Usually, I love dailykos rhetorical carnage. It's why I find myself so often contributing to it when I think it's worthwhile. And in truth, debate is positive when it helps us improve our ideas, sharpen our arguments, share our insights. But sometimes there comes a point when you just see rage for its own sake, and incitement for its own sake, even among people of good intentions, and it just becomes obvious that perspective has been lost.
Recently, specifically, the sniping between Edwards and Obama camps has just begun to get out of hand, totally disproportionate both to the realities of the two candidates' political situations and to their actual campaigns' positions with respect to each other. Specifically, I am talking about (1) the Edwards supporters who equate Obama with Clinton, or worse; and (2) the Obama supporters who insist that Edwards should get out of the race immediately to give their preferred candidate a clear shot. Both the Edwards and the Obama supporters who engage in these lines of argument do their campaign a disservice.
To the Edwards people who hold that Obama is in the stultifying grip of reactionary corporations, or that there is no difference between he and Clinton, I have for them these words:
Let me just say a quick word about this. You know, Senator Obama and I have differences. We do. We have a difference about health care, which he and I have talked about before. We have a fundamental difference about the way you bring about change. But both of us are powerful voices for change. And I might add, we finished first and second in the Iowa caucus, I think in part as a result of that.
Now, what I would say is this. Any time you speak out powerfully for change, the forces of status quo attack. That's exactly what happens. It's fine to have a disagreement about health care. To say that Senator Obama is having a debate with himself from some Associated Press story, I think is just not -- that's not the kind of discussion we should be having. I think that every time this happens, what will occur every time he speaks out for change, every time I fight for change, the forces of status quo are going to attack. Every single time.
And what we have to remember, and this is the overarching issue here, because what we really need in New Hampshire and in future state primaries is we need an unfiltered debate between the agents of change, about how we bring about that change, because we have differences about that. But the -- the one thing I do not argue with him about is he believes deeply in change and I believe deeply in change. And anytime you're fighting for that, I mean, I didn't hear these kinds of attacks from Senator Clinton when she was ahead. Now that she's not, we hear them. And anytime you speak out, anytime you speak out for change, this is what happens.
--John Edwards, ABC/Facebook/WMUR New Hampshire Democratic Debate, January 6, 2008.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/...
To recap, Edwards believes he is a change agent and Obama is a change agent and their debate is over the details of the policies they want to institute in the America they want to build. But he distinguishes the debate between he and Obama and the debate between the two of them and Clinton as being between agents of change and the continuation of the moneyed powers that govern Washington and the cross-party consensus they enforce. So if any of the Edwards people here on dailykos has a problem with the idea of Barack Obama as an agent of real reform, take it up with your guy there, because he doesn't.
The real and substantive differences between Obama and Edwards on trade, health care and social security are real and every bit worth fighting over (and I think Edwards is right on all these issues). At the same time, we should see that the context of these disputes is one of broad agreement on the way forward for the country, and that this can be a creative exchange of ideas rather than a demoliton derby that benefits the campaign whose only cause is its own self-interest.
And now for the Obama people trying essentially to shout Edwards off the stage: what precisely makes you think that Edwards' supporters, upon him leaving, would each and every one vote Obama?
Even if Edwards personally endorsed Obama, he couldn't guarantee the support of all his likely primary voters. It's not like he would walk them into the polling booth and pull the lever for them. The demographic profile of the Edwards voter is (we're painting with a very broad brush here) far more like that of the Clinton voter than the Obama voter, blue collar rather than white collar, die-hard Democrat rather than independent, Chevy pickup rather than Prius.
This also proves crucial if we move from the reflexive assumption that the two men divide the anti-Hillary vote, an idea that plays well on dailykos but which may not actually be true as an expression of what is actually happening. A perfect example could be South Carolina, where a resurgent Edwards could slice deeply into the white vote, winning those voters whose memories of the Clinton years are of broken promises and actual economic decline, but who are culturally reluctant to vote Obama. Similar trends persist throughout the South. In North Carolina, where the major candidates are at 31, 29 and 27, does anyone really think that if Edwards were to withdraw Obama would be the primary benefactor?
Before we get caught up in the racial politics specific to the South, it's helpful to note we've already seen this dynamic play out in the race. Barack Obama won in Iowa, the state where a strong Edwards campaign pulled 30% of the vote. Obama pulled more or less the same percentage in New Hampshire, but there Edwards won only 17%, with the correlation if not the result that Clinton won.
So, having two ideologically and culturally distinct political movements, each propounding its own variance on the theme of reform, is actually useful in stopping Hillary Clinton. In marketing terms, this is called segmentation. And by allowing Edwards and Obama to go after separate as well as overlapping pools of voters, it might well prevent Hillary's nomination.
Other diaries have made similar arguments, but it's worth noting that many states' primaries are not winner take all, and that the nominating convention is not the Electoral College, so it could even be possible for the two candidates to ultimately combine their pledged delegates to get a majority, even if Edwards never wins a state.
And conversely, if Edwards is ultimately able to garner more delegates than Obama, then the precise same argument could be made in reverse, that Obama kept African American voters, who have been for sixteen years the Clintons' reliable base, from rallying to their side.
So please, let's stop the infighting between the Edwards and Obama camps. I'll conclude with a brief allegory, taken from the brilliant television series Battlestar Galactica.
In one of the great space battles of all time, two heavily armored spaceships--the Galactica and the Pegasus--risk everything in a do-or-die attempt to rescue all that is left of the human race from the surface of a desert planet from the grip of an evil, soulless enemy against which they are almost hopelessly outmatched (remind you of anyone yet?). At a certain point in the battle it is certain that one or the other of the spaceships is going to be destroyed, but rather than break off the fight, and realizing that the battle can only be won if both ships continue their bombardment of the common enemy, they continue fighting until one is destroyed (listen closely, Obama supporters, the ship that fails actually turns out to be counter to everyone's expectations the newer, bigger, more powerful one), allowing the other to escape and escort the human race to safety.
The lesson is that both channelled their fight into a common enemy that stood against their shared principles, did not take their eye off the goal, and did not allow resentment to overcome their awareness that the other force out there fighting alongside them was committed as much as they were.
And before I get any grief from Clinton supporters, I would never compare your candidate's campaign to the cylons. I could never imagine Hillary Clinton as anything so intellectually honest, principled, and capable of sacrifice as a cylon. And while this race of killer robots did rain down nuclear destruction on humanity, they never tried to disenfranchise Las Vegas busboys from the Democratic caucuses.
So let's keep things in perspective, alright? This fall, we'll fight the final battle in the war of good versus evil. But before that, we have to fight the final battle between good versus Clinton.