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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
He's honing his stump speech and exhorting Democrats to stay the course. But can the twice-rejected pol hold the limelight until 2008?
Apr 26, 2005 | The first audience question John Edwards received, after addressing a packed house at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government earlier this month about his new anti-poverty campaign, had nothing to do with poverty. Instead it was about the subject nearly every Democrat has pondered since November 2004: campaign strategy. Considering how the election turned out, asked a young man describing himself as a former Howard Dean volunteer, what have you learned?
Edwards has heard this question before. In typical Edwards style, he already has a standard answer for it. "The American people want strength, conviction and a core set of beliefs that you will fight for," replied the former senator, presidential candidate and vice-presidential nominee. Discussing "how to maneuver our way through the political landscape," he added, is a fool's errand. "How about if the Democratic Party actually stands for the values the Democratic Party has always stood for?" asked Edwards. "We shouldn't change what we believe and what we stand for because of one election or even two elections."
In one sense, this is a political answer to a political question. Having experienced a campaign in which his running mate was battered with charges of inconsistency, Edwards is emphasizing that he, for one, is all about staying the course. But more generally, Edwards is right. After years of being on the defensive in elections, shifting this way and that and trying not to offend voters, the Democrats need to assert their values forcefully. One nagging question remains: What, exactly, do the Democrats stand for?
Articulating an answer -- the answer -- is what many political observers have argued the Democrats need to do, although none of them seem quite able to express it themselves. It is also the question John Edwards has taken up more directly than any other potential 2008 presidential candidate. "We stand for work and opportunity," Edwards said earlier this year. At times he has talked of creating an "opportunity society." At Harvard he spoke of allowing all Americans "the dignity and honor in hard work." The precise formula is a work in progress, but Edwards envisions a campaign in which the Democrats do not merely list good policy ideas, but emphasize the moral foundations of social justice, and depict the party's ideas as representing the essential American values.
Thus every time Edwards speaks, there are two talks being given: the one he is delivering, and the one he is crafting over time. When I saw Edwards at the Kennedy School on April 13, he delivered a decent policy speech, but not a superb one. He was warmly received by most of the standing-room crowd -- students, campaign workers, local politerati like Mary Beth Cahill and David Gergen -- though not everyone was impressed. One Kennedy School student I spoke to shrugged off the talk as political posturing -- though he admitted, "I'm a bit cynical" -- while an older woman was disappointed because she had hoped to hear a version of the superb "Two Americas" stump speech that vaulted Edwards to prominence a year ago.
But watching Edwards is like following a baseball team: The result may vary on any given night, but what matters is the long haul. In 2008, when George W. Bush will be a semipopular president leaving office for good, the next Democratic candidate will face a new challenge and a new opponent, but will still need a broad, compelling critique of Republican ideas and practices. Edwards may not find it, but then again, he just might.
Of course, during the current phony-war period when Washington etiquette deems it impolite for potential candidates to talk about their White House aspirations, Edwards has resisted saying anything definitive about 2008. Surely Edwards would need his wife, Elizabeth, diagnosed with breast cancer as the votes were still being counted last November, to regain her health before he gives the presidency another shot.
Whether Edwards should also defer to John Kerry's presidential plans, à la Joe Lieberman and Al Gore, currently fascinates Beltway insiders who have long forgotten the context of the Gore-Lieberman pact: the extraordinary 2000 recount, which, Democrats felt, wrongfully excluded Gore from the White House. At the moment, Edwards is deflecting all queries about Kerry. "I'll decide what's the right thing to do based on what's going on with my own family," he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News' "This Week" in February.
