While you're waiting (Part 2):

The NYTImes offers you the chance to match wits against their panel of experts in Trivial Pursuits: The 2008 Campaign Edition.



The most amusing answers tend to be the ones from campaign advisors whose candidates fizzled out.

Edwards endorsement: Looks like the cat's out of the bag

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What I missed because I was at Drinking Liberally last night bemoaning with friends the fact that John Edwards dropped out of the race

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Life after Edwards

Leah at Correntewire has a good post-mortem on the Edwards campaign (better even than this one).

(Note, by the way, that it's a post-mortem on the campaign, not the fellow himself. Like Al Gore, Edwards created a way for himself to continue public service after he was out of office, and I'm sure he'll go right back to that track now. It's the GOP presidential flameouts who tend to dive back into their Rolodexes and pick up their consulting and lobbying carriers where they left off.)

Several factors go into the mix: The tendency of Hillary and Obama to co-opt many of his themes; the failure of the campaign (as opposed to the candidate) to catch hold beyond white males; and--oh yeah, let's not forget--this:

(H/t to Digby.)

Edwards finds the exit

(Update: Full video below.)

John Edwards is pulling out of the presidential primary race. He made the pre-announcement this morning; the announcement will be this afternoon, at a very fitting location for a genuine progressive:

His effort ends where it began 13 months ago -- with the Democrat helping to rebuild a city still struggling after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

The Democratic primary race was better for having him in it:

Edwards has lost races and national attention to his better-funded rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. But his presence has steered debate in the Democratic contest toward progressive ideals such as universal health care, and restricting a lobbyists pull.

And the White House would have been better for it, too.

Let's not forget, as well, that he accepted public financing (in a hardly rewarding campaign financing environment), which is a main reason his rivals were "better funded." (Of course, he never won a primary either. Chicken, meet egg.)

No word yet on what he'll do with his 58 delegates. It's not enough to give leverage at convention time, although in the last week his people had floated such scenarios.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

When the government declares war on a noun, bet on the noun

(Update below.)

John Edwards is delivering a foreign policy speech today:

Democrat John Edwards Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a "global war on terror," calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

In a defense policy speech he planned to deliver at the Council on Foreign Relations, Edwards called the war on terror a "bumper sticker" slogan Bush had used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq.

"We need a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq military that is mission focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes," Edwards said in remarks prepared for delivery. "By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set - that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam."

Good for Edwards. This "misused for discredited ideological purposes" stuff still rings better for the CFR types, and isn't yet an easy sell for most voters. But it's a start.

"War on Terror" was a great marketing slogan, but not much as a plan for national security. Americans are catching on to that.

Much as he wants to be--so, so wants to be--Bush is not a "war president." He's a "failed foreign policy president," a different animal entirely and hardly a credential that justifies trashing out the military, wrecking the economy, and eviscerating the Constitution.

Update: Full text of Edwards speech here.

Don't do it, Democrats!

(Updated below.)

From the Free Dictionary:

com•pro•mise (kom' pro -miz )
n.
1.
a. A settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions.
b. The result of such a settlement.

[Middle English compromis, from Old French, from Latin compromissum, mutual promise, from neuter past participle of compromittere, to promise mutually : com-, com- + promittere, to promise; see promise.]

From this morning's Washington Post:

Democrats Back Down On Iraq Timetable
Compromise Bill in Works After Veto Override Fails

President Bush and congressional leaders began negotiating a second war funding bill yesterday, with Democrats offering the first major concession: an agreement to drop their demand for a timeline to bring troops home from Iraq.

Let's review the fundamentals: You can't compromise--you can't promise mutually--if one party to the action makes no promises, or makes promises that simply cannot be relied upon.

"Compromise' [sic] with Bush on this and nothing will change--except that Bush will get another talking point for his side, and you make it just that much harder to get as far again as you got in the last week.

Come on, Democrats, you're so close. "Compromise" [sic] with Bush and you prolong the war--and you risk owning it, too.

John Edwards has this exactly right:

We need the Congress to stand firm and strong. If they don't have enough votes for the veto, then they need to send George Bush another bill, another funding bill. If he vetoes that bill, they need to send him another bill.

They need to be strong. They need to be courageous. This is not about politics.

We have men and women dying in Iraq. We have spent five hundred billion dollars in Iraq. It is time for America to leave Iraq.

Come on, Democrats. Quit fooling yourselves and buckle down. (You certainly aren't fooling most Americans.) Imagining that you can "compromise" [sic] with Bush on this is bad policy, and it's bad politics. Don't do it.



Update: Reid and Pelosi are denying the Post's "compromise" story--although when you examine the particulars closely, it's not clear if their defense is "we haven't capitulated" or "we haven't capitulated yet." Stay tuned.

Transcription: John Edwards at MoveOn.org veto rally, Portland

(Updated below.)

BlueOregon has the full background, but in a nutshell, it's this:

In Portland for an already-scheduled town hall meeting at noon today, Senator Edwards joined a quickly assembled "emergency veto rally" in the south park blocks at 5:15pm, one of many such rallies organized across the country by MoveOn.org and allied progressive organizations to mobilize opposition and encourage Congressional resistance to Bush's veto of the Provisional Funding Bill yesterday.

Mise en scène:

We had thunder, lightning, and hail in the early afternoon in Portland, but things had calmed down by 5pm, so I shot across the Steel Bridge, weaved through the side streets to the South Park Blocks, and made it by 5:15. Naturally, people had gathered but the featured speaker was nowhere in sight.

A crowd of people had already gathered around the Teddy Roosevelt statue--for those who like their symbolism to be unsubtle--with signs and banners. It was a pretty representative Portland crowd, running the spectrum from Columbia rain gear to Nike to R.E.I. to Lands End, and even some die-hard Eddie Bauer enthusiasts among the lot.

The organizers had provided "Keep 'em safe/Bring 'em home" signs for participants. There were a lot of others, mostly homemade:

A long war is a disaster for whoever wins--Sun Tsu
Disavow AIPAC [triggered quite an argument near where I stood]
911 was an inside job: Google 911 truth
War against terror--stupid as a war against shooters

At 5.15 a light rain had begun to fall, although not nearly enough to chase anyone away--this is Portland--but enough to bring out those huge, magnificent golf umbrellas that always make it tough to maneuver in a crowd. The rain lasted about 10 minutes, and then there were brief sun patches until Edwards arrived.

KGW NewsChannel 8's remote truck was there, plus a lot of professional photographers of unknown association. (Nothing up on KGW's web site right now; if they upload a story later, I'll update this.)

I estimated 150-200 people; a photographer standing next to me guessed 250. I laughed that KGW would report that there were 100, and the organizers would say there were 700.

Three Portland bike cops stood to the side, chatting and keeping an unworried eye on the crowd (these were Edwards people, after all). Soon two horse patrol officers appeared, although they seemed mainly interested in staying under the trees and out of the rain. (Bike patrol officers have much, much better rain gear.)

Perhaps it was the rain, perhaps it was the short notice, but the obligatory counter-demonstrators were conspicuous by their absence. One of the volunteers, circulating a sign-up clipboard, did get harassed by a fellow with a cell phone to one ear who kept saying something to egg him on (just out of reach of my microphone). The two stood at the back fringe of the crowd, and I saw the volunteer nervously and indignantly protesting that he was "an American," that he "voted American." The cell phone guy stepped forward as the volunteer retreated, apparently offering some more unwelcome comments, but the volunteer refused to engage him further and he drifted away.

In an effort to run out the clock until Edwards arrived, organizers led cheers and made short speeches. In one delightful moment, a fellow read off the phone number for Gordon Smith's Portland office, and the crowd repeated it back as they punched it into their own cell phones. It became a chant: "Five Zero Three! Three Two Six! Three Three Eight Six!" Pity Gordon's local staffers tomorrow.

At about 5:30, a volunteer for Edwards suddenly looked around: "Anybody got a bullhorn? Bullhorn--we need a bullhorn!" The photographer standing on the park bench next to me and I rolled our eyes at each other in amusement. Fundamentals, guys--this was on the midterm for Anti-War Rally 101.

About four minutes later, a bullhorn was located. It had "PSU" marked on the side of it in permanent marker. Did someone sprint down to Portland State's student union building? Once the bullhorn was working, the first chant was: "What do we want?" [Peace!] "When do we want it?" [Now!]

It's probably not fair to mention, but the organizers from Edwards' team and MoveOn looked a bit more frazzled than their counterparts in "Primary Colors" or "Wag the Dog" seemed to do. Draw your own conclusions: It was the end of an off-and-on rainy day, at a last-minute event, 3000 miles from home--but I still give them credit for being on their game. Better them than me.

Twenty 'til six: When I first arrived, I was at the front of the crowd. Then, when they found the bullhorn, the center of activity shifted so I was on the fringe, standing on a bench to see. Now one of Edwards' team tells me nicely that the Senator is going to stand where I'm standing when he gets there, so I'll have to move. I smile agreeably and tell her I'll move as soon as the Senator gets there. You can see on her face that she's clearly spent a day--a week--a whole spring--in an environment where everyone wants to negotiate everything, and she instantly sizes me up for the utter lightweight I am, but she smiles and nods. Bless her heart. I stand on the bench as the crowd shifts and presses close--looking up at me. Just to be clear, I announce, "I'm not him." No one had asked to shake my hand.

Two minutes later, Edwards shows up, walking up the path from the south. Blue sport coat, open collar blue check shirt, blue jeans. Probably the only candidate for either party who looks remotely plausible in blue jeans. He shakes a few hands on the front edge of the crowd (including your humble narrator's), and mounts the park bench that I will insist to my dying day I was saving specifically for him.

The crowd closes in, and even with my trusty MP3 player only five or six feet from him, cheers and applause drowned out a couple of moments. But only a couple:

Edwards' remarks in the South Park Blocks:

Thank you very much. And let me say first of all how proud I am of all of you, and for others like you around the country, who are speaking out and standing up against this president.

This president, four years ago yesterday, arrived on an aircraft carrier and declared "Mission Accomplished." Not quite, right?

And now, for all of us, the reason we're gathered here today, is because the Congress has been given a mission. They were given that mission on Election Day 2006. And that mission is to stop this war in Iraq.

We need the Congress to stand firm and strong. If they don't have enough votes for the veto, then they need to send George Bush another bill, another funding bill [garbled]. If he vetoes that bill, they need to send him another bill.

They need to be strong. They need to be courageous. This is not about politics.

We have men and women dying in Iraq. We have spent five hundred billion dollars in Iraq. It is time for America to leave Iraq.

And I want to say to all of you, and all the MoveOn members all across this country: You've spoken out with strength and courage and passion about this issue. I'm proud of you for what you're doing. I'm proud of what you're doing, in speaking out, and standing up with strength and courage.

For those of you who haven't seen it, we put an ad on--we're putting an ad, tomorrow morning, on the air, in Washington DC, urging the Congress to stand strong, to stand firm, to stand with the American people and against George Bush.

And I want to say to all of you--you can join. Your voices can be heard. You can go to johnedwards.com, you can see the ad, you can pass it on to your friends, and you can join your voice to this chorus [?]. Because we want your voice to be heard.

This is such an important movement. Here's the truth--the great movements in American history did not begin in the Oval Office in Washington DC. The great movements--the civil rights movement, the movement to stop the war in Vietnam, the movement to stop the apartheid regime in South Africa--and today, the movement to stop the war in Iraq starts right here, in Portland, Oregon, with all of you [garbled].

Thank you all very much.

(Update: Video excerpt of Edwards' speech is here.)

Edwards under the radar

Blue Oregon brings up an important point: The media are obsessed with Hillary and Obama, but the numbers in Iowa all go towards the at-least-arguably-populist Edwards.

It's going to be an interesting eleven months ahead.

Contamination

As an sidebar to Frank Rich's column arguing that Beltway experience may be the last thing Obama needs to be a good president (and noting his early opposition to the Iraq war), here's an interesting tidbit from Newsweek about John Edwards and the Beltway:

In the fall of 2005, John Edwards sat down with a pad and pen and scrawled out three simple words: "I was wrong." It was nearly three years after he'd joined a Senate majority in voting to authorize war in Iraq. After an unsuccessful run as John Kerry's vice presidential candidate in the 2004 election, Edwards had returned home to North Carolina and watched as the war descended into chaos. Increasingly filled with regret, he concluded that the three-word confession would be the right way to start a Washington Post op-ed admitting his vote was a mistake.

But when a draft came back from his aides in Washington, Edwards's admission was gone. Determined, the senator reinserted the sentence. Again a draft came back from Washington; again the sentence had been taken out. "We went back and forth, back and forth," Edwards tells NEWSWEEK. "They didn't want me to say it. They were saying I should stress that I'd been misled." The opening sentence remained. "That was the single most important thing for me to say," Edwards recalls. "I had to show how I really feel." […]

Edwards's new commitment to authenticity may have real roots: in 2004, the candidate learned the hard way that too much caution can be fatal. When the Kerry campaign faltered, Edwards and his wife were convinced that a broad swath of competing consultants, offering conflicting advice, were largely to blame. "Consultants can make it hard to tell the truth," Edwards says. "They want you to be so cautious it makes it hard to say anything." Aides, who didn't want to be named discussing their boss's internal thinking, say he walked away from 2004 convinced that only strong, centralized decision making works in presidential campaigns.[…]

Aides saw a new confidence in Edwards after he publicly repudiated his war vote in November 2005.

(h/t to Atrios, who notes, "I think it's pretty clear to most of us that the primary reason Edwards as much traction as he is getting is because of 3 little words.")

It's a telling image: Edwards, sitting in North Carolina, watching that bit of honest and painful self-examination--too blunt and unambiguous to be reinterpreted later as political events might require--get dropped like a grenade every time he allowed it to be touched by people back inside I-495.

There's a world of difference between saying "I was wrong, and I take responsibility for that," and saying "I was wrong--and it's all George Bush's fault." (Hillary, I'm looking at you.)

(Typically, Newsweek doesn't bring up the Edwards story in order to consider the ways in which the political establishment--including not only the oversight-averse Congress but also Newsweek's own corporate cousins at NBC like Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell--were much more willing collaborators than honest victims in the dishonest setup to Bush's War. Instead, the incident is included as part of an attempt to raise the silly question of whether Edwards' "new authenticity" is authentic, whatever that means.)

Speaking of Hillary, Kos has a post this morning on HRC's "Iraq problem," and wraps up with this not-even-remotely-conciliatory peroration:

I have no interest in giving a pass to those Democrats who aided and abetted Bush's mistakes, and I especially have no interest in giving a pass to those who demonstrate Bushian inability to offer self-reflection and admit that mistake. It's not a question of offering an "apology". I want acknowledgment of past mistakes.

These Democrats didn't just enable Bush's war, they sat by and let the Right Wing smear machine attack those of us who waged our lonely battles to prevent this disaster from happening. And while most of the candidates in the field have come around, Hillary remains the notable exception.

Those who have admitted their mistakes are now free to train their sights on the GOP. It doesn't absolve them from their terrible judgment, but it mitigates it. While it's best to not make a mistake in the first place, it's even worse to compound that mistake by refusing to come to terms with it.

Clinton doesn't have that. And what's worse, she has pretty much lost the window of opportunity to do so. After resisting for so long, she finds herself in the thick of the presidential primary (yes, even a year out) with no room to maneuver. If she suddenly reverses course and decides that yes, she'll take personal responsibility for her vote, it'll feed into the strongest anti-Hillary narrative -- that she's a panderer and will say what is most politically expedient at the moment.

It's a sad state of affairs, but Hillary has made her bed.

Kos makes a good point, by the way, that those congressional Democrats who supported the war also stood silently by while those Americans who got it right four years ago were called traitors, America-haters, terrorist-lovers, betrayers of our troops, and so on and on. The consequences of that are something for them to consider carefully, now that they're courting those same citizens' votes as candidates.

Flash: Does Hillary read p3?

Here's a post from last Wednesday:

I stand by my prediction: I think it's going to be a tough row to hoe for any 2008 Democratic presidential candidate who supported the war unless they--all right, I'll say it: unless she--does more than merely surf the latest polls and claim that the war is now a disaster, and instead goes the distance and admits that it was a mistake from the beginning.

And here's what ABC News is reporting tonight:

As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to assess a possible presidential candidacy and the contours of a Democratic nomination fight, she has taken another step away from her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq by saying that she "wouldn't have voted that way" if she knew everything she knows now.

Clinton has often been asked if she regrets her vote authorizing military action and she usually answers that question with an artful dodge, saying that she accepts responsibility for the vote and suggesting that if the Senate had all the information it has today (no WMD, troubled post-war military planning, etc. . .), there would never have been a vote on the Senate floor.

However, she has never gone as far as some of her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination -- who also voted for the war -- and called her vote a mistake or declared that she would have cast her vote differently with all the facts presently available to her -- until now.

Okay, let's do the arithmetic: I give her two days to get around to reading my post, a day to talk it over with the Big Dog, another day to work on it with her staff . . . and, lo and behold, her statement comes out today. Honestly--can you think of any other cause for her announcement?

Makes me wish I had one of those "blue light" gifs like the Drudge Report.

Of course the other blogs and pundits who will resent my growing influence are going to ask: Why is she not getting the same snide treatment that I gave Gordon Smith for obviously trying to save his political hide by cutting and running from Bush after the midterms?

A couple of reasons, really. First, although it will somewhat spoil the literary effect I'm trying to achieve here, the truth is I do think there's something more than a little calculating about this. Who doesn't? Hillary hears Obama's footsteps right behind her. Ironically enough, Smith's anguished cry from the Senate floor a week and a half ago might well have been the tipping point for Hillary: If Gordon Smith--of all people--can get to the left of her on the Iraq War, what kind of leverage will her position give to an antiwar darling like Obama? Time to close that gap, and close it fast.

Second, of course, while I'm not really a supporter of Hillary '08, I'm more than happy to see her keep her Senate seat, which is something I can't really say about Smith.

But Senator Clinton, if you really are reading this [stop laughing, you hosers!], you're not really going to be on the right side of the Iraq War issue until you've said those three little words.

Confession: It's good for the soul

The Oregonian's Steve Duin reminds me of something I meant to mention in my recent posts about Gordon Smith's expedient change of heart on the Iraq war:

Duin points out that John Edwards showed integrity on this subject--and he showed it over a year ago. Both are important points: Edwards not only admitted that he was wrong to have supported Bush's invasion of Iraq, he came clean at a point where there was still considerable political risk for saying so and at a moment that had no obvious political advantage for him. He came clean on Veterans Day 2005 because it was the right thing to do.

I stand by my prediction: I think it's going to be a tough row to hoe for any 2008 Democratic presidential candidate who supported the war unless they--all right, I'll say it: unless she--does more than merely surf the latest polls and claim that the war is now a disaster, and instead goes the distance and admits that it was a mistake from the beginning.

Raising the bar for 2008

I could be wrong about this, but I'm beginning to suspect that no Democratic candidate for president in 2008 who voted for the Iraq war and who hasn't found some way to recant by then (cough, cough, Hillary! cough, cough!) is going to be electable.

It hinges on things continuing on the trajectory they're currently on, of course, and that's a big "if." (All it would take was one Bill O'Reilly launching himself at the Trans Am Building to turn things around.)

Here's where things are starting to move: Rather than use the Veterans Day holiday weekend as an opportunity to give opponents of the Iraq war the McCarthy treatment, as Bush chose to do, John Edwards used the occasion to come clean:

I was wrong.

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake -- the men and women of our armed forces and their families -- have performed heroically and paid a dear price.

The world desperately needs moral leadership from America, and the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth.

While we can't change the past, we need to accept responsibility, because a key part of restoring America's moral leadership is acknowledging when we've made mistakes or been proven wrong -- and showing that we have the creativity and guts to make it right.

I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool Edwards fan, but I have to admit I'm impressed by this--not only for being a mensch but for the tactical shrewdness I suspect lurks not far behind this declaration. The GOP smear machine, in the service of whoever will be their nominee in 2008, will have a hard time pinning the "I was for it before I was against it" tail on that donkey.

Wait and see: If more 2008 hopefuls find a way to join Edwards and Kucinich--and a majority of Americans polled--in saying that invading Iraq was a mistake from the get-go, a mistake that never would have happened if Congress hadn't gone along with the lies coming out of the White House, it'll be bad news for the wannabes who continue to continue to support Bush's war.