(Crosspost from HuffPo)
You don’t hear a lot from former John Edwards supporters these days.
There are a lot of us out here on the innernetz. In fact, the left wing blogosphere was a significant source of the former Senator’s support during the last presidential primary. I daresay that without us, he wouldn’t have stayed in the game any longer than Chris Dodd did. So let me be among the first to stick my neck out there and freely accept that scarlet “E” on my forehead.
We may all be quiet lately, but as words of cheating and hair fixations and the love child and the sex tape (good god) have come out, we’re all thinking the same things all you early Clinton or Obama or Kucinich (or whoever) supporters are thinking; holy crap, what if that guy had actually been elected???
If former Edwards boosters are silent, there are plenty of “I told you so”s to be found – particularly from early Obama supporters. And why not? We were told so – most notably by progressive icon and almost-candidate himself, Senator Russ Feingold, but he was hardly the only one.
This is not to say that, given the same circumstances, I wouldn’t do it all over again. As a progressive, I liked what Edwards had to say, and we should vote for candidates who say the things we want them to say. That’s how it works. Yeah, Dennis Kucinich also said what I wanted someone to say, but somehow the abortion rights flip flop got to me a lot more than Edwards’s more numerous flip-flops.
But still, I have learned a lesson in all this.
I’m rather a cynic, and like all cynics, we prefer to consider ourselves realists. As a self-dubbed “realist” I approached my own candidate a lot differently than Clinton or Obama fans approached theirs. While the President and the Secretary of State inspired actual personal followings, I (and I suspect many other Edwards voters) wasn’t driven by the personal. In fact, I rejected the personal entirely. When a friend commented to me that she thought Senator Edwards was “a good man,” I got all squirmy. How could she know? How could I know?
And in fact, that was the real point of frustration for me regarding Clinton and (particularly) Obama voters. Their followings were so clearly personality-driven, it drove me bananas. They didn’t know these candidates. How could they? Why get all goopy over a persona that seemed no less an ungrounded fantasy as, say, leprechauns?
Bottom line for me; I didn’t really trust any of ’em. They were working me, that’s what they do. Their personas were purely public ones. I started from the proposition that they were all, to an extent, phonies. So when Feingold would suggest that Edwards was a phony, I was all “no freaking kidding – as opposed to…?”
So given that I trusted none of them, my choice came strictly down to policy – or rather, policy rhetoric. It was important to me to send a message – that liberal rhetoric was an election winner. That people who say these things win. And in getting someone elected on such a platform, even if they were a complete phony, those of us who actually sincerely believe that rhetoric would have to have a seat at the table.
And at the end of the day that’s all I ever really hoped for – even from Obama.
But I said there was a lesson for me here, and so there is. Cynicism erases subtlety. There is no nuance in “they’re all a bunch of phonies.” So whereas they may all actually be a set of phonies, there’s a way to look at that reality critically rather than reactively, or perhaps, absolutely.
In short, what I have learned as a former John Edwards supporter – one who even drove to New Hampshire to knock on doors for him and (ugh) watch him shoot hoops in a high school gym – is the following.
Okay, maybe they’re all phonies but the fact is that not all phoniness is created equal. There are many, many degrees of phoniness. Many degrees. Hoo-boy, are there degrees.
Next time I’ll try to take that into account.
I was an Edwards supporter for precisely the same reasons…the “policy speak.” We’ll never know now how genuine that message was because he tripped so irreversibly over his own shoes. But given the penchant our selected few have, on both sides of the idealogical aisle, to self-destruct in a manner extraordinarily beyond the reach of ordinary men; it begs the question once again why these are the people who invariable manage to float to the top. Surely, there were many many other thinking men and women with equally sound policy views as Edwards who could have made that ascent to the heights of power potential, unburdened by secret compulsions to self-destruct. If only the need to curry favor in order to raise astronomical amount of campaign funding didn’t necessarily pre-select the type of person who is at once unfailingly charming, never-endingly self-confident, and born with a taste for risk of the highest order. Is it just that we Americans are schizophrenically adolescent with regard to sex and power, as some have suggested; or have we simply allowed our democracy to become such a high-finance circus act, that only the glossiest and least self-aware performers need apply?
Once I heard him speak a couple of times, I knew he was the right choice…the right voice…for the dangerous times we were facing. Unlike those who focussed more on his personality than the fine points of his policies, I have never felt “betrayed” by Obama. Disappointed, most certainly; but not betrayed. He is still the same person I believed him to be during the campaign. If you listened carefully, he gave every indication then that he would be inclined to compromise with the right. A great statesman, but a confirmed centerist. We will never be on the same page about a great many things; but I believed then, as I do now, that we could not do better in this time than to choose a great statesman. When it came right down to it, they were all going to govern from the center; because nothing else was possible in such a divided country.
how public figures can believe they can lie their way out of an extra-marital affair that has been exposed to the public.
is that I became an Obama supporter because I thought he could win and I didn’t think Clinton could. This was after putting some work into the Edwards campaign.
But I’m still glad Edwards was in the race because he pushed both Clinton and Obama on the policy end in very valuable ways. That’s key, from my point of view.
Edwards demonstrated the risks of a short-term tactic of entrusting our hopes and dreams to individual candidates instead of seeing them as one in a series of spokespeople for a strong, coherent party. The Democratic candidates for governor in Vermont seem to be doing a good job so far of building the party and articulating what it stands for regardless of which one of them is elected. The GMD campaign to pledge $100 to whichever one is elected furthers the idea of party over personality. How’s that going?
As has been said John E’s rhetoric resonated with us and still does but ever since Gary Hart was demolished by a picture of him on a boat with someone not his wife the american people have held fidelity and other character flaws as a major reason to not vote for someone.
The story I read about John was of his frolicking in the air while he was John Kerry’s VP running mate.
The philandering of politicians do not bother me so much but the obvious intoxication of incipient power with the global attention seemed to be too much for him to responsibly handle…. not to mention the way he wrote off Elizabeth in her time of need.
That is why I no longer support JE… as I still very much support the programs he espoused and his continuing progressive efforts.
As our shining knight he up and fell off the horse…. something he will not be able to get back on anytime soon.
…Edwards’ sleazy private life is not as big an issue as that his anti-poverty chops (pointed out, as someone mentioned up-thread, by Russ Feingold) were non-existent. His much-touted foundation to give poor kids scholarships did next to nothing and then abruptly went away. Basically, he lied to us — and the poor — and the party — in a breathtakingly grandiose way. He then hypocritically held court amongst the serious candidates, “testing” them to see who deserved to be anointed with his anti-poverty snake oil. I feel we usually pay way too much attention to politicians’ personal lives, but Edwards seems to have consistently bad behavior in all arenas, and his behavior in one area provides accurate indications of how he will behave in another.
I started out with Edwards. He was the only candidate who made addressing the problem of poverty the central theme of his campaign, and I thought, and continue to think, that it is of critical importance to the future of our country.
The one quibble I have with the original post is that I don’t think about what a disaster it would have been if he had been elected; I think much more about what would have happened if he’d been our candidate. The affair definitely would have come out, and we’d be one year into a McCain/Palin administration.
I remember making phone calls in Derry NH, sitting next to Jimmy Carter’s secretary the Sunday before the NH primary. After knocking on doors all day. I feel the worst for her, actually. She really thought Edwards was the one. She was so sweet.
Politicians have an interesting personality type. They must have at least a shred of integrity to be worth voting for. The degree of integrity can only be seen over time, through their behavior and speech. Edwards, obviously, developed into having no integrity at all. Perhaps it is those that are hopelessly narcissistic, and/ or anti-social who can be utterly and totally untruthful. It was so easy to like Elizabeth, but her judgement was horribly clouded too. Maybe I should have bailed out at the first sight of THE HAIR video. I thought about it.
Let’s hope we have learned from this ugly turn of events.
“So much potential, wasted, is what they’re going to say about his presidency if he doesn’t learn how to fight and stop trying to make nice with the criminally insane.”
Right on, JD. You can go further and say that about the liberal wing of the party that Obama leads. So much has been wasted to useless pandering to these GOP and centrist demos that are all but gop under another name. it has also not been fun to watch the right literally try to Lynch Obama under the guise of concerns for the budget and too much government. We really have not come that far at all.
true. Be interesting to see how much his centralism will cost Obama in November