The Right Candidate for the Right Reasons

The Left will eat itself

Jim Booth considers why Edwards, who has stood far above and beyond Obama and Clinton, is out and they are still in. I have struggled to put these same feelings into words, but he nails exactly how I (and I suspect, many others) feel about this subject.

EXCERPT

What Edwards is really doing is paying the price for being a white guy at the time of historic (and mostly just) back lash against the “aristocracy of white guys” that has been the target of the concerted efforts of “liberals” who aren’t liberal at all. What these “liberals” (too often media pundits) are are ideologues who proclaim that someone would make a better (read “more media interest worthy”) Presidential candidate simply because that person is a) a woman or b) an African-American. Justice is one thing - ideology is another - this is ideology at its most reeking…. Yes, I hear your scornful retorts: “These are the times that try [white] men’s souls…” yadda, yadda….
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I don’t say this to discredit Hillary or Obama, both of whom have real merit. I say this because the drive to push forward a woman or black candidate is (I fear) a media creation that allows the media then to control the narrative of the Democratic campaign - and the election. And the Democratic Party, which plays the sucker to every narrative the media creates for it, is playing the sucker again.
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John Edwards has addressed overtly and directly real issues plaguing our country at this historical moment - the shift toward a class system that the “Repugnacans” have engineered - and their systematic removal of any realistic opportunity for those in the rapidly developing underclass to better themselves. Edwards, like me, Sam Smith, and many others across this country, has been able to work hard, gain success, and rise to a position of both (in a relative sense) wealth and power because of the past social and economic policies of the Democratic Party. I don’t begrudge him any of his success the way the entitled scions of the Right do - to do so would be to repudiate my own life. What I find most repellent in The Left’s rejection of JE is its own smug self-righteousness that it is doing so for the “correct” reasons.
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Not so. The Left is rejecting Edwards because he reminds too many of us in the Left® of what WE came from - how we scrambled and worked and took advantage of opportunities made available by FDR, HST, JFK, and LBJ. It’s easier to glom onto the myth of Hillary as a deserving member of her gender or Obama as a deserving member of his race (despicably patronizing behavior masquerading as visionary open-mindedness) than to stand up and say “offering opportunities for people to better themselves has been and should always be a basic tenet of the Democratic Party.” That would mean supporting Edwards - who espouses these positions - and rejecting the more fashionable idea of supporting Hillary or Obama because they represent a “historic opportunity.”

Another poster at Scholars and Rogues, Martin Bosworth, had this say of Edwards:

Yet, through all that, his message perservered.
But his campaign did not. I honestly think it was because he focused so much on the dark, broken side of American life that people were frightened away. As I said to a friend of mine yesterday, the difference between Edwards and Obama is that the former inspires you to fight, while the latter inspires you to hope. And people would much rather hope than fight.

I would rather have a fighter than a hoper. And I would rather have the right fighter, not Hillary Clinton. Can we get Edwards back? Before it's too late?