The Old Eighteen

John Edwards: still waiting for his jet ski

As the North Carolina primary approaches, speculation continues to grow over the question of if and when John Edwards will make an endorsement in the battle for the Democratic nomination, and why he hasn't done so already.  According to the New York Times, Edwards has indicated to people within his inner circle that he won't make an endorsement prior to the NC primary on May 6.  But why not?

One former aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Mr. Edwards was angling for a role in a Democratic administration, and with the contest still undecided, was hesitant to commit to a candidate.

“He doesn’t want to pick the loser,” the aide said.

However, others have indicated that he has a high opinion of both candidates and appears to be genuinely torn between the two of them.  It doesn't help that he appears to be getting yanked in both directions by those surrouding him:

Many of Mr. Edwards’s supporters in North Carolina have been quietly pressing him to endorse Mr. Obama, and a large group of them, led by Ed Turlington, his campaign chairman during the last presidential race, came forward publicly last week to support Mr. Obama.

On the other hand, Mrs. Edwards, her husband’s closest and most trusted adviser, has made it clear that she favors Mrs. Clinton; aides said she had recently tried to persuade Mr. Edwards to do the same.

As to why Elizabeth Edwards supports Hillary over Obama, while it's possible that gender politics may be playing a role, the deal-clincher appears to be health care: Elizabeth favors Clinton's plan because it contains broad mandates, while Obama's plan focuses on reducing health care costs so that insurance is more affordable and only mandates coverage for children.  Neither plan is single-payer insurance and therefore neither one will provide true universal health care, but Obama's will arguably be more successful because it addresses affordability and doesn't give the Republicans mandates to use as a talking point in their inevitable "Harry and Louise" ads.

It's disappointing to hear that Elizabeth Edwards supports the DLC machine candidate, because she's been such a strong voice for our party and its values during this election cycle.  I can certainly understand the importance that she places on health care; having lost my mother to cancer several years ago, I know all too well the woeful deficiencies of our health care system.  But I think she's misreading Obama's plan and overstating the importance and political feasibility of mandates.  Single-payer should be our ultimate goal, but until we're able to get there, we should back the plan that does the greatest good at the least cost, and that plan appears to be Obama's.

In the end, my hunch is that if Edwards does endorse, it will probably be HIllary Clinton.  But he may wait until after May 6 to do so, and if he does and Obama sweeps both Indiana and North Carolina, Edwards's endorsement might be moot.  Let's hope that's the case, because an Edwards endorsement for Hillary could make things even more complicated than they already have been thus far.

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(via The Page)

"Bowling 1, Health Care 0"

The New York Times yesterday published a scathing editorial written by Elizabeth Edwards, who tells it like it is about the corporate media and its shameful, woefully deficient of covering the 2008 presidential campaign.  She lambastes the mainstream media for focusing its coverage on political strategy and trivial nonsense at the expense of a more substantive examination of the candidates' policy proposals:

The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

[...] The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

And speaking of Joe Biden, Edwards wonders why he and other candidates in both major parties were virtually shut out of the mainstream media's campaign coverage, while Fred Thompson, who was never a serious presidential candidate, was given the kind of coverage usually allotted to frontrunners:

What’s more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. [...] Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden’s health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.

And it’s not as if people didn’t want this information. In focus groups that I attended or followed after debates, Joe Biden would regularly be the object of praise and interest: “I want to know more about Senator Biden,” participants would say.

But it was not to be. Indeed, the Biden campaign was covered more for its missteps than anything else. Chris Dodd, also a serious candidate with a distinguished record, received much the same treatment. I suspect that there was more coverage of the burglary at his campaign office in Hartford than of any other single event during his run other than his entering and leaving the campaign.

Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

To back up her assessment of the media's campaign coverage, Edwards cites a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy which found that 63 percent of the media's campaign coverage has focused on political strategy, while only 15 percent examined the candidates' stances on the issues.  She places the blame for this problem squarely where it belongs: on the profit-driven corporations who own the major media outlets:

Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

News is different from other programming on television or other content in print. It is essential to an informed electorate. And an informed electorate is essential to freedom itself. But as long as corporations to which news gathering is not the primary source of income or expertise get to decide what information about the candidates “sells,” we are not functioning as well as we could if we had the engaged, skeptical press we deserve.

And the future of news is not bright. Indeed, we’ve heard that CBS may cut its news division, and media consolidation is leading to one-size-fits-all journalism. The state of political campaigning is no better: without a press to push them, candidates whose proposals are not workable avoid the tough questions. All of this leaves voters uncertain about what approach makes the most sense for them. Worse still, it gives us permission to ignore issues and concentrate on things that don’t matter. (Look, the press doesn’t even think there is a difference!)

Elizabeth Edwards knows what she's talking about here, from personal experience.  Her husband's campaign, too, was a victim of the media's tendency to focus on the trivial and impose its own narrative on the candidates: we heard a lot more about John Edwards' hair than we ever did about his health care plan.

As bad as they are, George Bush and the other corrupt, incompetent boobs who hold power in this country are a symptom of this country's problems, not their cause.  And these problems, at their root, are a direct function of the complete absence in this country of an active, independent, and inquisitive press.  Elizabeth Edwards get it; if only others in this country's political and media elite did.

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(via The Page)