It seems that Carolina’s fair-haired boy is starting to falter. According to the NYT OPINIONATOR’S opinion Senator Edwards is in danger of being marginalized before a primary vote is cast.
How poorly is John Edwards faring in his bid to become president of the United States? Writing on his personal blog, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor for The Nation, suggests that “the already sputtering Edwards’ campaign” hit “a definitive speed bump” yesterday when Edwards failed to win the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union. Cooper thinks “the much-coveted endorsement of Big Labor’s biggest union seemed to slip one notch closer toward never happening.”
Keep in mind that this is the NYT blog saying this, and they use The Nation and The Huffington Post as foundation to back up their thoughts. Apparently the country’s biggest union is just plain running scared, and does not want to get burned again “Howard Dean Style” by a candidate that has no legs or a broad appeal. Cooper summed it up this way…
SEIU officials are openly concerned that their once-favored Edwards is running a distant third in most national and state polls (with the exception of Iowa) and may no longer be a viable candidate, no matter how many union resources are poured into his campaign.
The NYT, my favorite source of truth and facts, offered more pearls for my swinish snout to sniff at with Mr. David Brooks’ op-ed piece entitled The Center Holds. It seems, hold the phone, Clinton is on the right track, well at least the right one if you want to get elected, and that track is the center one.
In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C. At the time, that seemed a sign that the left was gaining the upper hand in its perpetual struggle with the center over the soul of the Democratic Party. But now it’s clear that was only cosmetic. Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups — high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington.
Brooks confirms, what I have been saying for quite sometime, that the Progressive movement of the fractured Democratic Party is DOA. Their candidates, though engendering passion from the choir, can gain no traction amongst the masses. Clinton, who is quickly rallying the masses to herself, does not poll more than single digits amongst the netroots. That Clinton will ride the DLC model to win her party’s nomination does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that she is moving so quickly towards the center. We have yet to hold a caucus or primary, and she seems to be heading to the right of half a dozen Republican senators on the future of Iraq. Brooks put it this way…
On “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Clinton could have vowed to vacate Iraq. Instead, she delivered hawkish mini-speeches that few Republicans would object to. She listed a series of threats and interests in the region and made it clear that she’d be willing to keep U.S. troops there to handle them.
Regardless on what most progressively minded party activists think and the feelings of the netroots, even Hillary knows there are certain lines you should not cross if you want to survive politically. Besides it would be suicide foreign policy to follow the “run away” policy that the netroot/Progressives propose; and what they mistakenly claim ‘da people want.
Mr. Brooks, who I agree is a conservative liberal, or a liberal conservative, sums up what I believe ConClub conservatives have been outlining for quite some time: That nothing much is going to change in Iraq and the region as a whole no matter who is elected. It simply can’t. Like it or not, US foreign policy will reflect Joe Lieberman’s views more than it will Harry “Everybody Loves a Loser” Reid. The far left is spinning down the drain.
I wonder just how much, this sooner than expected; lunge for the middle Senator Clinton is now making is due to recent events. Has the surge’s success influenced her? The Senator is far too pragmatic not to get behind something ‘da people desperately hope will work if it looks like it just might. Has she been actually listening to the advice GWB has apparently been providing her? I have no worries about Hillary delivering on something for this country if she believes her interests lie in that direction.
Brooks closes with a wonderful summation, which you will have to read for yourself as I think I have pushed the copyright rules already. Suffice it to say, the Progressives have shot their collective wad. I predict IF the Dems win again in ’08, they will change leadership top to bottom.
What encourages me is that if the Democratic candidate does start to articulate a sane approach to Iraq and that region we just might make real progress on the Iraq imbroglio and the war on terror!
Democracy, as Plato wryly noted, is a pain for those who know better.
The Conservative Citizen 
Thoughtful post, PG.
Hilary is the most triangulated of candidates. She will pander to the nutroots as carefully as she can to get the nod, but will stay mindful that she needs to appeal to the middle to win. If she gets the nomination, watch her drop the wackdoodle left like a bag of expended uranium fuel rods.
Where have you been? If anything, Hillary has been moving further left with her policies. Frankly, it’s fairly ridiculous that endorsements are being made this early in the race. I think we all remember Al Gore jumping on the Dean bandwagon and how that turned out for both of them. Fact is, polling shows Hillary as the top candidate and also shows that people see her as the most liberal. That counters your logic in two ways. First, they clearly are not up to speed on the race in general, because (SHOCKER!!!) nobody is paying any real attention to the race except political junkies. But everyone plans to vote in the primary, so when they’re asked who they’re voting for, the name they know best is Hillary. It’s still a long row to hoe to get the nomination. Secondly, if she’s the frontrunner and is perceived as the most liberal, it should tell you that the far left is far from dead. Mostly because far left would be Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich, not John Edwards.
Wes, it’s over. Hilary is The Man. Deal with it.
You’d better hope Hillary is the candidate, because otherwise, you’re boned.
Wes, we are talking UNION endorsements. Edwards, as a matter of FACT, has been courting unions for years and in particular the SEIU. He has publicly stated he wants the endorsement. You need to learn a little more about politics if you confuse Al Gore’s useless nod with an endorsement of America’s largest union that spent 65 million dollars last election cycle. They fund ACORN for goodness sakes; they are the ones that register poor people to vote. You need to examine your candidate a little more closely my friend.
Sorry Wes, the point you don’t seem to get is that America sees Progressives and candidates like Edwards as the far left. Hell, you guys and your carbon credits and talk of corporation direction through taxing are socialists. Sorry Charlie, your views, the ones you express here, are for the most part only representative of 5% of the population, on a good day 10%.
I think THB made my point for me. Hill will drop the netroots and the loony Moveon/CodePink crowd as soon as Florida is called. They’ll be pissed, but whatcha gonna do? Blame it on Bush?
Yes Dave
Precisely my point, wes. Hilary creeps left to peel off liberal votes in the primaries. But she leaves herself wiggle room for a hard-Bill turn right once she gets the crown.
I’m fully aware of what Hillary is going to do. It’s also why she would lose. This is what makes it so hard for me to believe you guys when it comes to Iraq, because this is completely contradictory to everything that has been happening in this country. Republicans have lost. Polls show Democrats losing in Congress by NOT moving further to the left. The ONLY issues that the country were truly conservative about were defense and taxes. You’ve lost one and are well on the way to losing the other. News flash: the anti-corporate, anti-lobbyist, anti-wealthy-tax-break mentality does not belong to the far left. If you seriously think that people don’t want corporations to pay higher taxes, to create more jobs or to have the government force them to do it, you are out of your minds. Nobody wants socialism, but what you call socialism isn’t socialism. It’s just protecting the people of this country from the forces that are currently leading us straight into inevitable economic recession.
I don’t understand why you would POSSIBLY think America is yearning for the DLC when the progressive candidates were the only ones winning in the last election. The freaking head of the DLC couldn’t even get elected as Senator!! In a year when his opponent was running racist ads!!
because the moderates have the only hope of getting elected…?
Have you seen the latest polling numbers and trend for Congressional approval ratings lately? Zogby has the approval number in his latest poll at 11%. Those progressives are doing a mighty fine job!!
Yeah, Republican moderates. Fred doesn’t look like he’ll even make it past the primaries.
And why are those congressional numbers down? Because they keep cowering on the Iraq issue. Nobody is saying, “hey, you guys need to shut up and start talking about how to invade Iran”. ALL the success stories the Democrats have had, both in elections and in legislation, have been on progressive issues. You guys are either in denial or just crazy. Andre, back me up here.
Suuure – the nutroots are going to propel liberal icons Obama or Edwards into power. Dream on.
In what passes for debates, none of the three top Democratic candidates, not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Hussein Obama and not
the Breck GirlJohn Edwards, all of whom are running against the war, would commit to having the troops out by the end of their first term.They are running against the war, but none of them would commit to doing so in four freaking years; tell me where anyone can find leadership in that?
For a Democrat to win the presidential election, he will have to carry a big state, or a combination of smaller states, that voted for George Bush in 2004. Which of those red states does Mrs Clinton or Mr Obama carry?
Since 1972, DLC-specific and DLC-type Democratic presidential candidates were Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore; two won the presidency, while the third won the popular vote, but, thanks to the wisdom of the Framers, was not elected.
The more liberal Democrats nominated would have been George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis and John Kerry; in every case, the Republican opponent won an absolute majority of all votes cast and in two of those races, the Democrat carried only one state.
Listen very carefully: no truly liberal Democrat has ever won the presidency by being honest about his record or his intentions. Not a single one. Y’all run a
whacko liberalrepresentative of your base, and y’all will snatch defeat fromk the jaws of victory.Kerry was DLC and definitely not running as liberal, or at least not progressive. Like all DLC candidates, he had no distinctive positions or policies on anything. Jimmy Carter was populist, which counts as fairly progressive. Besides, as I mentioned, Hillary Clinton is perceived in most polls as the most liberal of the top three, yet she’s the frontrunner.
Jimmy Carter ran as a conservative Southern Democrat; he just didn’t govern that way. John Kerry tried to run as a moderate, but earned for himself the most liberal voting record in the United States Senate, to the point where President Bush was able to call Edward Kennedy the conservative senator from Massachusetts.
Mr Kerry tried to run as something he wasn’t: moderate and Catholic. No one believed him.
Hillary Clinton has a more moderate voting record in the Senate than either John Edwards or Barack Hussein Obama, and she’s trying, sort of, to run as a moderate, because she saw what happened to Mr Kerry in 2004. Conservatives picture her as a wild-eyed liberal, and maybe that would be the case if she were [shudder!] actually elected, but that isn’t how her voting record reads.
Thing about Senatrix Clinton is that she has a moderate-left voting record and talks like a centrist, pretty much the way her estranged husband campaigned, but conservatives see her as an untrustworthy, far-left liberal just pretending to be something she isn’t, to win the election, while some liberals see her as a traitor to the cause. I don’t think anyone knows who the real Hillary Clinton is, or even if there is a real Hillary Clinton; she might be entirely faked!
Of the Democratic candidates running, Mr Obama and Dennis Kucinich strike me as being at least honest about themselves; I really don’t know that much about Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (my former senator!), Mike Gravel or Bill Richardson and their campaigns.
But for the health and safety of the Republic, as well as the health and safety of our wallets, no Democrat should ever be elected!
It astonishes me to see your position on the candidates, since Clinton and Kerry personify all the weak and extravagant positions you most despise about the left. At least Edwards and Obama have plans that would actually accomplish something within the country instead of just doing nothing of substance. That said, the current Republican party wastes far more time and money than any Democrat ever could.
Wes, the point is that no OVERTLY Liberal candidate has ever had a hope of getting elected in a national campaign. They get in by pretending to be moderate. Dana has done a fine job proving that. In fact, Dukakis tried to campaign as a Moderate when he ran but lost when Bush managed to tag him as a “Liberal Governor of a Liberal State”. Once unmasked, he was toast. Why do you think they put him in that Tank in the first place?
Wes, the point is that no OVERTLY Liberal candidate has ever had a hope of getting elected in a national campaign. They get in by pretending to be moderate. Dana has done a fine job proving that. In fact, Dukakis tried to campaign as a Moderate when he ran but lost when Bush managed to tag him as a “Liberal Governor of a Liberal State”. Once unmasked, he was toast. Why do you think they put him in that Tank in the first place?
On that point, she is absolutely correct. It has been a great disappointment to me that no Democrat has the spine to actually stand for anything, which is part of why people despise liberals in the first place. But the position I am taking here is that it seems the tenor of the debate is different this election. People are extremely dissatisfied with conservatives, and “conservative” is a far dirtier word than “liberal” right now. The Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from that word, and the Democrats are proudly claiming to be the opposite. It may be that things will change, but at the moment, that’s the way I’m seeing things, even while living in the reddest state in the US.
Fantasy wish fulfillment, Wes. Just because Conservatism has been tarnished doesn’t mean Liberalism has lost its radioactive glow. Voters disenchanted with conservatives don’t suddenly become libs – one does not change his beliefs one hundred and eighty degrees overnight, maybe forty-five or even ninety. The real beneficiaries in this situation are Moderate Dems, which is why Hilary will cease her careful pandering to the nutroots and lurch right the very instant she can.
Go ahead, run Obama or Edwards; we need another Mondale Moment.
But we don’t need the voters just disenchanted with conservatives. It’s been roughly 50-50 both times, remember. A move way over to the left is way over to the left. And again, Obama and Edwards aren’t that far left. When you look at Nader, Kucinich, Gravel, etc, the differences are very clear.
I meant to say in that last one that you may be right and I might be greatly disappointed. But there IS a change underway right now, and an opportunity for real progressivism/populism to emerge. We’re not talking John Kerry as much as we’re talking Jon Tester.
Obama and Edwards may not look all that Libby to you, but they are, and in the national campaign you can bet the Republicans will get that out.
They will, and nobody will give a damn, because nobody trusts the Republican party anymore.
Wes, be careful with the broad declarations that are based on your world view. The “nobody trusts the Republican Party anymore” is just simply not true. It is one thing to believe passionately in your beliefs; it is another to lose perspective altogether. The worm turns.
Both Dana and The Beast have done a fine job of talking about liberal voting records and how problematic they are. It also bears mentioning that nobody has gone directly from the congress to being elected president since Kennedy. Many have tried, but their voting records kill them.
Carter was not a populist at all, btw. He got elected because of Watergate, no other reason. Even with that advantage he did not win by much. He also damaged this country in so many ways. He was such a horrible, horrible president. God love him, he is a terribly, terribly dishonest and resentful man now; and he still does damage.
Finally, the reason the public as a whole is unhappy with Republicans nationally is due to their perception that the Iraq War is not going well; again, nothing more than that. The ’06 election was not special at all. Statistically it was in line with 90% of all second term, midterm elections. There was no “mandate” in reality given to the Democrats. They certainly have done NOTHING with their majority (spare me it is because of Bush or the GOP’s fault, look things up first). I have no clue as to where your perceived ground swell is coming from.
I believe, as others have outlined here, that America instinctively flees from tax and spend Liberals. I think she also flees from leaders she thinks will be weak internationally during a time of unease. Great thing about this country is we get to see.
PGW, awesome post.
Wes said —
News flash: the anti-corporate, anti-lobbyist, anti-wealthy-tax-break mentality does not belong to the far left. If you seriously think that people don’t want corporations to pay higher taxes, to create more jobs or to have the government force them to do it, you are out of your minds.
I think this is nonsense. More Americans than ever own stocks, most pensions are heavily invested in the markets, and both the DOW and the NASDAQ have more than doubled over the last five years! There is no constituency whatsover for the program you favor, and that’s ignoring completely the unfortunate fact that there is no such thing as a way for the government to force corporations to create more jobs.
And it’s not just the voters who get that, either. The vast structure of wealth that funds American campaigns splits their money fairly evenly now only because they have come to be convinced that the Dems can be trusted on economic issues. Should the Democrats convince them otherwise, money sources for most Dem candidates will dry up.
PGW and several of the comments are correct: Hillary will easily win the nomination, she is viable in the general election because she is resisting the demands that she move left, and candidates that swerve left (like Edwards) immediately marginalize themselves to the electorate.
Hillary is smart enough to know that the lefty promises that fringe candidates are making (socialized medicine, abandoning Iraq, government-mandated corporate job creation) are complete fantasy. Unlike them, she plans on actually being President, and would rather not be saddled with wild-eyed and irresponsible promises she’ll only have to abandon.
Dana said:
For a Democrat to win the presidential election, he will have to carry a big state, or a combination of smaller states, that voted for George Bush in 2004. Which of those red states does Mrs Clinton or Mr Obama carry?
Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Arizona.
Either OH or FL clinches it for the Dem, or any two of the others.
More Americans than ever owned stocks in the periods right before a great big crash, too. The writing is on the wall. Financial stocks are leading indicators for the rest of the market. Savings accounts and housing values are low, personal debt is high. Not to mention the continually decreasing value of the US dollar. And thanks to the conservatives keeping those “tax-and-spend” liberals at bay, the country is thousands of billions in the red. Yeah, we’re in real good shape for the months ahead. Thanks, George!
I’m going to write a post elaborating on all of this stuff later, and there’ll be plenty to debunk there.