June 6th, 2011
I don’t mean to make too much of Steve Kornacki’s Salon piece about how close John Edwards came to the presidency–I understand what he’s getting at and his macro point is valid. (When you look back through modern political history, it’s amazing/terrifying how many people get close to power and then later turn out to be crazy.)
But I think Kornacki has it slightly backward: The closest Edwards got the presidency was when he made it onto the Democratic ticket as John Kerry’s vp. I followed Edwards pretty closely during the two cycles in which he ran for president and it was awfully clear that he was a two-faced candidate. Sometimes he was very, very good with voters. Sometimes he was dreadful. If you believe that raw political skill matters in these things, then it’s hard to believe that Edwards was ever destined to win anything. (On his own, that is.)
I hate to keep harping on this, but if you want to measure the skill-set of a politician, it’s not that hard. A politician’s primary job is to get more votes than the other guy. So just look at their record in campaigns. Good politicians win more–many more–races than they lose. Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, Al D’Amato, and John McCain all have one thing in common: They won a lot of races.
John Edwards, on the other hand, was [not] good at winning elections. Not very good at all. Sure, he had the ability to self-fund, but over the course of his entire political career, he won two races: In 1998 he beat a 70-year-old first-term incumbent to win his Senate seat. And in 2004 he won the South Carolina primary. That’s it. Lifetime, that’s something like 2-45.
My point is, politicians who lose election after election after election do not tend to suddenly start winning elections and go on a tear. Despite what journalists and political professionals thought of John Edwards, the candidate, voters never liked him.
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“John Edwards, on the other hand, was good at winning elections.”
Shouldn’t that read “was NOT good at winning elections. Does the Standard need editors…I’m thinking of a mid-life career change!
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Of the many interesting observations of Mickey Kaus is his position on Edwards, i.e., that the mainstream media/DC press corps was willfully ignorant of the Hunter scandal for critical weeks during the ’08 primaries. This goes far beyond the obvious “if Edwards were a Republican” media double standard status quo: In those key weeks, Edwards’s presence was clearly to Obama’s benefit.
Whether the media wanted to overtly help Obama in this regard is difficult to discern, but given the prevailing massive bias for the “American Narcissus,” I would rate this assertion as being reasonably probable.
tubbylover69 June 6, 2011 at 11:14 am
Lincoln lost many more elections than he won.