I'm just asking because it seems to me that if Edwards:
- is currently leading in Iowa polls
- has a real reasonable shot at winning in Nevada and South Carolina
- has a reasonable shot at raising enough money to contend in the race
- has very high positives and low negatives
- has the best online operation in the game in so far
then he should be considered a top tier candidate and what he has to say about the issues should be given some media attention.
But no, we can't let this guy get a word in edgewise. We can't discuss the McCain doctrine, or the Silence is Betrayal speech on Iraq at Riverside recently or the health care plan he proposed that might deliver this entire country, employers included, from the greedy clutches of insurance providers and for profit health care entities that regularly engage in murder by spreadsheet policies.
Paul Starobin was just discussing his recent article in the National Journal : The Authenticity Sweepstakes. The camera panned all the pretty pictures in the magazine article. All the candidates were presented with then and now side by sides, all except one.
John McCain was depicted as winning the medal of honor from a President on crutches then and in quiet dignified contemplation now.
Hillary Clinton was shown as a lovely, young, vibrant college student then and in a beautiful glowing profile shot now.
Barack Obama was featured as a smiling, gregarious, "clean" young man then and in the midst of a crowd passionately speaking into a bullhorn as a movement politican now.
John Edwards?
He didn't have a now and then picture. He had a picture of his announcement from NOLA depicted side by side with an aerial photograph of his house. The comment from the "journalist", paraphrase, you can't pose in jeans to announce your candidacy one day and go home to a mansion the next.
What the hell is going on here? I mean throw me a bone, am I asking for sharks with frickin' laser beams attached? No.
Let's check the money quotes from the article:
What seems to be mattering most is a different sort of standard, the "authenticity" standard, the winner being the most appealingly "authentic" -- as in real, not fake or false -- person in the race.
"We're in the era of authenticity," political consultant Mary Matalin has proclaimed.
A rundown of the top candidates demonstrates her point. John McCain, a war hero and former prisoner of war who is known both for his "straight talk" and for a string of best-sellers that trade on that character trait ...
Sing it from the roof tops kids for the matalin has proclaimed it and so shall it be. PS - Starobin and his editors don't think you know what authentic means. They also think that you don't know that the matalin works for Dick Cheney either. All of a sudden she's a "political consultant" not only "proclaiming" what Americans most want in their leadership but worthy of being quoted as the centerpiece in the article's set-up. Is it me?
The good little slave continues with Giuliani, Obama who has an "understandably meager list of accomplishments" and then segues into Clinton. Again we go to the matalin for some context:
"I don't think she is phony at all -- I think she is authentic," Matalin, a Republican, said in an interview, adding, "I like ambitious women."
Then we turn to the history books including the one ghost written for McCain for a couple of paragraphs to show how John McCain and not Hillary Clinton have mastered the authenticity model of great American politicians. No comment.
The good little slave continues:
Reaction and Backlash
The Jackson model notwithstanding, American politics has not always been consumed by a search for authenticity. Consider the election, four times over, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt starting in 1932 amid the terrible trauma of the Great Depression. Even his admirers often viewed FDR as a rather charming charlatan who could have each of 10 people leave a meeting believing that the boss was absolutely on his side. In his tactics, Roosevelt was a master of bluff and deceit; he could tell a convincing lie. A disoriented and fearful America, at that moment of immense peril in the 1930s, might have elected an "authentic" dictator, as another country was doing in Europe, but instead chose a wily patrician with a pragmatic genius for tailoring the right solutions to the moment. In that instance, a possible authenticity trap was avoided.
FDR is the other side of the coin to Adolf Hitler? I'm not kidding, check the link, it's all right there in the article. He continues:
Blame It on Bill
The roots of today's authenticity yearning can be found in the time of Bill Clinton. etc...
We all know that Clinton was a lying sack of shit, but the majority of Americans approved of his job performance even at the height of impeachment myself included. A majority of Americans trusted him to do a good job and they were persuaded to support his policies because he had credibility - that's a synonym for authenticity by the way, Mr. Starobin.
A caller interjects a reality in the C-SPAN program at some point and mentions the fact, which is glossed over by the host and "journalist" present, that today's Washington is the most corrupt we have ever seen in modern history. The scandals are endless, the disconnect between the insiders and the ordinary powerless Americans in this country are breathtakingly majestic in their scope and span a vista much like the Grand Canyon itself, but what does the National Journal have to say about the thirst in America for a reality that is actual real and reflects the problems that we all face day to day in our lives? Blame it on Bill - that's what they have to say. That's all they have to say because that's what their corporate masters want to see in the magazine.
Shocking - even I am shocked and I consider myself jaded and cynical to a fault.
Back to Edwards, he's not even mentioned until the closing paragraphs:
Edwards's Lifestyle Disparity
John Edwards, too, could find himself impaled on the authenticity stake. Picking up where he left off as John Kerry's running mate in 2004, Edwards is positioning himself for the nomination with a sell based on his life story as the son of a millworker who understands in his bones the concerns of working-class America -- an America not of the rich and privileged. His problem on this score is that he is a wealthy former trial lawyer who appears to be living the lifestyle of a wealthy former trial lawyer. Sensing a bio-hypocrisy issue, the news media are all over his "new, palatial estate" outside of Chapel Hill, N.C. -- a 29,000-square-foot house and a separate recreation area that includes a swimming pool and a squash court.
Jesus H Christ, a Democrat with money. Must be another charlatan like FDR. Break me off a piece of that nonsense. He continues:
Squash, a sport born at elite British boarding schools, is not exactly Joe Six-Pack's favorite. It's not clear whether the Edwards court is built for American-style play, with a hard green ball, or for the international-style game, which is increasingly popular in the States and is played with a soft ball. The ribbing about his plush new quarters, in any case, has begun. In an item in The Kansas City Star subheaded "The other America," the newspaper quoted comedian Jay Leno as saying, "All the presidential candidates were very busy this weekend. John Edwards traveled over 500 miles, and that was just from his front door to his swimming pool."
And then it's straight back to Hillary before the final bullet points:
- John McCain, the suddenly less-than-straight-talking former POW, still holds the authenticity edge.
- Crime-busting, tough-SOB Rudy Giuliani calmed a country with his empathetic side on 9/11.
- Hillary Rodham Clinton's 1960s activism has morphed into a smart-pol centrism for the 21st century.
- Everyone loves Barack Obama's story, but blacks say he isn't black enough, and his Lincolnesque legend may be too self-created.
- John Edwards is genuinely the son of the working class, but what about that lawyerly lifestyle of the rich and famous?
Is it me? Honestly. This piece was a total hit job, the choice of pictures alone was an ugly stain on the fabric of political media. A media that must serve the public interest in this country above all else. A media that is not interested in anything other than trash talking trashey stories that have nothing whatsoever to do with the issues in this country today.
I don't care that Edwards has millions. In fact, I'm glad he's rich enough to go out there everyday and stick up for Joe six-pack and Holly homemaker in the suburbs who find themselves in basically the same boat today.
We are all one illness, job loss or another life changing event away from being hungry or sick and completely alone in this country.
We are all in this together and that goes for this blog and the coming race too.
Nail it to their door people. As bloggers, there is nothing more important today, as Bill Moyer said recently:
The internet ... makes possible a nation of story tellers, everyone of us, every citizen a Tom Paine. Let the man in the big house of Pennsylvania Avenue think that over and the woman of the House on Capitol Hill.
And as the media moguls in their chalets at Sun Valley gather to review the plantation assets and multiply them: Nail It To Their Door.
They no longer own the copyright to America's story. It's not a top down story anymore. Other folks are going to write this story from the ground up and the truth will be out that the media plantation like the cotton plantation of old is not divinely sanctioned or the product of natural forces. The media system we've been living under was created behind closed doors when the power brokers met to divvy up the spoils.
-- Bill Moyers
Memphis, TN. January 2007.
"The Plantation Mentality" in American media today
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