The argument that kos made in support of Edwards on the main page last night has almost persuaded me to vote for him on March 2, despite the fact that kos said he was not trying to convince anyone. Though I still think that it is unlikely that Edwards will actually win the nomination, I am a former strong Clark supporter who has been weighing whether to vote for Clark in order to make a statement, or vote for Edwards because he is still running and could at least conceivably win, and in order to make a statement of a different and somewhat weaker kind. I do not think that Kerry needs my vote in the primary; he is likely to win anyway, and -- despite Clark's endorsement and generally sound rationale for it -- I still have serious concerns about both his ability to win in November and about the potential damage that he could do the party over the next four years in the event that he is able to. Whatever his strengths, he remains -- apart from his war record -- the walking embodiment of all of the negative cultural stereotypes that Republicans have been successfully running against for the last 36 years.
That being said, I do not think that electability is a bizarre notion, as kos asserts; I simply think that many voters have a bizarre notion of what it actually consists of. I do not think, for example, that winning pluralities in multicandidate partisan contests in Iowa and New Hampshire is a reliable predictor of a candidate's ability to unseat the sitting President in a national election. Very roughly, I would define electability as a candidate's potential ability to win the necessary percentage of swing voters in swing states to win an electoral college majority, which means a Democrat's ability to hold all of Gore's states and pick up the necessary minimum of ten additional electoral votes from red states in 2000, states such as OH, MO, WV, NV, NH, and possibly AZ or AK. Having spent the greater part of my own life in the red zone, it is my strong impression that the majority of true swing voters in these states normally look more than anything else for candidates who seem to be "one of us", or at the very least to "understand people like us". It is my even stronger impression that at this particular moment in history, the majority of voters in these states and in the country as a whole still believe, on a very fundamental level, that we are a nation at war, and will be looking for someone who they can picture as a strong and credible Commander in Chief before anything else.
To simplify only a little, Kerry is extremely vulnerable in terms of the first of these two criteria; Edwards remains quite vulnerable on the second. I should mention that when all of this began, I personally found Edwards to be the least attractive of all of the serious candidates other than Lieberman. Since I believed that Bill Clinton had done more harm to the party over the past decade than any Republican ever could have hoped to, I thought that the last thing we needed was another smooth-talking, finger-to-the-wind, DLC-style candidate touting his Southern creds. After 9/11 and Bush's skillful self-transformation into an American Caesar figure chosen by the Almighty to protect us from the terrorists, I was sure that Edwards would be doomed due to his wet-behind-the-ears appearance and lack of national security and foreign policy experience. By Nov. 2002, I was in such despair about the field and about the probable consequences of another four years of the Bush Administration that I put a considerable amount of time into a predictably futile attempt to persuade another well-known Democrat to enter the race; after this effort failed, I resigned myself to the probable Kerry nomination and hoped -- but didn't expect -- that his war stories might insulate him from the onslaught that was certain to rain down upon him. I was of course thrilled by the rise of Dr. Dean, but continued to have serious concerns about whether he would be able to win a sufficient number of red electoral votes due to his own lack of national security and foreign policy experience. I know that some people disagree with me about the importance of these issues, but I watched the Democrats try to sidestep them in 2002 and run almost entirely on domestic policy -- which the polls told them was more important -- and get slaughtered. These are visceral issues to many people, and don't necessarily register adequately in telephone polls.
I'm sorry for reciting all of that personal history; the point is that I started out thinking very little of Edwards. Having said all of that, however, it is clear that he has become a stronger candidate than he was; more importantly, it is also clear that some of Bush's chickens (turkeys?) have started coming home to roost sooner than I had expected, and the would-be Emperor seems to have been damaged on both the foreign and domestic fronts -- at least for the time being -- by both the unanticipated absence of WMDs and the failure of the much-anticipated jobs to materialize. (His warrior charisma has been additionally diminished -- I think -- by Clark's presence in the race and especially by Kerry and Clelands' well-publicized attacks on him during Kerry's media honeymoon period.) Because of all of this, it is now starting to seem to me like a tossup between the last two Democrats left standing in terms of electability, depending upon how foreign and domestic events play out between now and November. This being unpredictable, however, I find kos's reasoning in favor of Edwards to be persuasive. The main thing that he leaves out, I think, is the continuing salience of the national security/foreign policy issue. Perhaps Edwards could cover for this weakness by not only selecting a running mate who is unassailable in these areas, but also by surrounding himself very tightly with a shadow cabinet/NS-FP team consisting of figures that are equally so. (In my first late-night and probably little-read diary entry, I already made an argument for a coherent group of prominent, mainstream Democrats essentially running as a team to an extent that has rarely been attempted, partly in order to cover the weaknesses of the nominee. I assumed that this would be Kerry, but it applies equally to Edwards.) I'm not going to change my tagline until it becomes clear that Edwards has a solid chance of winning the nomination, but because of recent developments and kos's cogent argument, he now at least has a solid chance of winning my own individual, meaningless vote in California.