Edwards "A common sense Progressive"... following in the steps of Howard Dean.

[Ninga]

Ninga sez......"When at first you don't succeed....try, try, again".......

This OP is for those of you who are still looking, I recommend that you please take a few moments to read the entire diary at the link below. It is a fascinating read for sure.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/7575/23634

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Think back to 2002 and 2003, when Terry McCauliff was the Chair of our party and Joe Lieberman was, for a time, favored to be the Democratic nominee. Democratic leaders were still operating under the triangulating strategy that, whatever the Republicans were doing, the responsible thing for Democrats to do was to agree in principle with the repubs and then pick a small issue to quibble over. No Republican idea was too outrageous to grudgingly support. The D.C. democrats lived in a bubble of their own making. They were smug accomplices to our country's shame. They were wrong about almost everything, but they were Very. Important. People.

Well, Howard Dean stood up to them. On issue after issue, Dean spoke the truth while the talking heads and Washington dems enabled Bush. D.C. insiders (and their media enablers) managed to feign outrage at Dean's various "gaffes" while tolerating the most outrageous Bushian lies. Since they couldn't win on the issues, they attacked Dean by focusing on the trivial. The establishment constructed a narrative where Dean -- the moderate Governor of Vermont -- was some sort of a crazy combination of Vladimir Lenin and a pussified Ultimate Warrior.

The establishment won the first round. Howard Dean is not our president, but he kept fighting, and now he is chair of the Democratic Party. And, the FACT remains, Howard Dean was right and the establishment was wrong. The country was heading in a profoundly wrong direction in 2003, and we needed to elect someone who said this, not someone who quibbled.


The press reacted to Edwards in the same way that they reacted to Dean. Dean was destroyed over "gaffes" that were, in reality, molehills that the media turned into mountains. The media is trying to do the same thing to Edwards. We've had breathless reporting on issues like "haircut gate" or "housegate" or, my personal favorite, "he is goodlooking so voters will think he is gay or effeminate-gate." Don't think for a second that the presses decision to exaggerate Edwards miscues is a mistake:

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Will the Very. Serious. People. win? This time around, I think the answer is no. John Edwards is less swiftboatable than Howard Dean. I mean, when the media is reduced to running stories saying "he is too good looking", you know there's not much there there.

I also think John's message is maybe even more crucial than Dean's was in 2004. Our government is fundamentally broken. It needs to be vastly overhauled. This is becoming so glaringly obvious that it's going to be tough for people to believe the Washington narrative. We simply can't afford to let the Very. Serious. People. make the big decisions anymore.

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