John Edwards is dropping out. I caught one of his final "barnstorming" events through small-town South Carolina last week, and wrote about it for Salon. In trying to figure out why he never clicked, four things struck me:
- As the white male in a party whose 2004 nominee received almost three-quarters of his votes from either women or non-whites, he was always the minority in this race.
- Second, his us-v-them message had more emphasis on “us” four years ago but turned toward too much focus on “them” this time out, and most people do not want to vote against something or somebody but for something.
- Third, the primary/caucus calendar didn't work in his favor.
- And finally, his courageous transformation from a centrist DLC-type into a true populist was genuine, but served as a reminder to Democrats of their mistakes in compromising and joining with Republicans over the years on issues like Iraq and trade.
As I wrote in Salon, “In sum, 2008 is an uncomfortable year for John Edwards. Clinton is a woman and Obama an African-American in a multiracial party whose highest elected official is a woman. Clinton and Obama talk about change more in terms of what the good guys should do rather than why the bad guys should be run out of town. Clinton stands for a restoration of the Democratic politics of the 1990s, and Obama presents himself as a new-era, post-partisan Democrat. As the rural white underdog who abandoned his centrist posture to refashion himself as a populist anti-corporate bulldog, Edwards will be remembered as the 2008 contender forever in search of a winning coalition that simply wasn't there.” --Tom Schaller
