snip: I kind of winced when John Edwards, after Hillary’s choked-up moment in a coffee shop, said we need a commander-in-chief who shows “strength” and “resolve.” But my reaction was nothing compared to that of the Nation’s Katha Pollitt:
“John Edwards just lost my vote. How dare he take cheap shots at Hillary Clinton for letting her eyes mist over (not ‘crying’ as was widely reported) at a meeting with voters in Portsmouth N.H.? This is a man who has used his most private tragedies–his wife’s cancer, his son’s fatal accident — in his campaign in a way that had a woman done the same she would surely be accused of ‘oprahfying’ the lofty realm of politics.
“This is also the man who promoted himself early on as the real women’s candidate, and who has repeatedly used his likeable wife to humanize his rather slick and one-dimensional persona. Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they’re too emotional to hold power . . .
“Ooh, right, we need a big strong manly finger on that nuclear button! Even if that finger has spent most it its life writing personal injury briefs in North Carolina, which, when you come to think of it, is not an obvious preparation for commander-in-chiefhood.”
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/09/AR2008010900803_5.html?hpid=topnews
January 9, 2008
Media Blow It Again
December 31, 2007
Outside 527 ads “like a drive-through operation” – Pay and Go
One ad airing on Iowa television stations warns of “government run by corporate lobbyists,” and promotes “the Edwards plan” as a solution, accompanied by photos of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.snip
But Steve Weissman, associate director of the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute in Washington, D.C., said fines or penalties for any improprieties likely are years away.
“They don’t care if they’re fined,” Weissman said. “By the time that happens, they’ve disappeared. It’s just a cost of doing business.”
snip
The groups “are spending large sums of unlimited contributions on what they claim are issue ads but what instead are unquestionably campaign ads being run to influence the 2008 presidential election,” Wertheimer said.
The ads getting the most attention in Iowa in recent days are run by a union-financed group called the Alliance for a New America, based in Alexandria, Va., and feature the complimentary images of Edwards. The group is headed by Nick Baldick, a former Edwards adviser, and contributions have come from locals of the Service Employees International Union.
A $495,000 contribution also came from Oak Springs Farm LLC, which the Associated Press reported is the entity that holds the fortune of 97-year-old philanthropist Rachel Mellon. Mellon has also contributed directly to Edwards’ presidential campaign, as has the lawyer who holds power over Oak Springs Farm.
The New York Times reported about an e-mail that seemed to suggest conversations between Edwards campaign officials and the group’s leaders, with Alliance leaders apparently asking the campaign “what specific kinds of support they would like to see from us.”
Edwards aides said nothing improper occurred.
Critics, predominantly Barack Obama’s campaign, have accused Edwards of using supposedly independent groups to support him even while he bashes the power of special interests, and to get around spending limits he accepted in exchange for public campaign money.
snip
Weissman said that the lack of ability to rein in outside groups is the fault of both the Federal Election Commission and Congress, which has failed to approve legislation restricting 527s. It’s up to Iowa voters to remain wary of ads pitched by groups whose finances or agendas are unclear, Weissman said. “It’s like a drive-through operation,” he said.
December 23, 2007
Edwards Hit as Hypocritical on Murky Support Groups Spending Big Bucks in Iowa
Nick Baldick, Edwards’ campaign manager in 2004, and a senior adviser in his campaign until last April, is running the pro-Edwards “Alliance for a New America” with help from local branches of the Service Employees International Union.
“I don’t just talk the talk, I walk the walk,” Obama said in Oskaloosa, Iowa. “You can’t say, yesterday, you don’t believe in them, and today, you have three quarters of a million dollars spent for you. You can’t just talk the talk.”
In Lisbon, Iowa, today, Edwards insisted his hands are tied.
“I can’t talk to them about it at all. We’re not allowed to coordinate in any way,” he said.
In Coralville, Iowa, this afternoon, Edwards timidly called on the group “not to run the ads. I don’t support 527s. They’re a part of the law. I don’t have any direct control over it, because the law requires that I stay out of it. But I would prefer that all 527s — not just this one — but all the 527s stay out of Iowa. But I have no legal authority over that.”
Though it’s illegal for third party groups to coordinate with candidates or their campaigns, organizations supporting Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton are spending millions on their behalf.
snip
EMILY’s List is a political action committee, not a 527, meaning it is regulated by the Federal Election Commission, and subject to its contribution limits. The 527s operate much more beneath the radar, allowed to accept financial contributions in any amount from anyone, and required only to make regular reports to the Internal Revenue Service of both funding and expenditures.
The 527s are, therefore, much more controversial and — as they did in 2004 with “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacks on Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. — they are playing an increasingly large role in this primary season, and some of their tactics seem shady. They increase the amount of money backing candidates, and insulate candidates from the attacks, which is a particular benefit in Iowa, where voters look down on negative tactics.
December 3, 2007
Edwards vs. lobbyists: A posture, not a principle
JOHN EDWARDS has launched a Web site, Americabelongstous2008.com, to decry the influence of lobbyists and PACs. On it, he asks Democrats to pledge not to vote for a presidential candidate who has accepted campaign donations from either evil entity. To put it another way, he has asked Democrats to pledge not to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton.
This is yet another Edwards attempt to disguise self-serving posturing as moral righteousness. (Did anyone believe his claim that he was accepting federal matching funds because it was the moral thing to do and not because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were sucking up all the Democratic donor money before he could get to it?)
Edwards’ spiel against the “special interests” is as phony as his Cheshire cat smile. Edwards might not accept lobbyist money, but he accepts money from corporate executives and managers at firms that employ lobbyists. How is that any different from accepting the donations of the contractors (lobbyists) those business people hire to represent them in Washington?
Edwards’s self-serving class warfare rhetoric is getting tiresome. Someone should tell him. Maybe we can hire a lobbyist to do it.
The Union Leader
November 29, 2007
Sen. Edwards Says: Sign a “Pledge”
and Send me Your Brain; I Say: No Thanks
by eriposte
I’ve previously discussed historical analogies between Sen. Edwards’ campaign against Sen. Clinton and Bill Bradley’s campaign against Al Gore in 2000. Now, we have moved on to the absurd anticlimax that I had hoped we wouldn’t. Here’s the latest pronouncement from Sen. Edwards, via the WSJ blog Washington Wire (h/t Taylor Marsh, emphasis mine, throughout this post):
For too long, our political leaders in Washington have looked the other way as lobbyists and irresponsible corporations have fought against efforts to achieve real change in America. Enough is enough.
…Please sign the “America Belongs to Us” Pledge, and join together with Americans from all across the country who are taking a bold stand to make sure that our next president belongs to the people — not the lobbyists.
Here’s the so-called “pledge”:
Because I believe we need real change in America and an end to the broken system in Washington that works for special interests and not us, I pledge not to vote or caucus for a Democratic presidential candidate that accepts campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.
This “pledge” has finally – and sadly – tipped me over the edge and made it clear that there is one candidate I am NOT supporting in the Democratic primary. That candidate is Sen. John Edwards. If he wins the primary I will still support him in his Presidential campaign since he will be better than the Republican candidate for President. But, as a strong protest against his transparent stunt (aka the “pledge”) I’m not going to support him in the primary. The reason is simple. When Sen. Edwards ran for the Senate back in 1998, guess how much PAC money he took in, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (Open Secrets):
ZERO
Yes, ZERO (more on the significance of that in a moment). His Senate campaign against Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) was marked by his trademark cry that he would battle the “special interests”:
“This is who he is,” Prince said, noting that as far back as his 1998 campaign against Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), Edwards was talking about fighting for the little guy and against special interests. In one ad during that race, Edwards said: “Insurance companies have plenty of lobbyists fighting for them. I don’t want to be their senator. I want to be yours.”
Not to mention this:
Despite his own personal wealth, Edwards ran as the populist outsider, saying Faircloth cared more about big business than the people of North Carolina.
“We have got to start the process of restoring people’s faith, making them believe again that this really is a democracy, and that their voice matters when decisions are being made in Washington,” Edwards, then 44, said during his race against Faircloth.
With his emphasis on vindicating blue-collar workers and the poor, Edwards was a political anomaly. He had the kind of rags-to-riches life story that is often celebrated by Republicans, but instead of singing the praises of the free market, he condemned its excesses.
So, how did “populist”, “anti-special-interest”-crusader John Edwards vote in Congress after taking a sum total of ZERO dollars from PACs and lobbyists? He voted in favor of a Bankruptcy Bill not once but twice, voted against filibustering the bill and voted against some progressive amendments to the Bill, he supported NAFTA as recently as 2004, he voted in favor of storing nuclear waste at Yucca mountain, he voted in favor of No Child Left Behind, he voted in favor of the Andean trade agreement and easing trade relations with China – not to mention, he voted in favor of the 2002 Iraq war authorization resolution and stood by his vote in 2004, he voted against an attempt to restrict the Iraq war authorization to one year, he voted against creating an independent report on pre-war intelligence manipulation, he voted against an attempt to raise taxes to fund the war, and he voted in favor of labeling Iran a state sponsor of terrorism. You get the picture.
With this “pledge” stunt of his, I unfortunately have to draw the line and point out that some of us still have some brains left and don’t intend to email either the “pledge” or our brains to him. Sen. Edwards is running on a platform that says you can only trust people who take no contributions from PACs/lobbyists. As he has shown through his own career in the Senate, this claim can be catastrophically wrong. Who you take money from is a factor, but it is absolutely not the kind of defining factor that Sen. Edwards makes it out to be. What matters most is the character and ideology of the individual – NOT who they take money from. Lawyer-turned-lobbyist Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) has about $100K in PAC receipts, Republican Governor Mike Huckabee has taken barely $20,000 from PACs and Republican Governor Mitt Romney has about $300,000 in PAC funds – and all of them are far to the right of Sen. Hillary Clinton even though they have taken much less PAC money than she has. In other words, Sen. Clinton is very progressive on corporatist matters even when compared to Sen. Edwards and Sen. Obama and you have three top Republican candidates who are far to her right who have taken significantly less contributions from PACs than she has.
Don’t get me wrong. I am personally in favor of dramatically reducing the corrupting influence of corporatist interests in elections and would love to see all candidates refuse special interest PAC money. However, Sen. Edwards has undermined the “clean elections” movement with this “stunt” by hypocritically pushing the envelope so far against other Democrats who are far better than the Republicans who will absolutely undermine clean elections in this country. In an ideal world, I’d love to endorse Sen. Edwards PACman theory – i.e., that those who take money from PACs/lobbyists can’t be trusted with your vote. However, this theory – deceptively nice-sounding, superficially pleasing and comforting – is sometimes just a mountain of stinking horse manure and far more damage is often done to the country by people who take little or no PAC money, than by those who do. So, Sen. Edwards, here’s my position on your “pledge” – thanks but no thanks.
The Leftcoaster
November 27, 2007
Vote for the white man
Hand-scrawled photocopies bearing a racist message have been found at several locations throughout Story County, including on the Iowa State University campus and in the parking lot of Cub Foods in Ames.
The fliers say “Vote for Edwards, Not the Bitch or the Nigger. Vote for the White Man!”
Authorities say that have not yet linked the fliers to their purported author. The note bears a name claiming to be the author and says he is a 1977 graduate of Harvard University.
ISU police say the fliers were found Monday on a bulletin board at Davidson Hall. A report came in to Ames Police about the same time from a customer at Cub Foods who’d found copies of a flier which police said appears to bear racist remarks in the parking lot.
Lt. Dru Toresdahl of the Story County Sheriff’s Office said the fliers had been stuck in the doors of two residences in Slater.
Toresdahl said he didn’t see anything of a criminal nature about the flier.
“At this point, I don’t see it as anything of a criminal nature,” he said. “They’re certainly inappropriate comments, but the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.”
Ames Tribune 11/27/07
http://www.midiowanews.com/site/tab1.cfm?newsid=19061646&BRD=2700&PAG=461&dept_id=554432&rfi=6
November 22, 2007
Edwards’ aggressive strategy snubbed by Clinton
John Edwards is taking an aggressive strategy against Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — warning against trading “corporate Republicans for corporate Democrats.”
snip
Clinton has, for the most part, ignored Edwards’ attacks. At a campaign appearance in Iowa this week, Clinton made no mention of Edwards.
Edwards and Clinton do not differ significantly on most issues. But Edwards has tried to cast himself as an outsider who will push for change, while depicting Clinton as part of the entrenched Washington establishment.
Edwards’ recent aggressiveness — a dramatic change from the sunny optimism that marked his 2004 run for the presidency — has sparked mixed reaction among Iowa voters.
snip
Edwards has walked a fine line. He doesn’t call Clinton corrupt but says she is part of a corrupt system in Washington controlled by powerful drug, insurance and oil companies. Edwards that says he respects Clinton’s positions but that voters have a right to know the differences between the candidates.
Edwards’ criticism is almost exclusively directed at Clinton. He is vying with Obama for the anti-Clinton vote, so he is careful not to say anything that would alienate those voters on the fence.
Raleigh News & Observer 11/22/07
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/28512
November 19, 2007
Edwards and Obama camps de facto allies?
Edwards goes on to enumerate the many “differences I have with Senator Clinton on a whole range of issues.” But when I ask about Barack Obama, Edwards not only speaks warmly of how they are substantively simpatico, he prefaces his comments about their stylistic divergences—Obama’s tendency toward conciliation, Edwards’s toward confrontation—with the emphatic phrase, “Now, I’m not criticizing him.”
On first inspection, the strategy of going after Clinton while giving Obama a pass might seem odd: After all, Edwards and Obama are competing for the non-Hillary vote in Iowa. But the Edwards approach has its logic. Roughly 120,000 voters participated in the caucuses in 2004, and the savviest operatives in all three campaigns assume that something like half of likely caucusgoers are still undecided. (That public polls put the percentage at between 10 and 15 percent is dismissed as yet another sign of those polls’ notorious unreliability when it comes to Iowa.) For the Edwards campaign, the first crucial task in the next month and a half is to raise the stakes of the election in the eyes of those 60,000 undecided voters, to convince them that fundamental change is necessary, that not just any Democrat will do in 2008. Because if any Democrat will do, Clinton—the safe choice, the known commodity—likely wins.
In the drive to raise the stakes thus, the Obama campaign serves a useful purpose, for its message of root-and-branch transformation of Washington echoes that of Edwards. It’s also the case that Obama and Edwards’s demographic bases (upscale for the former, downscale for the latter) don’t overlap as much as Edwards’s and Clinton’s do, so Edwards and Obama can both grow their ranks of supporters without cannibalizing each other’s. And that, if Edwards and Clinton later wind up in a one-on-one race, the Edwards people hope to pick up Obama’s fans, particularly the young ones—hence an imperative to tread lightly on the Illinois senator.
So the Edwards and Obama camps are de facto allies in the cause of toppling Clinton? Certainly, in the weeks following Clinton’s wretched debate performance at the end of October in Philadelphia, the two sides seemed not just to be crooning from the same songbook, but doing so in perfect-pitch a cappella harmony. In the blogosphere, where some Edwards boosters saw the putative alliance as a suicide pact for their man, theories even sprouted that Trippi—who angled for a job with Obama before signing on with Edwards and is a friend of Obama’s backroom Svengali, David Axelrod—was an Obama mole within the House of Edwards.
In fact, the Obama campaign has never seen the situation the way the Edwards people do. If there was any doubt that this was true, it was removed last week, when David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, unleashed a strategy memo that strafed Edwards almost as severely as it did Clinton. “On many core issues the Edwards of today is different than the Edwards of 1998, or even 2004,” Plouffe wrote. “It’s admirable to admit mistakes but John Edwards has apologized for most of his record while in the Senate, saying he got it wrong on trade with China, Right to Work, Packer Ban, No Child Left Behind, Bankruptcy reform and of course, the Iraq War.” And for good measure, Plouffe added, “Senator Edwards does not show an inclination toward unity, suggesting compromise is a dirty word.”
The objectives of Obama’s team are straightforward: to make Iowa (and the rest of the contest) a two-person race between their guy and Hillary. In Plouffe’s telling, Edwards is fading fast in Iowa. And a key Obama supporter there, the former state party chairman Gordon Fischer, gave an interview last week disparaging the turnout of Edwards supporters at the big-deal Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on November 10, arguing that Obama was well poised to pick up Edwards’s voters, whom he described as “up for grabs.”
New York Magazine 11/18/07
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/40989/index1.html
November 18, 2007
Edwards softens rhetoric
The Hill
Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who has been most vocal among the top Democratic presidential hopefuls in attacking frontrunner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), softened his rhetoric Sunday before a national audience.
Edwards appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation three days after he was booed at the Nevada Democratic debate for criticizing Clinton. Earlier in the week, Edwards had made some waves when he did not answer the question of whether he would support the former first lady if she won the nomination.
Edwards softened his tone noticeably Sunday
http://thehill.com/campaign-2008/edwards-softens-rhetoric-2007-11-18.html
November 15, 2007
“The Politics of Planting,” Edwards-style
John Edwards, the sharpest thorn in Hillary Clinton’s side, is at it again on the web.
His campaign today announced it has created a website that jabs his fellow Democrat’s campaign for admitting that it planted a question at an Iowa event with a college student.
With tongue firmly in cheek, Edwards’ camp calls PlantsforHillary.com an one-stop shop: “Potential plants can listen to testimonials from past plants, read the ‘Top 10 Questions Plants Should Never Ask Hillary,’ learn how to recognize other plants at Senator Clinton’s events, submit suggestions for planted questions, and purchase the soon to be released ‘Questions are hard…so plant them’ T-shirt.”
The website also features a video, titled “The Politics of Planting,” a sequel to “The Politics of Parsing” video that made fun of Clinton for her bobbing and weaving during the last debate. It shows the student asking the question, then winking.
Boston.com
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2007/11/the_politics_of_2.html
