn't Obama? A good question to ask.
All along Edwards seemed especially reluctant to draw contrasts with Obama and instead often validated Obama's status as an agent of change. Edwards should have gone back and forth between hitting Clinton and Obama or, better yet, lumped them together as the corporate candidates. Instead, he focused on Clinton often to the exclusion of Obama, especially in debates. While Edwards seems to prefer Obama to Clinton, inthis interview Joe Trippi suggests the focus on Clinton was also strategic.
If instead of winning by half a point [Note: Clinton won by about 2 percentage points], she lost by five. My guess is if she loses Iowa, New Hampshire, she would have probably lost Nevada, she would certainly have lost South Carolina--she lost so badly anyway. There's an argument that there was a possibility we would be standing with Obama. Except for that half point in New Hampshire, she lost four straight. Those are all the kinds of things that happen in politics.
It seems that even before Obama had won Iowa, the Edwards campaign saw Clinton as the candidate more likely to fall away. It's a strange bet given Clinton's institutional strength. More to the point: although there are various paths to the presidency, JRE's ran left, and the candidate who stood in his way was Obama, not Clinton. It was mistake for Edwards not to direct at least half his fire at Obama.
That, in any case, is a failure of strategy, not substance. And as I said, even the mythical perfect campaign might not have saved Edwards. Seeing the breadth and fervor of Clinton and Obama supporters, I have trouble imagining a scenario by which Edwards could've captured the nomination. It's for this reason that I hope most progressives resist the temptation to doubt the potency of his message. Already Dana Goldstein and Mike Lux have cited his class-based message as a liability. (Ever notice that when populists lose the message is the problem, but when New Liberals lose the problem lies elsewhere?) In fact, his message was about his only advantage, along with fine skills on the stump. His message kept him in the thick of the race. It helped to win the final debates and to surge toward the end of each caucus or primary before the money, organizations, and frontrunner-ness of Clinton and Obama prevailed.
Edwards's loss is no reason to doubt that a populist message of economic justice is the right one for Democrats. Right as in moral and right as in smart. In fact, sometimes I have troubling believing that there's even a debate about whether Dems should run against corporate power and the inequality it causes. Should Democrats talk about poverty? Should they see unions not as a special interest but as the backbone of our party? Should they aim to be the party of the majority rather than the plutocracy? Should they speak for the unlucky classes? Are these serious questions? Yes, sadly, they are, deadly serious, as there are and will always be Democrats who claim that such as message is too divisive, too angry, too polarizing. These Democrats will be heartened by the triumph of either Clinton or Obama.
But remember, neither Obama nor Clinton has beaten McCain yet, much less made the Democrats the majority party. I see no reason to believe that Dems will dominate without taking a populist turn. (They never have.) And even if we could win without speaking for the non-rich, why would we want to?
Much has been made of Obama bringing people into the party. Well, Edwards, brought me back in. I was a disillusioned Dem, a former Nader voter who couldn't get excited about a party that had become almost as plutocratic and corporatized as the GOP. Senator Edwards, you made me proud to be a Democrat. You inspired me. And of course I'm not alone. I belong to a mass of activists who are proud to call themselves Edwards Democrats. We will work to create the kind of populist movement that can sustain the next Edwards or Edwards-like campaign. Senator Edwards, your fight is our fight and it carries on.