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Just 377 Days Left (and 98 days until New Hampshire): Vice President Edwards?
By Mark Grueter
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I was slightly unfair last week with a few unflattering lines about Senator John Edwards. After just recently watching an hour-long interview with Edwards it was clear that he has improved considerably over the past year as a candidate. Relatively new to politics, Edwards needed time (and still needs time) to study the details of both foreign and domestic policy options. Career politicians like Kerry, Lieberman, and Gephardt have at times made Edwards look a little weak on weighty matters; Edwards performances in the debates thus far have been unexceptional, to say the best.
But his energetic ideas for helping the downtrodden and his commitment to social and economic justice seem promising and genuine. His job, before being elected, was to sue evil corporations on behalf of ordinary people and he was evidently extremely talented at it. I think young Edwards would make a fine running mate to Wesley Clark. His inexperience on matters of foreign policy and his general nervousness make him unsuitable for the top spot. But issue by issue, right on down the line, Edwards is probably closest to where I stand. For instance, we both favored wielding American power to oust Saddam Hussein but, in light of certain things that have transpired, cannot trust Bush to handle the transition.
It has been confirmed that Clark, along with Lieberman, will skip the Iowa Caucuses. Get the word out early and play the expectations game. Iowa is essentially the first state to vote in the primary. In 2004, Iowans will meet up at the polling booths on January 19th. The next big contest is in New Hampshire on January 27, and thankfully Clark has decided to compete there; it would have been a disastrous blunder to bypass NH. Even though he’s trailing badly in the polls in NH he can still finish second or third, if not win the state outright. Clark can get away with foregoing Iowa even though nobody who has ever done so went on to become President. But past is not always prologue; John McCain ignored Iowa in 2000 and still won a landslide in New Hampshire a week later; and his eventual loss to Bush had nothing to do with him shunning Des Moines.
Moreover, Clark strategists are betting that 2004 will be different from past elections because other states have moved their dates up this time; the primaries are becoming increasingly “frontloaded.” On February 3, seven states will cast their ballots including the key battlegrounds of Arizona and South Carolina. The shortened amount of time between primary dates will not allow much momentum to build for the winner of Iowa, or New Hampshire.
National polls show Clark and Dean running about even, in the mid-teens, with a few of the others not far behind. However, “experts” are quick to note that Dean leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire and that these indicators are much more significant. With early victories, Dean’s nationwide numbers are sure to jump. This is certainly true; but an effective, wide-reaching national campaign can overcome this, especially if it’s headed by someone as formidable as General Clark.
I alluded earlier to the dissatisfaction many Americans feel toward the Bush team and the way it has conducted itself of late. Many of us gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in Iraq, for example, feeling that even if Bush is as sinister as the left suggests, he still couldn’t possibly make that troubled country any worse than it was under Hussein. And while I still think Iraq is better off now than it was six months ago, it’s difficult to see how any unaffiliated thinker could give Bush as pass. The simple fact that everybody in the administration acts as if everything is perfectly great, that they’re haven’t been any problems whatsoever, and that all is going according to plan should be enough to make even the most credulous supporter turn skeptical. In the latest New Yorker, Seymour Hersh documents how the Bush administration subverted and spat upon the entire established practice of vetting intelligence information to make sure it’s accurate. They decided what they wanted to do, then worked backwards from there, locating whatever “intelligence” was needed to justify an invasion. This type of behavior has created a minor revolt within the intelligence and military communities.
And they still claim to not having found out for sure who leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name to the fiendish Bob Novak. The press has pretty much dropped the subject, too. When Bush announced last week that they might never be able to discover who is responsible for the outrage he was essentially confessing to a presumption that he would prefer to cover it up instead. It is this very lack of openness and democracy at home that understandably leads people to doubt the administration’s desire to spread openness and democracy abroad. Don’t they get it?
Click here for last week's column.
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Mark Grueter is pursuing a Masters in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty for Political and Social Sciences. He is the Publications Manager and Web Editor for The Canon, the school's student publication and is a contributor to Stop Smiling, a magazine based in Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Grueter may be contacted at [email protected].
©
2003 Me Three