She thinks you're weak. She has no respect for you,
and her lack of respect amounts to loathing--the kind
of loathing that the powerful feel for the powerless.
She's confident that progressives are too impotent,
divided, and disorganized to deny her the nomination.
How else to explain her vote for the Lieberman-Kyl
Amendment, which designates "href="http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/kyl-lieberman.pdf">Iran's
Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist
organization"? Do the math, people: the Revolution
Guards are terrorists + Bush launched a global war
on terror = _____. Jim Webb called the bill "href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/09/25/webb-lieberman-iran-amen_n_65823.html">Cheney's
fondest pipe dream." Recall that "href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/21/030421ta_talk_remnick">real
men want to go to Tehran."
Her vote tells you that she's cocikly crusing toward
the nomination that the press has already awarded her.
Her chief advisor, Mark "href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1412212">union
buster" Penn has crunched the numbers and told
her that she can defy the core beliefs of the party's
core with impunity. She can prepare for the general
election and focus on money and href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/26/134117/583">do
AIPAC's bidding and still win the nomination.
John Edwards is betting she's wrong. Edwards is
running a more progressive and populist campaign than
Hillary, but the Clinton Machine, ever savvy, has
convinced the MSM and even a few href="http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1572">progressive
bloggers that the differences between the two
candidates are negligible. But Hillary's prowar vote
on Thursday opened the door for Edwards and that
night, at the debate in New Hampshire, he href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/26/232118/071">surged
through.
I voted for this war in Iraq, and I was
wrong to vote for this war. And I accept
responsibility for that. Senator Clinton also voted
for this war.We learned a very different lesson from that. I have
no intention of giving George Bush the authority to
take the first step on a road to war with Iran.And I think that vote today, which Senator Biden and
Senator Dodd voted against, and they were correct to
vote against it, is a clear indication of the approach
that all of us would take with the situation in Iran
because what I learned in my vote on Iraq was you
cannot give this president the authority and you can't
even give him the first step in that authority because
he cannot be trusted.
In a better, more logical world--one in which the war
in Iraq had transformed the politics of national
security--Edwards would have said that the lesson he
learned from his vote on Iraq is not just that you
can't trust George Bush but also that warmongering
leads to war, which leads to occupation, which leads
to disaster, or that change must come from within
countries, that it cannot be imposed.
Nonetheless, the point was made. Edwards articulated
an important difference between him and Clinton, and
it's a difference that all Democrats, not just
progressives, will grasp. With his commanding debate
performance and that answer in particular, Edwards
solidified his status as Clinton's main challenger.
We can argue till the troops come home about who,
Obama or Edwards, is the superior progressive--indeed,
in a subsequent post, I'll make the case for
Edwards--but one thing is clear: only Edwards has been
willing to challenge Clinton on ideological grounds.
He has blasted her href="http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/09/_edwards_camp_cranks_up_attack_on_corporate_insider_hillary_in_new_email.php">relentless
corporatism and now, with this statement, her
militarism as well.
This is not the first instance in the race that
Edwards has carved out an important difference on
national security. Unlike Clinton, href="http://johnedwards.com/news/speeches/20070523-cfr/">he
opposes the very concept of a global war against
terrorism. And unlike Clinton, he backed the Webb
Amendment, which would have made it a crime for Bush
to attack Iran without Congressional authorization--a
position that won Edwards no friends at AIPAC, which
killed a similar measure in the House. And unlike
Clinton, who would give Bush the 92,000 new troops he
wants, Edwards isn't committed to making our monstrous
military more monstrous. Huge issues, real
differences.
Hillary thinks you won't pay attention to the
differences, just as she thinks she can get away with
casting a prowar vote in the middle of the race for
the Democratic nominaton. John Edwards hope she's
wrong.
So do I.