Losing Ugly
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:56:30 -0800 (PST)
Losing Ugly
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 25, 2008; A19
There's losing. There's losing honorably. And then there's John
Edwards.
Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South
Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made
that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical
Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow. But his was not a
rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the
voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to
matter, and he might even carry enough remaining Southern states to
wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.
Fred Thompson will also not be president. His campaign failed, but
quite honorably. He never tacked. He never dissimulated. He refused to
reinvent himself. He presented himself plainly and honestly. Too
plainly. What he lacked was the ferocious, near-deranged ambition
(a.k.a., fire in the belly) required to navigate the bizarre ordeal
that is today's nominating process. Political decency is not a common
commodity. Thompson had it. He'd make a fine attorney general, and not
just on TV.
Then there is John Edwards. He's not going to be president, either. He
stays in the race because, with the Democrats' proportional
representation system, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might end up
in a very close delegate race -- perhaps allowing an also-ran with,
say, 10 percent of the delegates to act as kingmaker at the
convention.
It's a prize of sorts; it might even be tradeable for a Cabinet
position. But at considerable cost. His campaign has been a spectacle.
Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq war vote. But he
has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret
and renunciation:
¿ As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now
denounces.
¿ As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca
Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.
¿ As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind
education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it
"radically overhauled."
¿ As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it "a good
bill . . . and I am pleased to support it." He now attacks it.
¿ As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need
I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a
sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of
greed, etc.
Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But
everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a
single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an endless
string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy,
bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but
inveighs against.
Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an "epic struggle"
against the great economic malefactors that "have literally," he
assures us, "taken over the government." He is angry, embodying the
familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly
holds to any revelation other than the zealot's very latest.
Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What
is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the
raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has
been the "cause of my life," the very core of his being, ingrained in
him on his father's knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the
anecdote he's telling. You must understand: This is not politics for
him. "This fight is deeply personal to me. I've been engaged in it my
whole life."
Except for his years as senator, the only public office he's ever
held. The audacity of the all-my-life trope is staggering. By his own
endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint
newly acquired. His claim that it is an expression of his inner soul
is a farce.
A cynical farce that is particularly galling to authentic and
principled left-liberals. "The one [presidential candidate] that is
the most problematic is Edwards," Sen. Russ Feingold told the Post-
Crescent in Appleton, Wis., "who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns
against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it.
Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the
Iraq war. . . . He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even
though he had the opposite voting record."
It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world. But for
4 percent of the Nevada caucuses?
.
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