Edwards Still the Only Electable Democrat

A clip from Jayne Lyn Stahl at Huffington Post:

So, maybe the media has timed out on John Edwards. Maybe the pay for view press has decided to shrink the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination to two candidates, but this would be premature evacuation. Every contender with the stomach for it has the right to remain in the race for as long as he or she wants without the benefit of primetime postmortems.

Isn't it bad enough that we try, and convict, those who are only suspected of committing a crime on our TV newscasts? Is this any way to run a democracy? Yeah, into the ground, I think.

If we, in this country, weren't so insistent upon novelty, and looked instead to competency, John Edwards would be, by far, the clear leader as the nominee of the Democratic Party. Yet, in keeping with their time-honored tradition, the Democrats will instead show their uncanny ability to foul it up all just when a victory is most needed, and instead of delivering an end to a war which has lasted longer than Vietnam, we will, yet again, deliver a nominee who is guaranteed to pull an LBJ and keep fanning the flames of war in the name of bringing the boys home. The lies are the same; the only thing that's changed is the calendar.

While it's true that any Democrat nominated must secure as many crossover Republican votes as possible, if we think of government as a large ship, what happens when all the weight is in the center?

As long as any candidate places his, or her tonnage solely in the middle, the ship of state must sink. That was John Kerry's problem; not willing to go out on a limb, sticking with the tried and true -- is this what it means to be experienced? But, even more daunting for him, Kerry wasn't a fighter. If Kerry were a fighter, he'd have held out for every last vote to be counted, in Ohio, and we would not have had a second term of George W. Bush who didn't even deserve a first term.

It would be ingenuous to think, even for a minute, that only the experienced stick with the tried and true. No one who is unprepared, or unwilling, to take a risk belongs in the Oval Office, in the first place. George Washington took risks; John Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy -- even Richard Nixon took risks; not all risks are created equal, after all.

Make no mistake, whether one likes Hillary Clinton is beside the point just as whether one likes Barack Obama is also beside the point, the only candidate who has stated emphatically that he will withdraw all troops from Iraq is John Edwards. The only candidate not beating the war drums with respect to Iran or Pakistan is John Edwards.

Moreover, the only Democratic contender not luxuriating in generalities and abstractions is John Edwards. And, ultimately, the candidate, besides Dennis Kucinich, who poses the greatest risk to the corporate lobbies, and big business in Washington, is John Edwards. Edwards is a fighter which is what the Democratic Party needs if it's to win the presidency in 2008. Edwards will fight for economic equity, he will fight for the working man and woman in this country at the expense of the corporate elite. He will see to it that more of our sons and daughters are in college than on the front lines of battle.

Yes, and go figure, John Edwards just happens to be the guy the corporate media machine is intent on writing off, trying to figure out how to siphon off his votes while they're ratcheting up John McCain. Well, guess what, winning one or two primaries doesn't make a presidential candidate anymore than losing one or two breaks one. . . .