With Edwards out, things shift
John Edwards has announced that he is withdrawing from the presidential race and is scheduled to make a formal announcement at 1:00 PM today. This is disappointing, if not unexpected, although I fully expected him to remain in the race at least through Super Tuesday. His withdrawal only five days before that date suggests to me that he will throw his support behind one of the two front-runners, although the CNN article linked above quotes one of his aides as saying that he does not plan to make an endorsement right away.
This changes the dynamic of the race significantly, and it will also change the dialog about the issues. From the beginning, Edwards has hammered issues such as poverty, economic inequality, and our broken health care system to such a degree that the other candidates have been forced to articulate more detailed positions than they otherwise would have. The presence of John Edwards in the race has forced both Obama and Clinton to take at least a few baby steps away from their pre-packaged, DLC-approved, triangulating, GOP-lite positions.
With Edwards out of the race, that pressure on Clinton and Obama has now evaporated. I'm guessing that, with Edwards no longer applying pressure on them to stick to substantive discussions of the issues, the race will focus even more on shallow celebrity endorsements than it already has. With Edwards no longer in the game, the race will degenerate even further into bumper sticker slogans as a substitute for substance.
At least until the convention, the race between Clinton and Obama will now shrivel into two camps shouting "Hope!" and "Experience!" at each other, with little discussion of the real problems the country faces. See this depressingly vapid exchange between Obama and Clinton supporters as a harbinger of things to come.
Health care reform remains one of the top issues to me, and Edwards was the only candidate proposing reforms that stood even a chance of covering all of the 47 million uninsured. In contrast, the milquetoast proposals put forth by Obama and Clinton fall far short of the radical reforms our system needs; if either of them becomes president, we'll see a few Band-Aids thrown at the problem and not much else.
I guess we're supposed to "hope" for a miracle that will cover the uninsured, or rely on someone "experienced" at voting for a war based on lies to extract us from that quagmire.
Wake me in November.